『geekout about the cold war』

Nope. We have planes that fly really high and are shielded enough to withstand the effects at distance. Our air-dropped nukes are the most potant used by the US at 2.1 megatons (which is a sweet spot involving physics I don’t understand.)

Soviet bombs were bigger and more plentiful to compensate for their inaccuracy (so they’d shotgun strategic targets to assure a likely hit). This turned into justification for the arms rwce in the 1960s to get ridiculous with General Electric pushing the missile gap. It’s how we ended up with so many nukes we could wipe out humanity many times over, not just by carpeting all the continents but with nuclear winter and lingering radioactive fallout.

At that point, the doomsday device in Doctor Strangelove, a really huge cobalt bomb or salted bomb became the more cost-efficient deterrant. While there were actual designs, I don’t think anyone actually built it. 『/geekout』