[OkayPhysicist]

Nuclear armageddon would not spell human extinction. Not even close. Most of the southern hemisphere would be basically untouched: No one's wasting their nukes hitting most of South America or Africa, and frankly even Australia's a stretch.

Even in the United States, in a worse case scenario, large swathes would be untouched by the direct blast effects of all-out nuclear war. There's basically nothing in Idaho worth nuking, for example. It would spell civilizational collapse, sure, since the major economic, industrial, and administrative hubs would now be smoking holes in the ground. But for people living in the agricultural interior of the US, most problems would be economic rather than desperate survival.

The effects of EMP are grossly overblown. Most electronic devices would still work fine, once you have a generator or access to the parts of the grid that would not be targets (again, even when you're firing a couple thousand nukes, the windfarms of Iowa are going to be faaaaaar down the list of targets).

The refuge crisis of people migrating from places not completely annihilated but still no longer safe for habitation (think Merced or Gileroy, California) would be straining. Such desperation would breed banditry, sure, but not to the level of a Mad Max hellscape. Most people do not have the stomach for such violence, which is why even in the most apocalyptic conditions (look at say, Syria during its civil war, or Gaza today) you only see a moderate increase in criminality.

Nuclear war can be very bad without making up silly scenarios.

[hopelite]

This is so naive. I suggest you inform yourself more about things you clearly know nothing about. Ironically Iowa would be very much affected and likely depopulated by fallout from primary nuclear targets in Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, and North Dakota; not to mention the primary and/or secondary command and control targets in Iowa. Similarly Idaho not only has at the very leas secondary targets in Air Force bases and the nuclear weapons lab, but it would likely also get fallout radiation from the primary targets as winds shift. These things are based on current research and the military and government's own analysis and predictions.

There is also a book you may want to read called "Nuclear War: a Scenario" by Annie Jakobsen [1] so you can be more informed before you blather. It's a summary of what the government expects from a nuclear war, which would very much cause a nuclear winter and the death of at least 5 billion people. And she does not even take into account things you are also ignorant of, that South America/Caribbean, Africa, and Australia are very much also nuclear targets due to military installations in all those places, not to mention the famine. You should really try reading the books I mentioned about what happened during the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, since you are also ignorant of what happens in America under such circumstances. There are many other events like the LA riots that also shine a light on on the reality of breakdown in the USA and any other place that is not culturally homogeneous, when the rules no longer apply and there is no one left to keep the savages at bay.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_War:_A_Scenario

[lazide]

Hahahaha, no. That is not at all realistic. Just because someone wrote a giant fearmongering book about it doesn’t make it real.

Nukes are bad, but not that bad. Nuclear Winter has never checked out under any serious analysis either.

We’ve had multiple volcanic eruptions orders of magnitude larger than all nuclear armed countries arsenals too.