This

Yeah, don't you just hate how everything is standing?! SOOO unrealistic, unlike the giant ants, mutants, ghouls, and consumable 200 year old foodstuffs....

Mr. House and Robco sold just enough ABMs to the U.S. military/Enclave to not have all the major cities turned to burnt mud or craters.

War isn't simply about killing a bigger number of the enemy's population; it's destroying the things that support them so their infrastructure collapses. Take Rome for instance. Once one of the single most powerful empires in the world, but then it quickly fell. Was it through civil war? Nope. Nearby enemy tribes realized they had been using caravans to bring in food and supplies, so they stayed far away from the walls and took out the caravans. Rome eventually began to starve and broke out into fights over the last bits left until finally the entire city had died.

Targeting Vegas would be an economical choice and also a casualty choice. A lot of people travel here to gamble and waste millions if not billions of dollars every year. Taking out that system would do tremendous damage to the state of Nevada and would do a bit of damage to the United States' economy as well (after all, those casinos had to pay taxes as well. Now they can't). The amount of nukes targeted at Vegas is yes, absurd, but there's also the fact of people driving in and out of Vegas every day. Those nukes may have also been traveling to hit I-15 and eradicate thousands of lives driving in and out of the city.

Also we see that House, the enigmatic leader of RobCo also based himself here. He alone was able to generate untold amounts of robots for civilian and military purposes, and taking him out would also have a large impact on the United States.

I was reading that the bomb yeilds were basically those of the hiroshima bombs, because there was no cold war no country was racing to create bigger yeild nuclear weapons and technology went in different directions, so that would explain the big boy bombs in dc and the damage, but not obviously the massive destruction in vegas. And if you look at the wide black and white aerial shot of the destruction of hiroshima, it mostly looks bad because there were alot of wooden buildings, i live in country victoria australia and weve had fire obliterate a few towns, and when you look at how much damage fire causes, its not just blast from a nuke that causes damage to structures.

and if you read the wiki i think it is about new vegas and house he had some kind of weapon to shoot the nukes before they hit but with a core overload the guns shut down and like one or two hit but idk where

That was the only nuke that hit the ground. There could have been multiple airbursts as well which would explain less destruction but high radiation.

They would probabally put a location there too, right in the middle, so you have to take rad x/away ever 2 seconds because you feel compelled to get that location...
What no one else was like that in fallout 3, only to be pissed when they found an inacessibl door...

Great read. Thank you for that.