[ixgizccl] Hiroshima, Nagasaki, ________

Which city will be the next large city to be nuclear bombed?  Place your bets, inspired by the Deadpool.

• Karachi
• Lahore
• Delhi
• Mumbai
• Gaza
• Tehran
• Cairo
• Jerusalem
• Tel Aviv
• Riyadh
• Baghdad
• Damascas
• Moscow
• Kiev
• Tblisi
• Berlin
• Strasbourg
• Paris
• Brussels
• Dublin
• Edinburgh
• London
• Beijing
• Shanghai
• Hong Kong - Guangzhou (is this just one metropolitan area for the purposes of nuclear bombing?)
• Taipei
• Pyongyang
• Seoul
• Tokyo
• Mexico City
• Havana
• Caracas
• New York
• Washington
• Hiroshima
• Nagasaki
• Lawrence

Perhaps this is a good bucket list of cities to visit while they still exist, because any one of them have good chances of being obliterated at any moment.

Somewhat likely as the next nuclear bomb target is not a city in the normal sense but instead a large refugee camp (which might not exist yet) with population comparable to a city.  The bomber wants their enemy to die, not to escape, to prevent the enemy from counterattacking in the future, perhaps after making alliances.

Super optimistically, nuclear war might be so far off in the future that the next city to be bombed might not even exist yet.  Or that could be super pessimistic: something else (e.g., climate change) might devastate civilization down to a technology level where it becomes unable to use or build nuclear weapons for a long time, with our current stockpile degrading to unusability.

The cities chosen for inclusion on this list are large or important cities associated with regions of geopolitical tension in which at least one party has nuclear weapons.  One party having nuclear weapons often induces other parties to seek them as well, perhaps indirectly via an alliance with another nuclear power.  Are there other cities which meet this criterion which should be on this list?

Absent from the list is the entire southern hemisphere, possibly due to my ignorance.  South Africa reportedly no longer has the nuclear weapons that they were explicitly planning to use on their own citizens, a fact that residents of nuclear powers should note well: nuclear weapons don't necessarily make you safer in your own country.  Political winds change.

Perhaps the Monroe Doctrine makes the entire Western Hemisphere, including all of South America, potential targets for American nuclear weapons, e.g., to punish a country for not obeying the United States.

We include Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the list because whoever bombs Japan next might deliberately invoke history in choosing their first city to bomb.  Perhaps they wish to make a point that they should be considered no more evil than the first nuclear bomber of those cities.  The two cities also happen to be two of the closest large Japanese cities to North Korea and to China (though Fukuoka is closer and larger than both).

We include Lawrence as a joke entry because it's been repeatedly nuclear bombed in a movie (The Day After), then a TV show (Jericho), and also nearly laser-obliterated from space in Diamonds Are Forever.

Not included in this list are cities which might suffer because they happen to be close to a military or other strategic site.  For example, a bomb targeting Sandia National Laboratory would also hit Albuquerque, or a bomb targeting the Hoover Dam might also hit Las Vegas.  We don't include such cities because we are limiting the list to situations in which a nuclear weapon is used for the primary purpose of killing a huge number of civilians, a thing it does well.

This betting pool might be difficult to adjudicate because it is quite realistic that several cities might get bombed simultaneously.  Maybe split the pot.  However, how realistic is it that bombs go off so close to simultaneously that it's difficult to determine which of them detonated first?  Nuclear explosions generate all their energy in a tiny amount of time, so it seems likely that we will know their timings very precisely.  Maybe a Skynet-style attack of simultaneous bombs everywhere also destroys such instrumentation and recording.

Unclear what value the money in the betting pool will have after a nuclear attack.  For example, the dollar is fiat currency backed by the U.S. Federal Reserve.  What if the Fed doesn't exist anymore?

The list above is not actually a good bucket list if one is worried about global thermonuclear war.  Everywhere, even if not obliterated, will be profoundly affected by global thermonuclear war.  Afterwards, you will not be able to experience any place like it was before Judgement Day.  For example, fallout may prevent people from being outside, and many places are defined by their people.

Previously, not descriptively asking which city is likely to be nuked, but asking normatively, which city, chosen by a country's own citizens, should be nuked?