Night City Holocaust

The Night City Holocaust, also known as the Arasaka Headquarters Bombing or AHQ Disaster, was a nuclear disaster in Night City that occurred on August 20, 2023.

Detonation
During the Fourth Corporate War, on August 20, 2023, a Militech incursion team led by Morgan Blackhand and Johnny Silverhand attempted an infiltration mission into the Arasaka Towers of Night City in order to steal/destroy the Arasaka Corporation's Reliquary Database Project. The idea was to render the project unusable for the rival corporation by using a tactical nuclear device (or "pocket nuke"), with the planned area, a heavily shielded complex, to absorb the impact of the blast and prevent massive destruction. However, due to the firefight between the Militech SpecOps and the Arasaka troops, the nuclear device somehow prematurely detonated on the 120th floor of the southern tower, 366 meters/yards above the ground, inside Kei Arasaka's apartment bunker where the Soulkiller lab was located.

The explosion instantly obliterated the Arasaka Towers, splitting them in half and causing both structures to collapse outward. The entire City & Corporate District turned into ruins within seconds with almost everyone in the immediate area dying. The blast instantly incinerated over 12,000 people in the vicinity of the Arasaka Towers and fatally injured upwards of half a million more. Another quarter million died in the resulting aftermath over weeks and months.

The explosion was technically an air blast, as the detonation went off at roughly 366 meters above the sea level, and while this lessened overall long-term radioactivity, most of what remained penetrated only the huge skyscrapers surrounding the blast area. Since much of the metropolis was built on fill, and because the elevation was originally very low, the nuke caused a minor earthquake that liquefied parts of the fill and flooded the inner city. The high blast and the tons of raw concrete and steel instantly turned into particulate debris that covered the entirety of Northern California and far out to sea for many months, as well as igniting a fierce firestorm that covered thousands of acres beyond Night City. All this combined dust cloud spiraled up into the sky and turned it red with particulate matter for almost two years. Even many years after the blast, suspended particles caused the skies at dawn and dusk to glow a lurid red, inspiring people who lived through that timespan to call it the Time of the Red.

Aftermath
Night City was barely habitable within 24 hours of the detonation. Lots of Night Citizens were unaffected by the initial fallout as they were mostly cybered up or had radioactivity filters installed in their bodies already. However, the firestorm destroyed a large portion of the city's housing, forcing people to move over to either the suburbs on the other side of the bay, or to areas further out. The liquified shaking soil caused by the explosion broke gas mains, water pipes, and electrical grids.

Then-US President Elizabeth Kress blamed the Night City attack on the Arasaka Corporation, however she was soon able to determine that the actual weapon used had been supplied by a Militech strike team. The Big Lie pushed forward by Militech and the USA was that Arasaka themselves had blown up the Corporate Center in an area denial attack to stop Militech from seizing control of the Arasaka Towers. Truth is that it was was never formally decided who had triggered the explosion. In the public's eyes, the reasoning for the nuclear detonation was never uncovered. Some believed it was Militech's overzealous desire to crush Arasaka, while others believed it was an area denial weapon set off to protect the Arasaka Towers.

Within hours of the disaster, President Kress nationalized Militech through the expedience of their CEO, General Donald Lundee, and his reserve commission. Militech was placed thoroughly under the control of the still sizable United States military, and banished all Arasaka forces from the continental US under the threat of a retaliatory strike on Arasaka's Tokyo headquarters. Other nations swiftly followed the US's lead, nationalizing and/or interdicting assets of both participants of the War.

Legacy
At some point in 2045, Trace Santiago, a young independent media, managed to obtain information about what truly went down in 2023, writing several exposes and books about the Fourth Corporate War. With this story published, the Big Lie - the deception created by President Kress to blame Arasaka for the AHQ Disaster - completely crumbled. This publication backfired spectacularly against Militech and the NUSA, driving Night City to realign itself with Arasaka rather than the United States. After these revelations, it was a common opinion that Night Citizens would prefer to see the return of the Asian corporation than submit to federal rule.

In 2077, Hanako Arasaka cited the initial death toll was around four thousand Arasaka employees and Night Citizens.

Development
Mike Pondsmith commented about the nuke on Reddit:
 * Word of God Here: Ah, The Nuke. I spent way too much time with fallout and destruction tables to make sure this worked. To save making you guys read all that (40+ pages), I'll sum up. The suitcase nuke was based on a prospective terrorist bomb concept, which was about .5Kt. I used San Francisco as the target model, siting the blast at about Coit Tower. It went off halfway up the Tower, which absorbed the blast and put it around 1200 feet up. The Towers were surrounded by equally huge and tall structures that absorbed much of the initial shock wave (and fell outwards, causing much of the secondary destruction, but limiting the scale of impact). The Nuke was a "clean" device, so radioactive fallout was minimized ( the point was to wreck the Arasaka database, not the City). About 15K were instantly killed in the blast, with upwards of 100K dying over time from aftereffects like radiation, firestorms, building collapse... As I was doing this research and using fun tools like Alex Wellerstein's Nuke Map site (https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/), I seriously expected the feds to kick in RTG's doors and arrest the lot of us.

Trivia

 * The power of the AHQ Disaster bomb was about a tiny fraction of the Hiroshima bomb.
 * The explosion was technically an air blast, as the detonation went off at roughly 366m/yds. Little Boy, in comparison, had a detonation height of about 579m/yds.
 * The nuclear device was was basically a tactical nuke not much larger than a suitcase bomb. Similar to a 1950s Davy Crockett backpack nuke, with an overall yield of .1 kiloton.