>Would that have worked though? I don't know much about nuclear deterrence, but I'd imagine if the USSR already managed to evade the defenses and other obstacle

>Would that have worked though? I don't know much about nuclear deterrence, but I'd imagine if the USSR already managed to evade the defenses and other obstacles and destroy the city center in a nuclear strike, it wouldn't be a lot of additional effort to send multiple rockets instead of only one and also target the suburbs. The USSRs guidance computers were quite bad, and reentry would have scattered multiple payloads without those. Having talked to people in the programs from before the iron curtain fell they got around this problem by building larger bombs so the radius of destruction was larger than the radius of uncertainty around a target, to the point that dead-reckoning was viable. The maximum bomb size the USSR designed on top of Huston: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=100000&lat=29.7589&lng=-95.3677&hob_psi=5&hob_ft=47553&ff=52&psi=20,5,1&zm=9 https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=100000&lat=29.7589&l... In short, were the USSR serious about dealing with urban sprawl it wouldn't have taken much effort to build weapons that could vaporize Huston sized cities.