I don't know if something was lost in translation or if this ridiculous claim is straight from the Russian government. There is no way that a missile carrying a 100 tonne payload can "wipe out" 700,000 km^2. It wouldn't even be able to break every window in Texas. Not even with very high yield-to-mass ratio warheads and MIRVing.

(OTOH, just hitting the top population centers of Texas or France would be devastating enough, so nuclear war is terrifying even after discarding the hyperbole.)

EDIT: and the warhead mass is 10 tons, not 100. 100 tons is the mass of the whole vehicle. That makes a lot more sense, given that this is not a Saturn V-sized launch vehicle. It can carry up to 24 MIRVed warheads: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-28_Sarmat

The MIRV part is the reason they are saying "Texas".

It's plausible a single rocket could launch warheads at multiple Texas cities all at once. So most of the population vs most of the landmass.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_independently_targe...

Image: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_independently_targe...

Half of the population of Texas lives in just 10 cities. A single MIRV can kill most of the people in them.

So no, one rocket won't reduce Texas to a smoking crater, but will have a 50/50 chance of killing you in the explosions and subsequent firestorms.

>That's an interesting fact about power. Is this due to the inverse square law?

Yeah, but not in the way you think. Cities are densest in the center; as blast radius grows, the amount of things inside it does not grow at the same rate.

Somewhere I saw "theories" that Russia can simply aim several of those at Yellowstone and then let nature take care of the rest. Or just off East Coast and let tsunamis do the rest. Not sure how credible those are.

That sounds pretty dicey to me, and there are no do-overs in global thermonuclear war.

Even the largest tsunami ever wouldn't make it past the Appalacan Mountains, so I really don't know what they are thinking about there. My guess is that even our biggest nuclear weapons are puny compared to a modest earthquake, so the Taunami plan probably won't work very well.

"Even the largest tsunami ever wouldn't make it past the Appalacan Mountains"

I've read that the impactor that created the Chicxulub caused a megatsunami that washed over the Rocky Mountains, although I can't find the article now. Instead, I found one that talked about a tsunami 305 meters tall, and a wiki page about megatsunamis that talks about it being just 100 meters tall.

Interestingly, further down it claims that, had the impactor struck deep ocean, the tsunami would have been 4600 meters tall. That's about the straight-line distance from my home to my work.

Neat, and utterly horrifying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatsunami#List_of_megatsunam...

Neat, but most of those required dinosaur killer sized asteroid impacts. Mere hydrogen bombs aren't going to cut it.

Those ICBMs can hold 10-15 warheads, but each warhead only destroys 10-15 sq miles. You'd need at least 5-10 just to mostly destroy the Dallas metro area.

The Dallas metro area holds 7 million people - that's a third of the population of Texas.

A 500 KT air burst will kill probably half of the people in Dallas proper. Three will kill most of them. Ten will kill most of those 7 million people.

[1] http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=500&lat=32.7766642&ln...

If they're all outside...if they're in shelters etc you'd be lucky to get 1/30th of them

Are there nuclear shelters for seven million people in Dallas?

"It can't happen here!" is going to the epitaph of the USA.

How is this suppose to be able to wipe out Texas or France?

Take out the transport infrastructure and you've basically done the job and can dust of your hands and go home. Good luck keeping a megacity (or nation) fed when you destroy its ports and interchanges, polluting them with radiation such that they can't be put back into some form of action.

They are quoting Sputnik there.

It would be able to do enormous damage to 10 or 20 population centers.