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Originally Posted by Ursus Maior
So, the main differences visible to the naked eye between a nuclear and a conventional explosion would simply be the massive damage to the surrounding environment far beyond the immediate crater. When the Saudis used a Mk. 87 bomb on a Yemeni market in March 2016 (with a 428 kg warhead filling) they killed 97 people. Hitting a market in an urban center with a 0.3 kt device would likely kill close to 6,000 people immediately and wound another 20,500 people, many of them would die from maiming and 3rd to 2nd degree burns, which occur out to about 380 m and 480 m respectively. These burns would be also visible on trees, with charring marks at least out to 350 m, but probably more, and knocked over trees out to beyond 1 km in a concentric pattern around the 6.18 m deep crater (that's easily a two story building).
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To be clear, I was not contrasting the effects of a single large conventional bomb and a tactical nuclear weapon, but your points are well-taken.
The war in Ukraine has produced some stunning images of the effect of large volumes of conventional explosives on urban areas- Bakhmut, being an especially good example. Aside from being in color, aerial shots of present-day Bakhmut don't appear all that dissimilar from photos of Hiroshima taken in September, 1945 (it's also worth noting the fact that Bakhmut started with many times more concrete structures than Hiroshima did). To reiterate my point, a couple of years after a battle/campaign like Bakhmut, it would probably be difficult for the average soldier (not in possession of a Geiger counter) to distinguish whether such extensive damage was created by intense conventional warfare or by a tactical nuclear weapon. This would be especially true the further from ground zero one happens to be.
Of course, as you pointed out, there would be other clues, that those more experienced, or with special training perhaps, would likely recognize.
In a T2k campaign, in trying to clue the audience into the fact that the party was entering the outer margins of an old tac-nuke blast zone, I described the damage to a wooded area near a kilometer or two from ground zero as a concentric band of fallen trees all lying pointing roughly in the same direction. I got the idea after seeing photos of some of the forest surrounding Mt. St. Helens (a volcano in upstate Washington) a year or two after the surprise 1980 eruption.
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