Thats all fine and dandy, but a high yield nuke would leave that area of the planet completely uninhabitable for hundreds maybe even thousands of years. Its a win all the way around !
Not true. Nuclear fallout is overrated. The deployed nukes are always less than the low megaton yield. A nuke incident would have a similar effect to the Fukushima disaster at most. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are major cities, and started becoming such soon after we won and started rebuilding Japan. I would propose that Fukushima is worse than our 20kt yield war nukes as far as the environmental impact.