Was thinking about today. Thought it would be interesting to play a flight sim where the Cold War actually went hot, and I can fly my F-84F on a one-way mission to toss-bomb a Soviet SAM site with a parachute-retarded nuclear weapons, or hit an airbase in Kamchatka in my F-111 with SRAMs. I know this game doesn’t exist, but has there ever been any flight sim where nuclear weapons can be employed as a regular part of the game? By “regular” I am excluding things where e.g. it’s been modded in but hasn’t really been included as a normal feature of the game, or arcadey games where it’s the final part of the final mission (like Heatseeker). Also by “flight sim” I mean games where you’re actually in the cockpit rather than e.g. CMANO (which I do love).
Not really what you're after, but the CFS3 add-on 'Firepower' included some nuclear weapons,tho I don't have it installed at the moment and can't remember what you could actually do with them, in terms of missions or campaigns:
Strike Fighters/SF2 might do the instant sunshine thing, if you can track down a suitable plane and missions/campaign. This Voodoo for example is said to include a Mk7 tactical nuke:
Edit - this Aardvark is one of several variants flyable in the Strike Fighters 2 mod SF2 NATO, available over at CombatAce, and I just checked its loadout, which includes a nuke. Other aircraft in the mod may also have one.
And the weapon on the centreline of this Mirage 2000N is apparently a Mk28 1Kt job, the loadout also including an ASMP nuclear cruise missile. Didn't check to see what happened if I dropped the Mk28
The Hornet series by Graphic Sims (Hornet 2.0, Hornet 3.0) ended had the last missions in the campaigns where you were given a nuke to take out a high value target.
The old Lightning Simulator for the ZX 48K had the 'combat mission' being an intercept of two individual escorted Nuclear armed Backfires before they hit mainland UK targets.
Near impossible to accomplish - I think I managed the dual intercept once, but had insufficient fuel to make an rendezvous with a refueller or return to any runway.
Visually nothing much happened when they 'removed' their target airbases, but it was probably one of the earliest sims with nuclear weapons (TACAN, g-limits and in-flight refuelling too) in.