As a rule, I strongly forbid them in my campaign, for a number of reasons.
First and foremost, they're illegal and Imperially controlled by the Rules
of War, or whatever the GDW term is. That's a strong deterrent even to the
black market, as the Imperial authorities have a way of finding people who
violate what little territory they reserve for themselves and making them
go bye-bye.
Second, they're often not the best way to do things. There are better and more
effective ways of clearing land, breaking up asteroids, and eliminating large
scale military targets. About the only thing they're really good for is killing
large numbers of civilians in quick and gruesome fashion.
Third, they're terribly dirty and wasteful of precious land and resources. The
Imperial government as well as the various planetary governments frowns on such
waste; it's bad for business.
Since the military has and uses dampers on anything larger than a personnel
carrier, they only do well against civilian targets that can't afford to be
damped. This limits their effectiveness. However, the general abhorrence of
nuclear weapons in the Imperium obviates even marginally practical uses, like
convincing a shipload of pirates to leave you alone. In my campaign, the early
TL development of nukes is watched and controlled very carefully by the
Imperium; failures in the policy (that we know of so far) are rare and far
between: Weipu, Ganulph (which was a military target in a dirty war) and
Asmodeus (which wasn't an Imperial world).
As a final psychological deterrent to players who seem to think that nukes are
somehow vital to prove (to me? to each other? I'm still working on this one)
their machismo, I provide any number of hints that even the lowest orders of
criminalia in the Imperium regards people who use nukes to achieve their ends
with about the same solicitude as that the Dusseldorf underworld used in
hunting down a child-murderer in the 1930s, as chronicled in the excellent
Fritz Lang movie "M". This is astonishingly effective:
SNOOTY CHARACTER: "How dare you cast aspersions on me, you villain?"
UNDERWORLD BOSS: "I'm not the one trying to buy a nuke! Boys, take this
filthy stinkscrabbler out back and blow his head off."
As a side note, I wouldn't mind a discussion (here or via Email) on the topic
of Traveller players and (for want of a better word) player/character machismo.
After eleven years of running this game, I am finally enjoying the company of
a small group of players who equip themselves sensibly, disport themselves
maturely, and seem to have risen above the endless technological and military
variations on the childhood game of "my pee pee's longer than yours." There
may or may not be a need for someone, somewhere, to have nuclear weapons, I
suppose, but the thought of putting them in the hands of players with something
(God knows what) to prove seems somehow obscene to me. Probably a character
fault of my own....
metlay
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