...Except that developing nuclear warheads of a significantly higher yield involves going beyond the whole critical mass problem, which last I checked effectively puts a cap on the amount of energy that can be produced from, say, a uranium reaction, despite that cap being pretty damn high. I suppose they could fabricate new elements at this point, but for the sake of argument let's assume there's no simpler way to do so than we know about nowadays, and thus it's a terrible pain in the ass. It'd be much easier to make a hundred nukes and just launch them one after the other than to make something with a really high critical mass that was reactive enough to make a bomb and stable enough that it'd have a shelf life longer than a fish on the road on a hot day (I don't know, maybe a truck carrying pet supplies had an accident or something). Antimatter would be a possibility, though it's got the whole instability and huge-containment-field thing going on, and I haven't really read up on my antimatter so I don't have much else to say there.
And I'd really like to see where you get your figures, in turn. Maybe a trade when I get to a scanner, but I'd be interested to see a reputable source claiming that a nuclear blast is tens of times as hot as the sun. Particularly since it could be extrapolated from that that what an exploding nuke is is a particularly non-dense blue microstar resting on the surface of the Earth, and the very first two detonations would likely have, if not destroyed the Earth, at least sent the island of Japan into the stratosphere and caused a shockwave to hit the coast a few hours later a good bit worse than any hurricane ever seen by man. And full of boiling vapor, too, so it would essentially pressure-cook the entire coastal population of China, and maybe even bits of California and Hawaii. Heat on cosmic scales (twenty or thirty times the amount that's enough to set some materials on fire from Earth orbit, a few million miles away) is not to be messed with. But that's just a guess on my part- such a weapon might have only fried a twenty-mile-wide crater into the area where the city once was and sent enough particulates into the air to make things a lot less bright around here for a good long while.
Once again, the radiation would be a pretty useful tool provided there wasn't sufficient shielding for it (which is all conjecture), but it occurs to me now that in a vacuum, with nothing to neutralize or buffer the particles, whatever shot that nuke would be getting a fair dose of hard gammas as well...
Anyway. We're arguing about a hypothetical missile launched from a fictional spaceship using hypothetical technology to blow up fictional enemies. Some political arguments are worse, but not many. Do whatever you like, really- this ain't exactly a proposal to the Defense Department or anything.
