alt Hacker News> Why did we need more bombs when there were less people
Bombs don't really scale with #people do they? I'm not a military expert of any kind but I would expect the number of bombs required to end humanity is really more a function of how much landmass people occupy?
Eg if you have a nuclear bomb that levels a city block it does not matter if 100 people live there or 10000, it pretty much just kills everyone there?
The number of nuclear weapons needed is more a function of reliability and accuracy than of population density. The older delivery platforms were much less accurate. That doesn't matter for targeting entire cities but it matters a lot when targeting hardened military sites that might survive a near miss. Now accuracy is much better so fewer weapons are needed to achieve the same deterrence effect.