> Nuclear powers can credibly threaten to not just destroy a single city, but to wipe a modern nation off the map. That's something you can't do with conventional bombers, even a lot of them.
I think the key insight here is rate-of-production (measured in, say, tons of TNT equivalent, ready for delivery to a target), ease of stockpiling huge levels of destructive power, and cost of delivering that destructive power. The first two are incredibly higher for nukes vs. conventional weapons, and the last, far lower.
500 late-WWII Allied heavy bombers couldn't wipe out all the major cities in, say, the Soviet Union in a couple days. Impossible. The logistics simply don't work, there's no halfway-plausible scenario in which they could even get close to achieving that, there are tons of obstacles standing in the way.
.. with a few hundred nukes, though? Now it's totally possible.
I think the key insight here is rate-of-production (measured in, say, tons of TNT equivalent, ready for delivery to a target), ease of stockpiling huge levels of destructive power, and cost of delivering that destructive power. The first two are incredibly higher for nukes vs. conventional weapons, and the last, far lower.
500 late-WWII Allied heavy bombers couldn't wipe out all the major cities in, say, the Soviet Union in a couple days. Impossible. The logistics simply don't work, there's no halfway-plausible scenario in which they could even get close to achieving that, there are tons of obstacles standing in the way.
.. with a few hundred nukes, though? Now it's totally possible.