Be it a Cuban Missile Crisis gone wrong, Stanislav Petrov asleep at his post or just some idiot president pressing the button.
So, most of the major cities of the world, belonging to nuclear powers - New York, London, Paris, Moscow, Beijing etc go up in blinding flashes of light, but nobody is going to waste a nuke on Bumfuck, Egypt. Obviously it will still suffer from fallout and infrastructure collapse, but what are the educated guesses as to largest city that would be spared a nuking?
Mexico City?
Tokyo, probably. Largest city in the world (by population) and a non-nuclear nation. I doubt they’re anyone’s primary target. Close ties to the US, but removing then doesn’t really affect a US retaliation.
Seoul, South Korea is third by population and most likely safe from everyone but North Korea for the same reason.
Mexico City is the next largest on the list (in 7th place) belonging to a non-nuclear nation.
To be honest on the list of the 33 largest cities most are probably not targets or are unlikely to be in a full scale nuclear war. Only 13 belong to nations with nuclear weapons (Mostly China and India). Paris isn’t even on there, although Egypt does have one. (Cairo though, not Bumfuck. 
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But it won’t survive the subsequent attack by Godzilla.
Actually, there was little reason to target cities. You’d want to target military and political centers and maybe some industrial targets. A lot of these would be in cities but that was just coincidental.
So Manhattan, for example, was probably not a primary target for the Soviets. It has surprisingly little value in a strategic sense. It would have ranked far below places like Omaha or San Antonio or Colorado Springs.
Of course, being down around #100 on the list of targets doesn’t mean much if they’re blowing up five hundred targets.
Dublin, Ireland?
Politically neutral country, upwind from the closest nuclear targets (in the UK) and having a sizable distance buffer of US targets, mitigated by ocean water and arctic storms possibly cleaning up fallout.
Probally somewhere in India like New Dehli or Mumbai/Bombay. Assuming of course than China and India avoid waring with eachother. In Europe probally Stockholm. And then there’s South America.
I’d have to vote for Sao Paulo, Brazil, which is already one of the biggest cities in the history of the world, is the largest city in the Southern hemisphere (and thus likely to avoid fallout from Northern Hemisphere nukefest) and I don’t know why anyone would nuke Brazil.
Most cities over 150,000 would have plenty of people alive (if bewildered) on the outskirts. Nuclear bombs are not the planet-crackers that movies and media make them out to be. In fact the hype about atomic bombs vastly exceeds their actual explosiveness.
Leaving that aside, as Little Nemo correctly says a nuclear weapon on a city is largely a wasted effort. From a military perspective what you want to achieve first is to knock out the enemies ability to react. That requires cutting off the Gorgons Head = the political leadership of that country.
If you cannot be sure of that then your first strike must be at communication and command centres. All the missile silos and submarines are dumb and useless without orders from command.
Anyway I hate to pour water on your question but nuclear bombs are simply not as bad as everyone believes. Ohhhh yes they are nasty enough but do some research and you’ll find flowers growing in the centre of Nagasaki and Hiroshima today.
Nuclear targeting is based on political, economic, military and industrial targets. Most large cities are therefore targets. Plus Manhattan is nearby the Port of New York, which would be a target.
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Probally somewhere in India like New Dehli or Mumbai/Bombay. Assuming of course than China and India avoid waring with eachother. In Europe probally Stockholm. And then there’s South America.
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Or India and Pakistan. In anycase, New Delhi is the Indian Capital, HQ of its Military, Naval and Air Forces and has several IAF Stations nearby. Its going to be flattened. As are most capitals actually. Bombay is India’s largest port and something like 60% of Indian oil goes through its terminal as well as those of nearby ports.
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Most cities over 150,000 would have plenty of people alive (if bewildered) on the outskirts. Nuclear bombs are not the planet-crackers that movies and media make them out to be. In fact the hype about atomic bombs vastly exceeds their actual explosiveness.
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Yeah, most cities can expect multiple strikes which will cewrtainly approach the hyped destruction. I remember reading about SIOP, there never was a reason not to target.
