Y’know, it would have been such a differently horrific world if they actually had started using nuclear weapons for shit like that.
They were actually used, and widely deployed by both sides of the Cold War. Just never fired in anger, only ready to be fired at a moment's notice for decades.
Regarding nuclear surface detonations, there were so many of above the ground tests, (some tests were even conducted in space) to the point that you need to drag up old shipwrecks that sunk before August 1945 from the ocean floor, if you want to build a highly sensitive radiation sensor and need steel for it that isn't contaminated with the fall-out from those tests, and will therefore make the sensor give false readings...