[citation][nom]tenshin111[/nom]I don't have time to elaborate on the topic as I'm at work now but you're quite wrong here.First of all, large cities and population centres are as valid targets for strategic weapons (ICBMs) as other (military) infrastructure. Just read a little about cold war era nuclear doctrines of USSR and USA.Secondly, ICBMs targeted at population centres do not fall to the ground and explode like bombs - they get detonated (or to be more precise - the multiple nuclear warheads they carry) at some altitude so that the blast and radiation waves have higher spread and are way more devastating than from a simple bomb drop.As far as effectiveness goes - do not forget that Hiroshima/Nagasaki were quite primitive nuclear bombs. Modern nuclear weapons (strategic ones) use thermonuclear warheads which are more devastating.Basically, if you don't get killed in the blast (heat) wave or the initial radiation burst you will die within days or weeks mostly due to radioactive fallout which will cover large areas around the main explosion centre. This is especially true in urban areas where the irradiated dust/debris from destroyed buildings will be thrown up high in the air.[/citation]
You haven't disagreed with what I wrote, just rearranged the words to sound like you are.
There are three basic types of impacts, Ground Burst, Low Altitude Air Burst and High Altitude Air Burst. Each has a different purpose, Ground Burst being to dig out bunkers and other hardened targets that require direct impact to damage. Low Altitude Air Burst being to flatten non-hardened structures and do the most area damage, High Altitude Air Burst being to set things on fire and take out any large formations of troops / anything unprotected.
Out of those three Low and High Altitude Air Bursts produce nearly no fall out. Fall out is created by debris matter that is sucked into the middle of the fireball and tossed into the atmosphere. When your fireball isn't touching the ground then you get very little debris matter. Ground Burst on the other hand produces lots of fall out as all the mater that the device is burning through underneath gets sucked into the middle, irradiated and tossed into the atmosphere. The destruction forces of these devices are well known, it's just physics.
You also have failed to counter the fact that concrete is incredibly resilient to the pressure wave of a nuke. When the device goes off it is guaranteed to destroy everything within it's radius of total destruction (ROTD), that's the fireball itself and nothing inside has a chance to survive. That radius is bound by the inverse square law as all radiative forces are. The power of the device falls as a function of the distance squared. This makes a 500KT device much less then 50x the power of a 10KT device, somewhere around 5x actually and only approx 2x the power of a 100KT device.
Counter-population is a poor strategy as it only works with non-advanced population centers. The moment people build things out of concrete your ability to maximize death count plummets fast. You'll get a few thousand at best during the initial blast then maybe another 10K from the radiation, and that's assuming it went off in busiest part of the city during the busiest part of the day when most people are outside unprotected. If you really want to take out population then need to get creative and stop targeting them directly. Instead find a city with a large mountain nearby, time your device to impact with a ground burst on the city facing side of the mountain during a time when the wind is blowing towards the city. The device will kill nearly no one in initiate impact but the amount of dirt it'll suck into the fireball will great a very large radioactive dust cloud that will fall over the city. Death count will be 5~10x higher due to the large amount of radiation poisoning.
See, everything involving nukes tends to be counter-intuitive. An ABMS functions not by taking down incoming missiles but my inducing strategic paralysis on the attacker. Nukes can't kill nearly as many people as the movies make them out to be, one nuke will hardly scratch a city, that is why you send several. Nukes aren't targeted at the center of city's but rather at things, those things just happen to sometimes be inside city's. Certain command and control facilities, telecommunications facilities and political facilities are there. Factories and industrial assets are also targets. Killing 10 thousand people isn't going to do much to remove your enemies ability to fight. Also contrary to the movies, counter-political (targeting the political structure) isn't a very popular tactic for the same reason regicide has always been frowned upon. Killing the people who are authorized to negotiate surrender isn't a very good way to win a war, it virtually assures that you have to fight all their military in a guerrilla war (hasn't Iraq proven this already). Instead the goal is to remove their capacity to fight and force them into a surrender by which you lose minimal manpower (what we did in Japan).
Anyhow it's been fun, if you want to know more you can look up the essays done by Stuart Slade who used to be involved in planning nuclear strategies during the cold war. It breaks down how attack strategies are drawn up, how effects are calculated and some of the not-well-known limitations of them. Goes into the Geo-political considerations behind nuclear strategies and nuclear deterrents. And finally goes into a post-nuclear war world and how it would change society. The USA actually did tons of in depth research during the cold war.
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