Because the unit creation process is very customizable and very easy to use, you can (and I have) made all sorts of crazy Cold War contraptions, and some that went beyond even that (for instance, I made a missile called the Centurion that has a hundred MIRVs)
Can you make Edward Teller's dream project,
Sundial, aka, the 10GT (yes, GT - we're talking ten
gigatons) bomb?
From that source, an example, and I've bolded one of the best bits:
It is hard to convey the damage of a gigaton bomb, because at such yields many traditional scaling laws do not work (the bomb blows a hole in the atmosphere, essentially). However, a study from 1963 suggested that, if detonated 28 miles (45 kilometers) above the surface of the Earth, a 10,000-megaton weapon could set fires over an area 500 miles (800 kilometers) in diameter. Which is to say, an area about the size of France.
I want to put it on a MIRV containing a hundred such warheads, so I can roleplay a Bond villain about to turn the world to dust
Beyond the scope of
actual doomsday devices, I can't say I'm particularly impressed by the look of this, and that's as a fan of the simulator genre in general. The UI looks nasty, kinda like the stock Unity one, and there's unfortunate gaps in the simulation that I would've really wanted on a graphical level (ie, the lights of cities seem to stay on even after they've been hit by a bomb), and all in all, it doesn't seem like it brings all that much to the table compared to just plain ol' nukemap. You get to see the ordnance in flight and design your own boom-devices, but that's sort of what I'd expect to be the bare minimum, and the game
ICBM, although not a simulator, serves more as how I'd expect the logical "next step" from DEFCON to have looked. It has a tech tree, it has a launch planner, it has an orbital component that lets you build satellites and gain intelligence information, etc, and that's the kind of thing that I'd want in a nuclear war simulator as a start of the content. Compared to that, NWS seems kinda shallow - it has bomb design, yes, but from the videos, that seems to be about it. ICBM tries to be about the strategy, DEFCON tries to be about the madness and folly of nuclear war...
...but this seems more like it is trying to be more in depth and more of a simulator, but lacking the features to really make it work.
Personally, what I'd want from this kind of game would be to sort of combine something like this with a sort of nation-building management game - a sort of Grand Strategy kind of title that'd start in the last 24 hours or so before the bombs drop, and then pick up afterwards, the player now the shattered government trying to hold things together, maintaining order, keeping resources moving, that sort of thing. Think something like, say, Victoria with its economic setup and politics, except set right as WW3 kicks off. That's beyond the scope of this game, though
