[WilliamDhalgren]

Agreed, if civilization does come tumbling down. However, as far as I could read, for it to survive a nuclear exchange is quite possible, even probable.

Blasts themselves seem relatively harmless, beyond the hundereds of millions they just outright kill that is, radiation we're just characteristically paranoid about, but can actually deal with at least in many remaining areas, and the main issue at debate is whether a nuclear winter of substantial duration would be formed or not. Which depends on the scope of the fires, so flammability of urban environments and the like. We can't pretend to know a real answer, but its certainly possible.

And then there's the issue of whether the south hemisphere could avoid that fate even in such a case, due to weather patterns, provided there's no detonations there (as there are no weapons there).

Now that doesn't seem substantially different from any large-scale warfare civilization easily survived previously, like world war II; urban devastation and millions of dead. Hardly a civilization-ending event.

[M_Grey]

It depends on if we're talking about Pakistan and India dusting each other, or the US and Russia pulling the trigger. In the former case it's as uncertain as you said, but in the latter to be honest, we're done. Huge areas will be utterly toxic, and there will be infrastructure or meaningful leadership to let anyone know where those are.

So I grant you that something a bit less hopeful and dramatic than 'Mad Max' is more than possible, but only as part of a long slide into the end of our species.

While "Humans" would almost certainly survive (for a while), the odds of any given human (i.e. you or me) surviving are pretty poor. At best you'd be looking at generations of struggle and misery, and then what? Our way of life came to pass by a number of factors including the ready availability of coal. That's... not coming back either. Resources that don't' require extreme mining are generally depleted already, from fossil fuels to various metals.

The various steps that brought us up from mud huts don't necessarily work for another round.

[WilliamDhalgren]

hah, mostly very good points

IDK, for one I'm not even sure a major exchange is as deadly as here supposed (much depends on who else joins the party I guess); sure lots of land on some continents at least is badly irradiated, but a majority is not quite as bad, and most of radiation degrades quickly, some simple measures help, and besides not everyone needs to survive every year After Launch anyhow, and non-extreme radiation doses kill only statistically. Much depends on - as you say, on how much of state command structure is able to survive and organize the remains, and that could easily vary from state to state on the planet.

I lived through a minor war in my youth, with the frontline maybe 2km at its closest approach and regular shelling for IDK couple of years. It was a remarkably well-ordered affair, considering. Fact half the GDP evaporated and rest was put under direct government command for war and other logistical purposes didn't really constitute a panic collapse of societal order or anything like that, and return to some kind of (low budget) normality quite quick. Kinda remarkable in retrospect, in how badly we react to small upsets, like a high-single digit GDP loss in a recession, yet tolerate such major disasters...

If the number of people directly killed is on the order of a few hundered million, thats not a substantial part of the humankind, so it may not be too different -- to people living in places too boring to have been hit by a nuke and not too close downwind from something interesting, ofc.

Guess it becomes worse if all the players hit all the other players, and no further advances in reducing nuclear inventories are made before it hits etc.

But again, yeah, a societal collapse is certainly a kill-myself kind of event for me too, because as you say - we're never gonna rebuild if we fall to that point. I'm just more sanguine about nukes being lobbed about not necessarily causing this I guess.