Comment by nostrademons
7 days ago
Realistically speaking you're going to die of starvation or get shot by marauding gangs, or die of cancer a few decades later from radiation in the food change. NukeMap [1] has good visualizations of the relative fireball vs. blast vs. thermal radiation vs. fallout radiuses. One thing that stands out: most of the suburbs is going to survive the initial nuclear exchange. At worst, they'll have a few broken windows.
The problem is that if you eliminate ~20% of a nation's population, supply chains, continuity of government, and the economy aren't going to last long. Social organization breaks down much more widely than people die. The resultant pullback of all the trapping of society - reliable food supply, clean water, transportation infrastructure, electricity, heat - is going to kill many more people than the nukes will.
Not only 20% of the population, but wiping out cities is going to make everything grind to a halt. Best case, tiny pockets of social order is going to remain in very hard to reach, remote rural areas which also has local access to food. We are talking about maybe thousands of people in a population of hundreds of millions. The rest are in for a decade of pure hell.