[badfreeper]

"There is no way 11 warheads could take out 25% of the Canadian population."

If you're looking for straight kills, maybe even less than eleven...just the greater Toronto area alone has nearly 20% of the Canadian population.

Totally off-topic question: Why take some of the richest farmland on the planet and put your biggest city there? Gotta love our crack planning departments up here...or is that planning departments on crack?

[GOP_1900AD]

You might be overstating the effects of the warheads. For example, to completely devestate the greater Los Angeles area, somewhere between 30 and 60 warheads would be required. It would all depend on yield and altitude, with the obvious trade offs of ground bursts being ones of high overpressure and rapid radial decline in power, versus airbursts, with overall lower overpressure but impacting a wide area with moderate overpressure. Topography also plays a role. The thing about nukes is the law of diminishing return - due to the disipation of the energy (both mechanical and radioactive) with the square of the distance from the detonation point, it requires a huge increase in megatonnage to noticeably increase the effects of a given warhead. That's why most nuclear powers have steered away from the "citybusters" of yore in favor of warheads in the 1 - 50 KT range of yield. Not only are they smaller and MIRVable, they are adaptable to multiple platforms and uses, ranging from counterforce attacks against an adversary's own nuclear forces, to more mundane uses such as punching large holes in conventional forces and supply lines. Just really big munitions, with some radioactive side effects, but no nuclear winter, no doomsday. The sooner we realize this, the better prepared we will be for their eventual use (against us and by us). Peace never lasts. War always arrives.