I plan on reading your book first. I have noticed the assumption in this attack scenario is a surprise nuclear war, however, I think that is unlikely. There would be a period of tension when crisis upgrading and emergency personnel would be on alert. If an attack was expected then natural gas valves would be closed before the attack occurred. Preemptively shutting down utilities would be one way to encourage major cities to evacuate. Only 5% of the country would be subjected to lethal amounts of blast. It is more effective to spread out the population but people may be unwilling to leave unless the can move to areas where utilities are available. Earthquakes do not give the advanced notice while even a surprise attack would have some warning. A buried small metal pipe is highly resistant to blast forces due to its small diameter and the earth arching phenomena and would likely survive directly below the airburst of a 500KT weapon. Natural gas valves near homes would be covered in debris choking off their supply of oxygen.
Painting houses white is another potential crises upgrade that may be encouraged before a conventional war turns nuclear. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGJcwaUWNZg&t=3m30sClosing blinds would also prevent the flash from entering the entire of the homes. In commercial buildings without blinds. The sprinklers do have standing water in them to keep the system pressurized. The flash shown in the video was from 29KT which has a shorter more intense pulse at around 0.3 seconds. A 1 megaton weapon can blow out windows 20 miles away but it is only capable of igniting dry leaves up to 11 miles from the epicenter.
If using intumescent paint becomes the industry standard through inexpensive products then would that stop a global famine?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVWVP3tKlZc
The flash from a weapon cannot penetrate most substances as it quickly deposits all its energy. What if cities are protected by releasing white smoke when missiles are inbound?
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were largely built from wood, paper with charcoal used for heating and cooking. It was much easier for Japanese cities to firestorm. Conventional weapons were used to firestorm many cities. How did the burning of those cities impact the climate?
Hardtack can be stored for over a century. Salt, sugar and multivitamins never expire. The country is littered with abandoned mines which are at the ideal temperature for long term food storage. I think the costs would be low. A one time expenditure has a long shelf life. It might be more expensive than alternate foods but it can be accumulated over time without triggering food shortages and may help people who are already food insecure under the guise of protecting Americans. Eisenhower argued we needed national highways to win wars. This does not solve the worldwide problem but your arguments are compelling. I just think there is too much uncertainty to give a definitive answer.
I have read everything you have posted so far and your thorough analysis has piqued my morbid curiosity. I feel that I should be playing devil’s advocate.
I think you might be underestimating the number of initial deaths in a nuclear exchange and overestimating the number of deaths from a nuclear winter with your assumptions. You do acknowledge that you assume only one nuclear weapon per city which downplays the importance of MIRVs.
Smaller and more accurate weapons will not reduce the total number of fatalities but kill many more people. Increasing the yield of a weapon by a factor of ten doubles the size of the blast radius. It is more efficient to use many smaller and more accurate warheads with overlapping blast radii to attack a city. Using a death to kilotons calculation based on Hiroshima is likely not a good assumption. More yield means more deaths but with a MIRV smaller yields kill more effectively.
All buildings including above ground reinforced concrete structures are demolished at a 20 psi overpressure. MIRVs are designed to create this overpressure evenly throughout their target areas. By design MIRVs will trap people under rubble. The mechanism that significantly reduces the probability of cities firestorming also kills the people who are trapped. This scenario is ideal for the attacker by maximizing fatalities and minimizing the likelihood of a nuclear winter. The combustible material is buried under rubble where it smolders generating carbon monoxide and asphyxiates the people who are trapped.
In a firestorm the temperature increases by air from the surrounding areas stoking the fire just like in a blast furnace. The hotter the temperature the higher the smoke is lifted into the atmosphere where it is unlikely to rain out. The smoldering fires in a MIRV deprive the fire of oxygen which reduces the risk of firestorming.
In the dark calculus of nuclear war your model shows it may even be ethical to double tap a city with a MIRV that is firestorming. A firefighting MIRV could be over a firestorming city within minutes. The city might burn for several hours before the deleterious climate effects are irreversible. This should give just enough time for nonbelligerent countries to launch in order to protect themselves from a nuclear winter famine. I think this scenario is most likely if India and Pakistan started a nuclear war, annihilated each other, but used only a single warhead per city, generating many firestorms.
If MIRVs are not used then I would reduce your models by at least a factor of two for the amount of smoke generated. Unless your model already accounts for the differences seen in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Most of the damage and deaths in Hiroshima were due to the firestorm after a single nuclear weapon. Nagasaki did not firestorm due to terrain masking and would not have contributed as much to a nuclear winter.
I believe a counterforce attack will quickly escalate to a countervalue attack. An initial attack would include runways over 7,000 feet long. It is likely that many airports would be targeted to deny nuclear bombers the ability to use them.
A counterforce attack would include groundbursts against missile silos, Cheyenne mountain and Mt Weather. There are many populated areas nearby that will receive lethal levels of fallout from groundbursts on those hard targets. Therefore, I do not see a difference between counterforce and countervalue targets other than counterforce targets being the initial targets of SLBMs.
I think there are ways to reduce these risks assuming we decide to keep nuclear weapons instead of scrapping them altogether. We should prioritize submarines and SLBMs over strategic bombers, hardened ICBM silos, and cold war bunkers. Nuclear submarines are harder to destroy, they operate far away from populated areas, and can quickly hit their targets. This would significantly reduce the number of groundbursts and deaths from fallout. I give nuclear war a 0.1% chance per year since it does not occur once every ten years and likely not once every 100 years. At 1 in 10,000 years we are talking about the entire history of civilization. I put it at 1 in 1000 years because I cannot rule that out and it is still significant enough to look into ways of reducing risk. I see now that I am even more optimistic than the minority report “super predictors” :)