I think this is a neat idea in theory, but for any long term value to be gained, a military power would need to practice generating at least medium-scale sortie

I think this is a neat idea in theory, but for any long term value to be gained, a military power would need to practice generating at least medium-scale sorties many times to know if this strategy was really viable, and specifically, since this strategy is so reliant on scale and weather - you would need to also test launching at some scale at your actual target (even with dummy payloads) prior to the real attack (i.e.: what if once you get to a wave that's 10k/100k strong, they start to mess with your weather projections?) Basically, I think this is a strategy that's effective at scaring the US citizenry, but it is such a bad idea in practice no good adversary would choose this instead of the usual nuclear deterrent.