1. Civilians in Gori weren't shooting at anybody, and nobody was using that building to shoot at anybody, unlike in Iraq and Lebanon.
2. US forces in Iraq don't use cluster bombs since the invasion. We prefer 500-lb bombs for close air support that take otu the whole building the sniper is in, or we use a 2000-lb JDAM robot-wing smartbomb for precision hits.
3. Once again you must whine about AMERICA AMERICA AMERICA when discussing the Russia/Georgian conflict.
4. Everybody knows an American first-strike would be with bombers!
5. "A one megaton weapon would cause 105 square miles of 3+ psi destruction. With firestorms, the 20 Kt encirclement pattern can readily envelope 105 square miles in total destruction, leaving no escape for the inhabitants. At a population density of 12,000 per square mile the 20 Kt encirclement pattern might well produce 53% more deaths than a single one megaton weapon, which is to say, approximately 1,082,884 deaths with 20 Kt encirclement versus approximately 708,426 deaths with a one-megaton blast.
...With the simultaneous detonation of eight 20 Kt weapons on a day with 35 mile visibility, the thermal energy from the initial blast throughout the 105 square miles would be sufficient to ignite items having the same degree of flammability as thin black rubber at every point that was in line of sight of the contributing weapons. At Hiroshima (12.5 Kt), the approximate area characterized here by the flammability of rubber was involved in a firestorm.
...Although the high-tech aspects of the physics of a single weapon usually receive greatest attention, the physics involved in a confluence of blast forces and thermal energy from multiple weapons simultaneously detonating can be made to present far greater destruction in an urban environment than can a single thermonuclear weapons of the sizes that currently predominate.
There are two reasons for this: First, there is a ceiling on the amount of destruction that a single weapon can produce, because the radius of destruction for any given level of blast increases approximately as the cube root of the energy output, measured in kilotons. Further, a very large weapon, say one half megaton, must be detonated at a higher altitude (0.9 miles higher than a 20 Kt weapon) to maximize 3.5+ psi destruction, making it further from the target. Thus each increase in yield often has a modest incremental increase in destruction in urban areas. These limitations on destruction can be overcome by simultaneously detonating clusters of weapons, using patterns such as encirclement. The use of cluster bombs with conventional weapons (as in NATO's 1999 war in Yugoslavia) also illustrates the effects that can be achieved with multiple explosions in a specific area.
Second, it is not generally appreciated that some buildings and humans escape destruction when individual nuclear weapons are used alone. As Glasstone states, "close to ground zero the casualty rate will be high, but it will drop sharply beyond a certain distance . . . [p. 545]." Indeed, the earlier tables for Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed large percentages of "uninjured." The survival rate for humans in the exposed area beyond the 2 psi boundary has the potential to be in the order of 75+%, as can be seen in the earlier tables of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Closer in, at static overpressures in excess of 2 psi, survival rates can be in the neighborhood of 45% of the total population in the area. A similar percent of buildings may survive. Heavy multistory steel-frame construction may be especially resistant to blast pressures and survive. The only such building nuclearly attacked in Japan was 0.85 miles from ground zero in Nagasaki [6.7 psi]. It remained standing [Glasstone, p. 162]. But, as Glasstone points out, weakening of unprotected steel by fire can contribute significantly to the damage to steel-frame structures [pp. 162, 165]."
To overcome deficiencies in single weapon targeting, the incentive among weapon planners will be to use a simultaneous burst of multiple weapons. In an urban environment, the firestorms produced would insure that few humans or buildings would survive. As horrendous as past firestorms and nuclear attacks were in Japan, there were always a substantial number of survivors. A simultaneous blast of multiple weapons in an encirclement pattern raises the specter of no avenue of escape -- few to no survivors, a new plateau of horror in the history of war. This would be the case with even crude nuclear weapons of 20 Kt size.
...Simultaneously detonating nuclear weapons would produce greater and more complex forces than indicated by the individual circles in the above diagram. With 7 weapons in a circle, at the midpoint between zero point distance [half of 4.3 miles], two 20 Kt blast waves would collide at the 1.6 psi overpressure points. On interior points of the circle, the blast waves, depending upon the angles at which they met, would be reflected or merge. The key feature of encirclement in terms of blast forces is that the energy on the interior of the circle would be concentrated in a comparatively small area instead of dissipating from the zero point at a 128
The core joke of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is that of course no civilization would develop personal computers with instant remote database recovery, and then waste this technology to find good drinks.
Steve Jobs has ruined this joke.
Accidentally fired ICBM? 
