I"m not sure if the gate itself would increase the yield to weight ratio of the bomb, but I am certain that it would have destroyed the village at that distence. Modern nuclear bombs size depends on if they were built for countervalue (city busting) or counterforce targets (for lack of better term, military targets).
As the accuracy of the weapons increased, the air force shifted towards smaller bombs in the idea that you could fight a limited nuclear war attacking just the enemies infastructure and not blindly target cities. The navy for a long time resisted this tendency because they saw increasing accuracy as making it much too tempting for civilian politicians to push the button. The logic being that if you tell the man "we can level Moscow" he's less likely to go with it than "we can take out the command bunker".
In the end counterforce prevailed and by the 1980s the weapons got quite small relatively. Still at the time, NATO planners were estimating the deaths from even a small scale conflict to a couple hundred thousand 'attrits per second', so I'm never quite sure how much I feel about what they really thought a small scale nuclear conflict was.
But you have to remember that Jack was trying to do as much damage as possible, and my guess is that he chose to use a large nuke to do that. Even if they didn't keep them around Cheyenne Mountain (and they seem to have them handy in other episodes), I'm sure he could have gotten one from Peterson AFB nearby.
In real life? I highly doubt NORAD or US Space Command has nukes sitting around the mountain. Major cracking in the mountain during construction made the survivablity of the Cheyenne Mountain Ops Center really questionable. Which would be why they relied more and more on the Looking Glass and TACAMO aircraft as the real assurance of command post conflict.
As the accuracy of the weapons increased, the air force shifted towards smaller bombs in the idea that you could fight a limited nuclear war attacking just the enemies infastructure and not blindly target cities. The navy for a long time resisted this tendency because they saw increasing accuracy as making it much too tempting for civilian politicians to push the button. The logic being that if you tell the man "we can level Moscow" he's less likely to go with it than "we can take out the command bunker".
In the end counterforce prevailed and by the 1980s the weapons got quite small relatively. Still at the time, NATO planners were estimating the deaths from even a small scale conflict to a couple hundred thousand 'attrits per second', so I'm never quite sure how much I feel about what they really thought a small scale nuclear conflict was.
But you have to remember that Jack was trying to do as much damage as possible, and my guess is that he chose to use a large nuke to do that. Even if they didn't keep them around Cheyenne Mountain (and they seem to have them handy in other episodes), I'm sure he could have gotten one from Peterson AFB nearby.
In real life? I highly doubt NORAD or US Space Command has nukes sitting around the mountain. Major cracking in the mountain during construction made the survivablity of the Cheyenne Mountain Ops Center really questionable. Which would be why they relied more and more on the Looking Glass and TACAMO aircraft as the real assurance of command post conflict.
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