Nuclear explosions...
...Do indeed give a thermal pulse, followed afterwards by blast waves - but there is a major problem here. Not fallout, but the fact you just expended part of your nuclear arsenal, when a different weapon might have been sufficient - opportunity cost. It is far cheaper to use incendiary warheads or thermobarics, both of which are owned by Russia in large numbers and deliverable by cruise missile or rocket. Did you know a thermobaric/FAE weapon has a locally higher overpressure than a nuke? A nuke has the tendency to rise when airburst over the target. Your refinery might burn, but a factory with heavy industrial equipment would lose roof and wall elements and suffer only minor damage to (for example) rolling mills, hammers, lathes and foundry furnaces. As simple a protection as a pile of tipped sand would offer sizeable protection to industrial equipment inside it - and that is a published Russian approach.
Russia was notoriously bad at warhead reprocessing, so had a lot of warheads that were going through natural radioactive decay and so gradually 'poisoning' themselves, so a detonation became less likely. In 'Hard Rock' the powers that be finally let us local authority EPOs play with nuclear UXM effects. Russia did indeed produce large numbers of warheads, just to make sure that enough of the 'fresher' ones would detonate - on that I will agree - but nuclear weapons production is notoriously difficult and expensive. That is why nukes would not be thrown about like confetti, and why 'conventional' weapons would still be needed.
...Do indeed give a thermal pulse, followed afterwards by blast waves - but there is a major problem here. Not fallout, but the fact you just expended part of your nuclear arsenal, when a different weapon might have been sufficient - opportunity cost. It is far cheaper to use incendiary warheads or thermobarics, both of which are owned by Russia in large numbers and deliverable by cruise missile or rocket. Did you know a thermobaric/FAE weapon has a locally higher overpressure than a nuke? A nuke has the tendency to rise when airburst over the target. Your refinery might burn, but a factory with heavy industrial equipment would lose roof and wall elements and suffer only minor damage to (for example) rolling mills, hammers, lathes and foundry furnaces. As simple a protection as a pile of tipped sand would offer sizeable protection to industrial equipment inside it - and that is a published Russian approach.
Russia was notoriously bad at warhead reprocessing, so had a lot of warheads that were going through natural radioactive decay and so gradually 'poisoning' themselves, so a detonation became less likely. In 'Hard Rock' the powers that be finally let us local authority EPOs play with nuclear UXM effects. Russia did indeed produce large numbers of warheads, just to make sure that enough of the 'fresher' ones would detonate - on that I will agree - but nuclear weapons production is notoriously difficult and expensive. That is why nukes would not be thrown about like confetti, and why 'conventional' weapons would still be needed.