2 ICBMs can not render our coasts unliveable for decades. Our coasts are extremely large relative to the fallout radius of any single known nuclear warhead.

Perhaps I haven't been clear what I meant so you've assumed I've meant coasts.

I have no detail knowledge of the fallout radius or radioactive decay, I would assume an ICBM hit would render the valley and Manhattan unliveable, but I haven't been in both places for more than five years so I might be wrong.

NK nukes, which are fairly small, would mess up the skyscraper blocks of NYC and San Francisco city while leaving the rest of those cities mostly intact. And that’s in comparison to cites — the state of California is massive. When I visited Davis CA, I could see the hills to the west but not the mountains to the East. You could lose a nuke in one of the smaller forest fires.

https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

I guess we differ, I could not shrug away the destruction of a million people city as "messing up" - as someone who lived through the cold war of the 80s, who watched "The day after" while new Pershings were deployed to Germany and who felt the impact of Chernobyl.

The times make the people.

That is a complete mischaracterization of GP. This is a very dangerous conversational pattern, where someone makes a factual assertion and the reply is to something which wasn't said, and reimagines the original comment as evil in some way.

Whenever I see someone do this, I generally stop talking immediately, but I am sticking up for GP on this one.

The comment you are replying to in no way made a statement about what is or isn't awful. Simply a comment about the size of various things.

A single modern ICBM will have several warheads. Would all the reactors on our coasts and their spent fuel storage be safe?

In principle that is possible, but NK weapons are relatively low-yield and the estimated number of warheads they could manufacture in total is relatively low; and as bad as damaged reactors are, they’re significantly less bad than a nuke in a city, even a small nuke like NK’s.

Don’t get me wrong, I certainly hope the USA strategic and tactical defences are capable of facing even the worst case estimates; but, as a civilian, NK nukes and ICBMs never put me off visiting the USA and played no part in my ultimate decision to not bother trying to move to the Bay for work.

Yeah I forgot that ICBMs could have multiple warheads, so yes, NYC could probably be taken out in one fell swoop.

Don't argue, you'll get more down votes. People here are not interested in discussions but in being right.