Comment by 0xbadcafebee
3 days ago
With only 10 large metro-areas destroyed, there are still other very large cities and metro areas. Phoenix, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth, Jacksonville, all have over 1M people. San Jose, Austin, Charlotte, Columbus, Indianapolis, Seattle, Denver, Oklahoma City, Nashville, all have from 700K-1M. And there's 20 more with 500K+ people. We have a big-ass country. Military and national guard are spread all over, as well as "industry" that is tapped in time of war (we don't have much of it left, but enough to be useful)
I'm not defending whatever OP's point was, I'm just saying we would have a whole lot of people left. Very few resources, and very poorly distributed, but a lot of people. If we lost 40% of the population it would still be a lot of people.
I think the 10 U.S. metro number itself is somewhat arbitrary here. It’s impossible to say precisely without looking at all parties’ deployed warhead counts and operational plans, but I have seen estimates that put the number of direct casualties over 100 million. (Russia and the United States each have well over 1000 warheads deployed.)
I do accept that towns far from both major metropolitan areas and high value military targets could survive. However, the short term social impact of supply shortages and the longer term agricultural effects of atmospheric changes are difficult to predict.