Liberal Forum

The larger nukes carried on ICBMs and Medium Range Strategic nukes don't have a small 10 mile blast radius. It is more like 25-30 miles. Which is a circle 60 miles across. To give you an idea Birmingham Alabama and Huntsville Alabama are 90 miles apart center to center. Birmingham is in the center of Alabama and Huntsville is at extreme Northern Alabama. If a 10-20 MTon nuke exploded directly between the two cities the blast radius would just touch the city limits of each. Outside this zone wouldn't be very nice either. Lots of debris and very high heat. Fires everywhere. Most everything burned. Radioactive fallout perhaps 45 miles from the epicenter would cause lots of problems. Thereafter, weather patterns would cause further mayhem downwind. This is 1 strategic Nuke and it would essentially take out half the state of Alabama with further problems outside the 60 mile diameter blast zone. And most don't have a clue how to deal with radioactive fallout. So 2 of these would pretty much obliterate Alabama, an average sized state.

So how many nukes are we dealing with. Well the combined blast radii of just the US nukes is enough to cover the entire land surface area of the planet Earth (not counting ocean surface) 100 times over. Russian's quite a bit more at about 150 times the entire land area of the Earth (see book of lists). China not as much but multiple times as well. And there are other nuclear capable nations, all of which can destroy the surface of the earth at least 1X over. There have been reductions so I'm not sure how up-to-date those numbers are, but you get the picture.