Thanks for reminding me once again that your position is "If Israel Does It, I Support It."
You're actually arguing that Israel is right to threaten her neighbors with nuclear annihilation (though I bet if pressed you'd never admit they actually have nuclear weapons) because they feel threatened, but that Iran has no right whatsoever to similarly arm themselves. Might makes right in your world, and so long as Israel has (allegedly) nuclear weapons, no other nation in the region can.
Yet while taking the "Israel is just a terrified victim (with nuclear weapons)" position, you went off book. Nobody is trying to retaliate against Israel? Your entire argument is premised on the notion that Israel is inches away from total destruction by hostile neighbors, but now you're claiming nobody is even trying to attack them?
You're gonna half to go back to the Bibi Netanyahu School of Likud Talking Points and get a refresher course!
It is. It would take just one single bomb to destroy tiny Israel! Iran is hundreds of times larger, and would take one hundred nuclear strikes to obliterate this evil empire.
A 20 megaton bomb (rather larger than most nukes) has an effective radius of destruction of un-hardened buildings of about 17km (based on a 5psi blast overpressure, and on an air-burst at the optimum height of about 18,000ft AGL); unprotected buildings would catch fire out to a radius of about 30km.
According to Wikipedia, Israel stretches 424 km from north to south, and its width ranges from 114 km to, at its narrowest point, 15 km. Assuming that burning down most of the buildings would suffice, destroying all of Israel would take about 30 such huge bombs.
Of course, it makes little sense to nuke the Negev desert; according to Wikipedia, in total, Israel has 74 cities, 14 of which have populations of over 100,000. So if you only care about the big cities, 14 nukes would suffice (and these could be in the more 'sensible' 1 megaton range, rather than being 20MT blockbusters*); If you want to knock out all of the smaller cities as well, you might be best served to use fourteen megaton range devices plus a further sixty in the 10-20 kiloton range.
One nuke could wipe out Tel-Aviv, but would not "destroy Israel" on its own.
One hundred nukes would be far from sufficient to destroy Iran, using the same standard; 31 nukes would suffice to destroy all of the provincial capitals, but smaller towns and cities are very numerous; a quick google suggests that there are around a thousand of these; so you could probably do the job with 30 or so megaton range bombs, and about a thousand more yielding in the 10-20 kiloton range.
Your estimate for the number of nukes required to destroy Israel is too low by a factor of between 14 and 74; Your estimate for the number required to destroy Iran is not too bad, ranging from too high by a factor of three, to too low by a factor of ten, depending on your criterion for 'destroying' or 'obliterating' a country.
Of course, if simply eliminating the current government suffices as 'destroying' a country, one or two low-yield devices would probably suffice in either case - as long as your intelligence could correctly determine the whereabouts of the various people who make up the government at the time of the strike.
Given that a nation with all of its major cities destroyed is unlikely to retain the ability to threaten her neighbours, I would say that the best guesstimate would be 14 nukes to wipe out Israel and about twice that number to wipe out Iran; A ratio of 2:1, which is rather less than your suggested 100:1 ratio.
I conclude that your hyperbole in this post has an estimated factor of fifty. If you divided your pro-Israel bias by fifty, then you might be somewhere close to reality.
*Even small nukes make a big bang, and so the effectiveness of a given mega-tonnage is far greater if you use lots of small bombs rather than one big one. Ten 100KT devices are a lot more destructive than one 1MT device; a hundred 10KT bombs are even more destructive again - not least because population tends to clump in towns and cities, so one big bomb just ends up extending the destruction out of the city and into surrounding farmland, while each small bomb can target the centre of a built up area. In the case of Israel, smaller devices also have the advantage of reducing any 'overspill' of blast or heat effects to areas outside the borders of the country itself, although radioactive fallout effects are obviously not so well contained in either scenario**. The 16KT device dropped on Hiroshima effectively destroyed that city, which had a population of about 350,000, about a third of whom were killed by the immediate impact of the bomb, with another third being injured. No matter how big the device had been, it could not have killed more than three times the actual number of people, simply because that was all there were in the target area. The difference between a 1MT and a 20MT device when targeting civilians in un-hardened buildings is purely academic; they all die in either case. The really big bombs are only good for wiping out hardened targets and/or targets for which the exact aim-point is uncertain.
**Radiation effects at Hiroshima probably killed about 1-2% of the number of people killed by the immediate blast and heat; Modern thermonuclear weapons are cleaner, and the effect of (and means to protect from) radiation after a nuclear strike are far better understood today, so radiation effects would likely be fairly small in relation to the big picture - albeit still accounting for thousands of deaths. Ecological non-radioactive effects, (eg 'nuclear winter' due to stratospheric particulate smoke) would likely cause non-trivial remote casualties over time in the Northern Hemisphere in any case, through diverse effects including crop failure induced famine, for example.