Just because a nation isn’t part of the primary conflict, doesn’t necessarily mean it wouldn’t be nuked. I can easily see an all-out nuclear war between two powers devolving into a barfight mentality, where nations not involved in the primary conflict decide “Hey, everyone else is doing it”, and opt to take out the individual thorns in their sides. So, does Japan, say, have anyone who really doesn’t like them, and who is capable of delivering a nuclear weapon? If so, then Tokyo is likely to get bombed.
The enemy might see pictures of Detroit and assume it has already been nuked and therefore avoid targeting it. Or perhaps even conclude that a nuclear blast would increase property values.
If I had to run from NK nukes but wanted to stay on US soil, I would want to avoid Hawaii, Guam, the CNMI, southern Alaska (Anchorage, Kodiak, etc.), areas in the Midwest with major bases (e.g. Omaha), the West Coast in general, and major cities in the east coast megalopolis corridor (DC, Baltimore, Philly, NYC, Boston) which act in some ways as a single city and you better bet that if Philly gets nuked there’s going to be literal and figurative fallout in Baltimore and NYC.
Places to go might include the middle of West Virginia. Also, on another note, West Virginia is going to be almost impervious to ground troops. The mountains themselves aren’t the easiest to roll across, the second amendment is very much active there and them thar mountain men are tough and rugged and can hide for years and wear down any occupation.
I was thinking that one of the Caribbean territories (USVI or PR) might be a good place to hide since their military value has decreased quite a bit from what it once was, but they are awfully close to Cuba. El Morro protected Old San Juan for hundreds of years but one nuke would blow it to smithereens - even the US military abandoned it (though it is still a Federal building).
You’re looking at it the wrong way, by population.
If you go by area, the largest city in the U.S. is Sitka, Alaska, which has a land area of 2,870.3 sq. mi. or larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined. Ten bombs wouldn’t obliterate it.
But the point is that primary targets are military and command. You hit those first because you want to attack your opponent’s ability to attack you.
And we have to assume this will have some effect. The first wave of attacks will cause a country to lose a lot of its ability to launch further attacks. And that means some of the targets that were supposed to be follow-up targets won’t be attacked because the capacity to attack them was lost in the first wave.
That vastly overestimates the range of North Korean missiles (map available here.) The North Koreans might not even be able to hit Seattle, much less anywhere else on the West Coast, and certainly not the Midwest or the East Coast.
Unless you’re talking about decades in the future, Hawaii, Guam, and possibly other North Pacific or Alaskan bases are the only places in the U.S. that have to worry directly about North Korean nukes. It’s also unlikely they have a lot of nuclear weapons, 14 having been the highest possible number several years ago, possibly more by now, but for much of the time between 2005 and 2013 the enrichment facilities were shut down and subject to verification due to various agreements and negotiations.
Not really. Lots of launchers are not quite accurate enough to reliably target military and command installations especially those which have been hardened. Minuteman III for instance or almost all SLBM except the Trident II (and that relies in GPS which may nit function in a nuclear war once the Russian ASATS have been at work).
One city that I think would survive is Jerusalem. The Israelis are not going to nuke themselves and it being holy to Christians and Muslims mean that US, Russia, France, UK, India and Pakistan are not going to either and if Mossad can buy off the appropriate Chinese and NORK official, you will see a sudden interest in immigration to Israel.
Tel Aviv is still screwed though.
Heck, I’m not convinced they could even hit Japan. Seoul, probably, if they managed to build a nuke that could fit onto a missile at all.
On a side note, I can remember an item of trivia in a quiz or radio show that mentioned something about the UK listing Trinity College Dublin as a place in Ireland that it considered under its protection during war, something like that.
The only thing I could find through Google was a note that the original institution had the protection of the Crown in the 1300s, but nothing else. I thought that the quiz/radio show had meant something much more recent.
Sound likely/familiar to anyone.
The primary target would be the civilian population. Command and military targets will certainly be priority targets, but you’ll run out of military and command targets long before you run out of available warheads to assign. A full scale strategic nuclear exchange is total war taken to its logical conclusion, and enemy civilians are a target in and of themselves in total war.
This is assuming that there will be more than one wave.* The best way to protect an ICBM from being destroyed is to fire it.
*Excluding SLBMs and such which will be able to survive and launch anytime from hours to weeks or months after the first exchange.
Indeed, there were so many nuclear warheads around that individual cement factories were being assigned multiple warheads in the end.