@John:
I bought 3 nuclear blasts and 30 radiation markers. I going to have a game where if you develop the technology and drop one those bombs, the space you drop it in and spaces around it three spaces deep will be affected for the rest of the game. You won’t be able to cross by sea or land, and won’t be able to fly over it for the rest of the game, because of the radiation. What do you think? :-D
If realism is a consideration, I’d say that it would be excessive for even a single territory to be affected in this way – let alone a radius of three territories – given the low yield of WWII nukes and the large geographical area represented by most of the map territories. On the map, for instance, Japan is a single territory; with the exception of Tokyo, individual cities (like Hiroshima and Nagasaki) aren’t even shown. Rjpeters might be able to calculate how powerful a nuke would have to be to render all of Japan impassable due to radiation, but my own impression is that the yield of such a bomb would be on the scale of the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million or so years ago. The blast would probably wipe out half of the pieces on the entire Pacific 1940 game board, much to the dismay of the Chinese, ANZAC and British players and of the US forces located from Hawaii westward. I don’t think the real A-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki rendered them impassable: the initial flash did cause fatal irradiations and I assume that the fallout did produce some localized hazardous zones, but nothing on a scale that would have affected military operations to any appreciable degree, especially beyond the range of a few kilometers from ground zero.
