The Military Industrial Complex has provided us with some wonderful illustrations.
These are surface to air anti-aircraft missles.
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It's my guess that if the Defcon level is high the conventional warheads were switched out for small 'nukes'-
1/10 to 1 kiloton range. Same size was used on air-to-air aircraft mounted missles.
That's explosive equivalent to 100 to 1,000 tons of TNT. That's a lot of whallop on the end of that not so big missile.
"Hey, when the bad-guy's bombers are planning on dropping H-bombs on you and the 30 square miles of the Atlantic your aircraft carrier task force occupies, fleet air-defense wants a sure kill as far away as possible. Now which one of you swabbies wants to be the first to try arming
a nuclear device?"
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* a large percentage of the thousands of warheads stockpiled or deployed at the height of the Cold War were small low-yield "tactical" weapons as described above. So there- you sissies!