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How can you pretend to know any of this stuff about war yet not know a MIRV is more than one nuke.
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One warhead still = one MIRV warhead.
I still stand by that statement.
An MIRV "claw", in the absence of a ABM system or any chance of failure (expect only 1/3rd of your missiles to get launched: 1/3rd being serviced, 1/3rd expected to fail and 1/3 expected to work and they still have yet to face an ABM defence) would be capable of destroying the majority of a single city, but not wipe out a billion people.
FYI, ballistic missiles with MIRVs capability are not packed to their maximum capacity either, the typical SLBM, be it Russian, American, British or French (I'd assume China follows the same model) is only fitted with a single bus of 3 warheads because there are more missiles now than there are warheads to fill them all up.
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i am p sure a 1.2 megaton bomb dropped over manhattan would destroy all of new york city
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The buildings would soak up a ton of energy and prevent the ones furthest from the initiation from feeling the full brunt on the blast, even if it's still an air burst.
Of course, this is all trivial, nukes (at least all of the US ones, and most of the Soviet ones, China doesn't have enough to go over targeting.) are not targeted at population centers, they are targeted at targets of value, many of which happen to be inside population centers.
As a redundancy, several missiles are assigned to a specific target. For instance, the entire British nuclear deterrent would have be spent on the leveling on Moscow alone.
Funny thing is, Moscow was all smoke and mirrors, the Soviets had nothing of importance placed within the city and spread disinformation about it to turn it into a nuke sponge.