Dear Tim:
These are estimates not by me but, by the NAS, and I also saw this on PBS (exactly where and when I do not remember). When I talk of cities as targets, I include the metropolitan area as the city. Thus, downtown Minneapolis is only 300 to 400K people but, the metro area is well over 2.8 million. You also should include the resulting firestorms in many metropolitan areas. Just the NY, Chicago, LA, Wash-Bal, and SF metropolitan areas would kill 60 million or so. The next ten metro areas would add about 50 million and the twenty or so after that would add 40 million more. That is about 150 million there alone. Granted no metro area would suffer complete loss of life, but many surrounding cities could be caught in the resulting firestorm.
Add to that the populations of the 10 largest metropolitan cities of our developed allies like London, Tokyo, Seoul, Paris, Manila, and Osaka, you add over 100 million more. If they just targeted the 100 largest cities in the world, and destroyed them all but no more, you would kill about 500 million.
Again I will grant you that this assumes that populations would be targeted rather than strictly military targets which inflates the initial loss of life. A better easier to hit set of targets would be the world's nuclear plants, oil fields, chemical plants, etc. These would cause far more reaching and longer lasting deaths.
Pete |
