Anyone remember “Theatre Europe” Th erelease code fo rthe nukes was Midnight Sun
There was a game called Apocalypse that was essentially Risk with nukes.
Fun game to play, with some very interesting aspects, particularly the combat resolution system: instead of rolling dice the attacker chooses a quantity of pieces to commit to the attack (from 1-6, but only up to what they have in the area. Further complexities arise from attacking into mountains; can only choose 1-3, etc). This number is concealed from the defender, who must try and guess it. If the defender guesses correctly all of the committed troops are lost. If incorrect the defender losses 1 piece. If the defender has no troops left the attacker may advance into the new territory… and gains a 1-stage nuke. 
Nuke stages can be stacked, and a nuke will fly as far as its stages (i.e. a 1-stage nuke will only fly into an adjacent area). Nukes then destroy everything in the area they hit and all adjacent areas. If any destroyed area has a nuke in it that too goes off… which can result in unpleasant chain reactions. 
Has anyone seen a conversion of David Foster Wallace’s fictional outdoor LARP-slash-athletic-drill-slash-political-exercise Eschaton for the PC or Linux?
From New World Computing. Just a quick Google turned up an abandonware site here and there is this site which seems to be offering somebody’s rewrite of the game. WARNING: I have no idea if this stuff is going to install viruses or spy-ware on your machine.
I realise this is old but might be useful to someone but there is superpower (2) and supreme ruler (2010,2020 or cold war) that all have global maps and the ability to use nuclear weapons but both of these games are considered to be geopolitical simulations and can be quite difficult and boring at times for many (big focus on economics etc.). superpower is probably more superior in terms of nuclear weapons but I would recommend no one use this game due to it having starforce but I suppose thats up to you. Supreme ruler is good for global conflict though and I don’t know what the nuclear capabilities for cold war are like (only played 2020).
Hope this helps.
Rise of Nations is a real time game that starts with spear chuckers and ends with thermonuclear war.
Don’t you hate it when you come into a thread to make a corny joke, only to realize that somebody beat you to it four years ago… and that person was you?
If someone is looking, then World In Conflict is an excellent WW3 game.
Third World War for Sega CD was AWESOME!
In college I actually tried tracking down a working Sega CD system and that game. No luck.
I haven’t spent much time playing the Civ games but I think Third World War was a similar concept. A loose resource management system and then combat rounds that were not quite turn-based and not “real-time” just slow paced to allow you to move units around during the battles. You could pick different play modes like “Cold War” or “Mid-East Crisis” that determined the make-up of the map and the tech level.
My favorite game was when I was the US and the world was in a stalemate between Israel and Russia and myself. Militarily no one could get any traction and we all had missile defenses that made nukes worthless. Eventually I just bought out their economies and settled in to rule the world–but then the I reached the turn-limit/term-limit. A screen came up saying that “after 50 years of rule, I was ousted.”
Harpoon had a nuclear option, nut it was almost impossible to get a weapons release in any of the canned missions. Brew your own scenarios, however, and you made the rules.
Only problem was that you were limited to a one megaton device.
Declan
There was a game I used to play back in the early '90s when I got my first PC called Shadow President where you were the President in a relatively abstract geo-political simulation. You have 7 advisors (defense, economy, etc) and the game starts with the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, and lets you go from there.
I had a grand time setting up Libertarianopia - I slashed tax rates, abolished discretionary spending, pared down the military, told the Kuwaitis to go bother somebody else and ended up with an economy that was growing about 30% a year but people were rioting because they lost their food stamps and social security. Oddly enough, I was not re-elected. 
And, yes, you could nuke everything, but you’d end up losing the game. Nukes=BAD in this game, as well as others.
There is a patch that removes this, but to tell the truth Superpower (1) was a better game anyway.
Red Alert 3 loses the nukes (no Einstein) but RA2 and the earlier games have them.
Generals: Zero Hour has some great nuclear action. You can play skirmishes as the Chinese Nuke General which gives you nuclear artillery, nuclear jets (and a helicopter IIRC- the Helix normally drops HE or napalm but I think the Nuke General gets one that drops nukes), nuclear-powered tanks (that shoot a nice burst of radiation along with their shells) and half-price nuclear missiles. If you play as this general you end up victorious, lording over a giant swath of black shit stains all the way back to the craters where your enemy’s base was.