So, thriving metropolis or all but devoid of human life?
Your position is ridiculous for two main reasons. Firstly, the reason that nobody lives in Chernobyl anymore is not because it's going to kill anybody who stands inside it, Call of Duty style, but rather because the government evacuated everybody. There are actually some people who
do still live inside the exclusion zone. It's obviously not hugely detrimental to animals living inside it, because
they are. They're thriving, not dying! They probably have higher than average rates of leukemia or something, but it's no wasteland.
The second, and far more important reason is that a slow release from a reactor isn't even remotely comparable to a nuclear bomb detonation. Even if Chernobyl was exactly as you'd have us believe, totally uninhabitable, a completely dead environment... that still wouldn't mean that this was the same thing that happens when a nuclear warhead explodes.
The fact that Hiroshima and Nagasaki
are still inhabited, and were constantly inhabited since the bombs went off is ample proof that the effects aren't equivelant. The radiation dissipates almost immediately, and all long-term effects come from the fallout. Ground-bursts generate a lot of fallout, and air-bursts generate very little. In fact, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were far lower to the ground than is optimal (but they didn't know that at the time), meaning that it put out more fallout than it would have with an optimal airburst.
Modern weapons are also Fission-Fusion weapons, as opposed to pure fission. The fission charge is used to initiate fusion, which does the supermajority of the damage. Fission = lots of fallout, fusion = very little fallout. The fission first-stage of a Fission-Fusion weapon is actually far smaller than a conventional pure-fission bomb. This is to say, modern, high-yield nukes are
far cleaner than older, less powerful nukes.
... and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were perfectly habitable after the bombs dropped.
everybody always likes to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki when they argue that nukes won't have any effect on the world.
Nobody is arguing that they have no effects. The argument is that a nuke doesn't render a city uninhabitable. The ecological effects of large-scale nuclear exchanges is unknown and highly controversial. Carl Sagan famously screwed up when he claimed that it would cause "nuclear winter", and was later shown to be completely wrong.
Note: edited an inaccurate statement.
