Wiping out an American city, much less the largest ones, requires either blast yields well beyond the capability of any terrorist organization, or numbers of nuclear weapons that would make the terrorist organization one of the largest nuclear powers on the planet. This is particularly true of major cities such as Atlanta, Houston, and LA, which are defined by their suburban sprawl.
Who writes this shit?
- zero understanding of islamic geopolitics
- zero understanding of nuclear blast effects
- zero understanding of nuclear weapons
This is like asking the question "what if the US decided to wage war against Libya but only used 1/7th of their lasers?" It doesn't make fucking sense. On any level.
So for starters, Pakistan has atomic weapons, not nuclear ones. They're probably on the order of 10-15kT. Yeah, more than I'd want to sit on but we're already off by a factor of 5. We'll also mention that they have less than a hundred, so we're not talking about "twenty rogue nukes" we're talking about somewhere between a fifth and a half of Pakistan's entire nuclear arsenal walking out the door. I mean, Ian Fleming didn't get that preposterous and he wrote Moonraker.
They're also not sophisticated as weapons go. Yeah, we aren't testing that carefully for fissile material but we're now talking about full-fledged non-clandestine pits wandering through customs. To expect none to get found is pure folly.
We'll also mention in passing that no attempt at geography or weather. Set off a 10kt in Long Beach and Downtown LA doesn't give a shit. Fuck, set off a 1MT in Long Beach and Downtown LA sees fireworks. Oddly enough, though, not even this goofy little map tells you much because Palos Verdes, for example, does some shielding of the airport, does some reflection against the harbor, etc.
But it doesn't even matter because nobody wants to use nukes. Nobody. Think about it: we had 50 years of some truly scary confrontations between the US and the USSR and nobody wanted to play. Chechen rebels have been playing around former Soviet missile silos for two decades and nobody wants to play. Georgia and Russia both had nukes in the war in South Ossetia and nobody wanted to play. There's this vision of the lone madman with a deathwish striking down the Infidel in the name of Allah that drives most Hollywood movies but guess what? Lone madmen don't acquire nukes, let alone set them off, let alone smuggle 20 of them into the US to blow up in a synchronized fashion.
This is already too much effort to spend on a Quora post by way of Gawker but fuckadoodledo, man, have some credulity. On the scale of relevant questions, this one is below all of them below: