Most of the cities you struck are major production centers for food packaging, canning, etc. Not to mention gas refineries. So in short order, no food from far away, no gas to deliver locally for the surviving cities. Things will get very hard, even if you expect everyone to hold hands and work together. 122 cities will either kill or displace over 100M people who won't be paying taxes, and 85% of federal revenue comes from personal income taxes and social security. So the feds will have lost a quarter of their revenue (@1T) at a time when they need to be spending massive amounts of money on reconstitution. And a whole lot of electronic financial transactions went up in mushroom clouds, so expect MASSIVE economic dislocation... oh yes, and the war still may be going on.
Well in the affected areas, most people will die from fallout and panic. Well on the positive you left Phoenix AZ unscathed, and Luke AFB in tact. Also Kentucky looks safe, most of Indiana, and a few other places. But as far as recovery goes Globally, it would take at least a decade, if not longer. People would be in small communities, and probably become tribalistic in nature. So recovery would be a little more than a year, cause you hit every important governance world wide. So it would dissolve into a chaos of independent entities taking up the roles of power in the vacuum once the dust settles. Worlds basically gonna suck. Fallout Series much? (Personally I have no clue what the lore on this one is, but it sounds similar to how that fictional world was created.) Good luck killing about 2-3 billion people.
At least a few years. Considering the extent of the damage to civilian infrastructure there would need to be a lengthy period of martial law while communication and banking systems were restored, food shortages alleviated and resource distribution returned back to civilian control. Considering the impact zones described and modern civilization's fragile nature due to it's complexity, even your 'relative normalcy' would take a long time. Even with the ludicrously underestimation of the long term impact of nuclear fallout from even low-yield weapons. Watch Threads to see a dramatization of the impact from a 'moderate' nuclear attack on England, based on the actual government report estimating the physical, economic and environmental damage, from the pre-war as shown in the trailer, to the civil unrest, martial law, nuclear winter, to the long term impacts on future generations, ending with the next generation trying to plow fields in radioactive soil. And that's for the 1980s when society was a bit more robust.
Here's a great documentary about what a nuclear attack, even moderate, would actually mean to the environment and the ability to have even basic crops and safe rainfall across all your assumed 'white bits'. Rivers and dams would be polluted by fallout. So no water. "When we began our work people assumed nuclear wars would do nothing to the climate, or that their effects would be limited to the zones that were attacked. Our work was designed to answer the simple question: would there be a large effect on the climate or the people outside the combat zone... and these models do suggest very strongly that for a very wide range of possible nuclear wars... that there would indeed be very large effects on the atmosphere." "The main consequence of nuclear conflict would be very sever temperature drop .. over the course of a few days... we are talking 20, 30 or 40 degrees Celsius decrease... that would last 6 to 12 months..." They explain how single volcanic eruptions around the world in the last few hundred years impacted on the growth of trees in America by causing frost damage.
Keep in mind that this book was written by the same mindset that, in the 1950s, told us we could all survive the initial nuclear attack using the duck-n-cover technique. That book's not science fiction, it's political humour.
Yeah, it seems like what the OP is asking has two different answers: what he wants us to tell him and what the truth actually is. It's not going to be a quick fix. Most major cities have been destroyed, limiting supplies and food. Water is tainted. The President is displaced. It's not going to be a couple months to get the power back on. If anything, electricity will be one of the last things restored while the government deals with the sick and injured and provides everyone with food and shelter. No country can get hit by 122 nuclear bombs and just be okay within a few months. Maybe 22 bombs. Three or four, sure. But not 122. It's just not plausible, and if you decide to do it anyway, good luck trying to convince your reader.
@Selbbin, thanks for the link. I saw "Threads" 30 years ago, and I think it is one of the most realistic depictions of the aftermath of a nuclear war that I have seen to date. I have been trying to find it since, but haven't been able to locate it.
I'm puzzled by some of these target choices. Why is Puerto Rico hit, but not New York City? That strikes me as utterly ridiculous. Ignoring the many plausibility problems of this scenario, we're looking at a major economic collapse, both in the US and worldwide. That would severely hamper recovery efforts.
Puerto Rico is a very reasonable target. American Territories (along with Alaska and Hawaii, which used to be territories,) are major strategic assets, considering they allow us to place nukes and ICBMs in plaves we couldn't otherwise.
The strike OP is talking about is far too small to be targeting such assets with the intent to destroy them. It's less than half the size of a counter value strike, which would focus on destroying population centers to cause long term damage. By any measure, destroying New York City does more damage to the U.S. than hitting Puerto Rico.
But hitting Puerto Rico damages the US's ability to retaliate immediately. Besides, as I pointed out earlier, he also left out KC and St Louis, so it looks like they're avoiding population centers and focusing on military targets.
Then the OP needs to totally overhaul the plan, because he doesn't have near enough missiles launched or targets hit to accomplish what you're talking about. That's something I pointed out in the last thread related to this topic, but it seems OP wants to continue with the plan.
This is a map from FEMA, circa 1990: Black dots are targets in a 2000 missile strike (this is a Russia/Soviets strike first scenario). If you want to "win" a nuclear war, that's the plan you follow. Purple triangles are a 500 missile strike (this is Soviet retaliation for a successful American first strike). The latter plan isn't about winning, it's about hurting your opponent really bad. Edit: link to Reddit thread in case the image messes up again. https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/2zhbol/probable_targets_in_the_us_for_a_soviet_nuclear/
You're assuming the attacker has 500+ nukes to spare. At this point we're just splitting hairs, though.
Russia is estimated to have 7 700 nukes, according to https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Nuclearweaponswhohaswhat I don't know that any of them are exactly "spare", but they exist.
Considering the lead up to the conflict that the OP laid out in another thread, that's not a problem. The Russians have their full arsenal available and believe the U.S. has launched a first strike at them. I don't see a logical way hundreds of nukes aren't hitting the US, but even if we take OP's numbers, it's extremely unlikely New York doesn't get hit. Look at all of the markers over the Atlantic coast from New Jersey to Boston.
To split more hairs, I was defending Puerto Rico as a target over NYC, not every target listed over NYC.
Puerto Rico's military installations are largely insignificant in this sort of conflict. Hitting them doesn't make sense in the scenario OP has set up. It does make sense in the massive first strike option, but that's apocalyptic in character.
That's just a trailer, but the whole thing is online. You can also buy it on Amazon on DVD. At least I managed to a few years ago. I was shown it in school and it stuck with me ever since. Part of the realism is that it's based directly from the official government post war strategy plan. Not a warning or study, an actual civil defense plan of action.
According to that report 3,200 of those 7,700 are retired. Other reports put this at 2800 retired. Many of the warhead delivery systems are MIRV (Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicle) which contains several warheads in the payload that spread out in a targeted cluster over no more than about 100km from each other, with an accuracy of about 100m for each independent target. Only about half of the potential strikes would fit an actual weapon system deployment. MIRV systems are very common in the Russian arsenal and can hold up to 10 x 800 kilo-tonne weapons, and when used in a circular cluster pattern causes far more damage than a single 8 mega-tonne would be capable of, and is also harder to stop once deployed than a single projectile. All submarine based systems for both sides (SLBM) are MIRV warheads, while about half of the Russian ICBM are also MIRV. Ignoring the bombs, only 168 Russian systems use a single warhead, all are ICBM and all are 800 kilo-tonne. Here's a detailed breakdown of estimated (or confirmed) Russian systems, broken down by type, yield, delivery system and operational status. (page 126) http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00963402.2016.1170359
Thanks @Selbbin! Took the time to watch the full 1:50 of this very sobering movie. For those who think that 122 NUDETs on major cities of the US is nothing at all, a minor inconvenience that we will quickly get over, think again. I was a freshman in high school during the Cuban missile crisis of Oct 62. And unlike freshmen of today, we followed the news. We didn't have the plethora of information of today's internet, but we didn't have its distractions either. We all knew what was going on, we all talked about it at lunch, and we all knew it was as serious as a heart attack. Our school had an air raid siren (but no basement) and that went off promptly on the 1st of the month at 12 noon for the monthly test. A nuisance, as it was very loud. However, it went off at some other time around the 22nd of October, and not at noon. The protocol was that a steady tone was a test, a wavering tone was the real thing. But it rotated, so was it wavering or just turning? It stopped, and there was a big sigh. I delivered a paper route after school, and every business that afternoon, people were glued to the black and white TVs seeing footage of Russian ships carrying missiles, would they turn around, or would our world change forever? About halfway through my route, at a barber shop, everyone was cheering. They had turned around. People who do not understand nuclear war should not attempt to write about it. Please.
This hits me as well, and sorry when I make a statement as a person too young and not knowledgeable enough for you. I have not made 'the mistake' of writing about a nuclear war, but I have made another mistake with another highly sensitive topic so I do know what I am talking about when I say that I DON'T REGRET making this 'mistake'. Only in putting my writing out there and asking questions - and taking the chuff people came down on me - exactly such a statement as the quoted one above - ONLY through that did I realise what I had failed to find on my own in research. If I (or the thread starter) don't know to ask the right questions, how do you propose that I find the right answers? So please refrain from making derogatory statements. I realise that these topics are highly emotional and may hurt if people who write about it don't understand because they haven't lived through these events - but making mistakes - or failing to find information - is just human. Exactly these personal statements, like you talked about the siren at your college in the above post, ONLY that will give a hint to what is missing in the writing. Thank you for sharing this. However, I regret that you felt that making this a personal attack was necessary.
Totally unrelated, but I have to ask why you chose to nuke White Settlement, Texas. Lol. It's literally one of the smallest, stupidest towns in the DFW area. My hope is that you were looking at a map of Texas and you were like, "Well Dallas and Fort Worth are obvious ... what's this? A town called White Settlement? Fuck that place, it's totally getting nuked ... "
I also can't help but shake the feeling that after viewing your map and blog, I'm now probably on some sort of watch list ...
