Yes. But the point is that the CK were being built, because not even mixed links of 72, composed of both men and women, would have been sufficient to do what had to be done. That suggests to me atleast that the CK are far more powerfull than the maximum circles available to the AoLers.

The point I am making is that the before they understood the danger, the AoLers were able to take out cities with 100K people in, and I quote "one go". To me that suggests an instant annihilation.

We know that Rand, the most powerfull channeler, using an angreal in rage, using all his strength, created a bar as thick as 1 meter.

The city/town I live in is relatively small. Only 70K people. And yet it is 37 km width. Now thats not exact since cities are not perfect squares but go with me. Lets take 7 km away just for that and we get 30km.

If there is no way to modify the width of the balefire, how the heck would a circle of 72, which is the absolute maximum, create a bar of 30km width! The power required would be utterly silly. Not to mention that if strength and width were connected, the balefire stream there would have had to burn all those 100K people back days or even weeks. Which would probably have instantly destroyed the pattern.

I think there is a way to choose how balefire works, and that when that city was wiped out, the balefire was made in such a way that it was incredibly large, but incredibly weak. So each citizen of that city was burned back by lets say half a second only. And the strength all went into the area of effect.

Now that would still be devastating ofcourse. Even though the people were barely burned, it was still a hundred thousand people taken out of the pattern in a single go as RJ said. Nasty stuff.

The bottom line is, I think it is perfectly reasonable of me to think that when Rand balefired Graendals palace, he did this. He used a small amount of what CK could offer to extend the balefire streams width, so that he would take out the entire palace in "one go". But he kept the total strength as low as possible to minimise the damage since he did not want to unmake existence just yet. In doing so he got Graendal (probably) but did not cause immense damage. Some yes, but not anywhere close enough to bring the pattern anywhere near to total destruction which is what Min and Nynaeve seemed to think.