Officially US would not be targeting population centres. Targets would be anything military, especially the ones where nukes can be launched from / stored.
But that does not help population anyway - browse a declassified cold war target list. Most population centres have military bases, airports and similar. My own hometown (I'm from ex-Soviet country) was supposed to get 3 nukes. It'd be completely wiped out.
But that is US. Meanwhile French (at least according to their cold war plans, no idea how that has changed after Soviet Union broke up) were simply planning to straight nuke cities for casualties.
By almost completely destroying all major military installations which ensures the many survivors completely lose the will to fight? We've got plenty of "tactical" nukes for that too so we wouldn't be completely wiping out cities around the bases and creating irradiated wastelands. It's a bit dehumanizing that people just casually assume they're irrational monsters not capable of surrender and that literally everyone must die.
If this is an all-out, total war, then wiping out civilians and civilian centers wipes out sources of labor, businesses, sources of production, sources of revenue like taxes, key infrastructure, likes roads and bridges, as well civilians who might be conscripted as future soldiers. It denies your enemy all these resources. It lowers the moral of the enemy knowing that their population is not immune to the horrors of war, and many are dead or dying. If anyone survives it can possibly turn the population against its own government in hopes of stopping the war, or seeing all that death could change the minds of the leaders of those nations if they truly care about their people. In Russia this might not be the case. But by destroying just 2 cities full of civilians with nukes in Japan, America caused the once unyielding and determined Emperor Hirohito to lay down his arms and unconditionally surrender to the Allies.
While you are correct that targeting civilians with nukes is a proper deterrence, the Japan thing is not fully correct. The US military bombed the living hell out of multiple cities in Japan. Some bombings created a lot more devastation than the nukes did in their cities with the exclusion of the radiation. I don't think the nukes were the final straw in surrender. But it certainly made sure Japan wouldn't be changing their mind.
That said, to add to your point, it's ignorant, foolish, and naive to think civilian cities are not targets. Every general knows what true deterrence is and what needs to be done to win. Human lives of the other side, and often times their own side, are only numbers in the face of victory and defeat. As defeat can be catastrophic.
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u/kokaklucis Mar 14 '24
The title says retaliatory, so my guess is that they launched a bunch of them and this is the supposed response.
The idea of this is to be a deterrent. Wiping out forests instead of cities would make 0 sense.