[portofcall]

I feel like this conversation is taking place in a strange parallel universe in which people don’t appreciate what 15,000+ nuclear warheads being exchanged would do. The fires started from them alone would be an extinction event, and the kinds of incredibly remote areas in which you might find long-term survivors would not be laden with caches of electronics and populations capable of using them.

Getting enough food and water that wasn’t dreadfully contaminated alone would be the preoccupation of generations. By the time anyone had ideas about rising from barbarism, what we think of as civilization now would be rusted, eroded, and overgrown.

All of that assumes the most optimistic of assumptions regarding global wildfires, teratogenic effects, and nuclear winter. We wouldn’t be using magnetic tapes, we’d be using rocks and sticks and animal hides.

[Retric]

The earth's surface is ~200 million square miles. 1 bomb per 13,000 square miles seems bad, but we had survivors very close to ground zero with even H-Bombs and these nukes would not be eventually spread over the surface. Many people would be 5,000+ miles from the closest detention.

Remember we actually detonated a large number of nukes on the surface with minimal impact on global radiation exposure.

While relatively small by modern standards Yoshitaka Kawamot was less than 1km from the hiroshima blast and survived. Yes, these nukes may be 100+x as powerful but destruction is far from 1:1 with yield sizes.

[portofcall]

People are not evenly distributed on the surface of the earth, most of which is ocean. Nukes do. It target randomly, they target population centers and strategically valuable regions. Most people live where nukes are aimed, which is why they are aimed there.

15,000 warheads concentrated where humans live, on the fraction of the 27% of Earth that isn’t water. Be reasonable.