"Geoffrey Sinclair" wrote in message ...

How about we drop the "area affected" for the conventional bombs to
something like their known lethal blast area? In which case 90%
casualties can be expected, just be within so many feet of the bomb
going off. If we ignore anything outside this blast area, since after all
there will be only building damage, not destruction, we can make
conventional explosives quite lethal. Most of the area is actually
"missed" if you use the bomb blast radius.

That just changes the way the difference is stated. Nukes don't
"miss" any of the area affected, and so kill people that are in areas
otherwise missed.




By using more explosive per person killed, you also kill a greater
portion of the people in the area you are bombing.

There is the overkill factor, since the blast dissipates as the square
of distance, the buildings near the centre are hit "too much".

Airbursts help with that quite a bit.

The blast pressure directly underneath an explosion at a burst height
optimized to maximize 30 PSI, is probably not as strong as the blast
pressure near an exploding conventional bomb.