The historian Gwynne Dyer has said that Sennacherib destroyed Babylon as thoroughly as a nuclear bomb would have. In fact, the only difference between the ancient world and the modern is that it took a lot more human muscle power to accomplish the same thing. The Assyrian soldiers pulled the walls down and burned the city. (Imagine what would be involved trying to create a Hiroshima or Nagasaki if human hands had to do the work.)
