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Thanks for your insult moron. "Several" could mean two in Manhattan, two in L.A., two in Chicago, two in Seattle, and God knows how many other targets. Several means SEVERAL. Ten million could be killed easily in this scenario. But even if it was two million, the question is just as relevant. Too bad you're incapable of analyzing it or coming up with an answer.

. "Several" could mean two in Manhattan, two in L.A., two in Chicago, two in Seattle, and God knows how many other targets. Several means SEVERAL.

Exactly. And you need well BEYOND "several," as you just did in your scenario. You'd need several DOZEN, not several.

With the types of construction used in the US, you'd need dozens of suitcase nukes to destroy most of the urban core of a city such as New York or Chicago. Modern buildings need a LOT of blast and thermal effects to get knocked down--each tower of the World Trade Center took the equivalent of a contact one-kiloton nuclear blast and still stood for almost an hour.

Beyond a few city blocks, most of the damage would be broken windows--the buildings immediately around the blast hypocenter would absorb most of the energy.

Guess you are not well versed on the strength of a suitcase nuke. Most yeilds are below 1-2 KT. That is not a lot of damage (as say...compared to a 8.0 earthquake). You would wipe out several city blocks...but even that will not cause death to all within the blast radius. If you detonated a couple in each of the cities you stated...my guess would be about 500,000 - 800,000 dead. That's still a lot. However, I think all this is a moot point because Al Qeada doesn't have them. If they did...they would have used them already instead of plowing airplanes into buildings. They would have detonated the thing between the trade centers at 10 am...and walked up to the capitol building. They would have used them. They are crazy...not stupid.

BTW...there is a neat little XLS program on the web called "nuke.xls" located at http://nuketesting.enviroweb.org/hew/Library/Nukesims.html , look it up and download the nukexls.zip file. You can input various yields and get a good idea of the blast damage. That way...you can get an idea the damage of the suitcase nuke (.001 MT). One thing this program will not take into account though is that the buildings will deflect a lot of the blast...so instead of buildings 1000' away destroyed in a downtown area...you're probably looking at a couple of hundred feet max. Just some FYI.