U.S. President Donald Trump gestures to China's President Xi Jinping as he leaves after a visit to Zhongnanhai Garden in Beijing, May 15. gettyimagesbank-TNS

The U.S. is quietly — and largely with a view to a potential war against China — tweaking its nuclear strategy, contemplating a bigger role for so-called tactical nukes. To the uninitiated, the shift may seem arcane. To those in the know, the stakes are nothing less than the risk of atomic Armageddon.

Obscure or not, the topic is so existential that it should top, or at least make, the list when U.S. President Donald Trump hosts his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, later this month. If they don’t discuss it, after already avoiding their looming nuclear arms race when they talked in May, they will endanger the whole world.

The adjustment in American nuclear strategy has been communicated in various speeches and comments by administration officials such as Elbridge Colby, a policy thinker in the Pentagon. It’s generally couched in phrases such as giving the president more “options,” with weapons that are “credible” because, as Colby puts it, a potential enemy has “got to believe there’s some sense in which we would use” them.

That language is code for tactical (also called theater or nonstrategic) nukes. The difference between those and strategic nuclear weapons is big but sometimes subtle.

Strategic nukes are typically the most powerful warheads, made to be launched on intercontinental missiles or from long-range bombers or submarines against an enemy’s homeland. Their implied purpose is to annihilate any adversary who dares to initiate a nuclear war, thus deterring a first strike by enemies.

Tactical atomic bombs have more variable yields, ranging from limited blasts — enough to take out an airport, say — to explosions comparable to those at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (“Limited,” in the radioactive context of nuclear war, is a relative and macabre term.) They’re usually made to be launched at shorter ranges and on more kinds of vehicles, including cruise missiles. As their names imply, their purpose is to win on the battlefield, especially when defeat........

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