Yea that's a pretty good article, but a "Mini-nuke" is not related to the technical terminology, miniaturized.

Well, I wasn't used technical terminology. I was speaking as a plainclothes civilian. My bad for not being clearer.

Your entire 2nd point makes no sense, soldiers won't risk their lives so that makes civilian lives more expendable?

Civilian casualties are a fact of life in war, son. That's the kind of shit you hear whenever innocent people are dying from bombs nowadays. Civilians always die during war.

Also if a nuclear weapon is deployed with such a low yield that it no longer necessitates a MAD response, how is it different from large conventional ordnance?

It will be a matter of escalation.

At the moment we are in Cold War 2.0, with a large portion of the war playing out in cyberspace, and two points of hot conflict (Syria and Ukraine). These new developments in weaponry are part of the arms race that comes with said Cold War. It's entirely possible we'll find some other points on conflict in the next 20-30 years (DPRK, SCS/SEA, Iran, some place in Africa, who knows), and that at one of those points the conflict spins out of control because of the lowered barrier, and from there begins to escalate into full-blown war.

First you fly some robotic drones over a conflicted territory. They get shot down by "terrorists" (aka the enemy army, but the enemy is unwilling to acknowledge that, like in Ukraine today). Then you send in some robotic tanks to deal with the "terrorists". At some point, someone decides "this is too much", and launches a preventive 'mini-nuke' on a gathering of robotic weaponry near their border, thinking it won't be acknowledged because its just robots and maybe you can blame the terrorists again. But no, there's escalation. Fire returned on your own positions.

It just takes a few bad calls. A few moments of escalation. We've been so close before, it could easily happen again, and if the barrier is even slightly lower or more gradual, we could be done for.