[TalonDJ]

No one bothered to explain that we were only 12 miles from NYC—which means that in a hydrogen bomb blast, our whole town would have been incinerated.

Not really acurate. ICBM warheads are not that big. The shockwave or firestorm would have been what you got and the inner hall may very well have been plenty of protection. Yeah, they built bombs much bigger that could do that, but most of the ones actually FIELDED on both sides were not nearly that big.

[Thud]

CEP aka Circular Error Probability means that half the ICBM warheads launched will come down within the CEP and half will come down someplace else.

The someplace else will, on the average, generally be closer to the target than randomly scattered along the trajectory between the launch site and the target, with a generous side vector.

So, if the NYC metropolitan area is intended to be hit by 20-40 ICBM warheads, the Soviets would have sent 40-80. And a fair amount of the 20-40 which missed would have dribbled down near NYC.

So exit82 was right.