Guessing there would be several aimed at each city of any size, and the targeted locations would be spread out a bit to maximize impact. If you're conducting an all-out nuclear assault you're probably not pulling any punches.
I was going to say there aren't enough warheads to target every city because:
>[The] United States and Russia have the vast majority of nuclear weaps, with 4,804 and 4,480 warheads stockpiled respectively. There are approximately 1,861 nukes spread over the rest of the world, between China, Israel, the U.K, Pakistan, and India. France has the largest number of nukes after the U.S. and Russia. [0]
However, there are only 326 cities with over 100k population in the US. [1]
It would not be hard to list out the most valuable US locations to destroy, government, business, and military, for either the goal of preventing C&C and/or for ending the civilization.
I actually just recently read a report from the late 80s that discussed a couple of scenarios and likely distribution of nuclear targets in each one.
The best case scenario (in the context of a full scale nuclear war with Russia) was a couple hundred successfully detonated strikes. The eastern seaboard, and all the metropolitan areas on the west coast were smoking holes in the ground. Pretty much anywhere with a sufficiently large military base, or significant government presence was on the "likely destroyed" list. There were a lot of random inland areas, which I assumed were targeting silos.
Basically, even in the 400 bomb scenario, the Boise field office of the IRS becomes the nation's highest authority.
> However, there are only 326 cities with over 100k population in the US. [1]
Only using an definition of "city" that's based on arbitrary political boundaries:
> This list refers only to the population of individual municipalities within their defined limits; the populations of other municipalities considered suburbs of a central city are listed separately, and unincorporated areas within urban agglomerations are not included. Therefore, a different ranking is evident when considering U.S. metropolitan area populations.
Metropolitan statistical areas are probably the right thing to count, and there are 358 of those over 100k (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area) in the US. Since US urban areas are pretty sprawling, you'd probably need multiple strikes to fully destroy most of the large ones.
When I way playing with nukemap, it looked like with a single air-burst bomb aimed the the urban core, the destruction of wooden buildings wouldn't even make it to the inner-ring suburbs.
