I was always, and still am, of the opinion that I can rest comfortably in the confidence that if weapons of mass destruction are ever unleashed, it will be the Americans deploying them somewhere else on some other poor buggers. So it is not something that I ever really contemplated.
Yeah, O’Hare, Midway, all the railroads and highways in the country converging here. The missiles wouldn’t have to be accurate to hit multiple high-value targets.
In Oct '62 I lived in Virginia, close to the Blue Ridge mountains and far enough from DC that my folks figured they could get us into the Shenandoah Valley in time. We didn’t know about Mount Weather. The Russians did.
Anyway, growing up close to various Grounds Zero made me the fatalistic chap you know. Everything since I was eight has been gravy I never expected to taste.
I plum forgot there was an Air Force pilot training center not too far away. I may have felt some heat.
If the Russkies had dropped a Cuban Missile Crisis-sized warhead directly on downtown St. Louis in October 1962, I might have survived the initial blast. But if they aimed for the McDonnell Aircraft plant adjacent to Lambert Field, I wouldn’t have known what hit me.
From birth to early teens, lived in Savannah GA. - Hunter Air Base. My mom said that during the Cuban missile crisis B-52s took off and landed 24 hours a day in continual rotation.
Then in 1975 moved to Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area. State capital and home of Honeywell. In addition, most of the state would have been blanketed by fallout from strikes on the Dakotas ICBM fields.
Glow-in-the-dark toast.
I went with “None of these results…”, because it depended on where Dad (USAF) was stationed.
So…Detroit - dead
Hickam AFB (Hawaii, huge number of military facilities in the are) - Oh, so very dead.
Chanute AFB (Rantoul, IL) - looking at the map, we could expect a nuke or two in the area. Dead. A few other places in Illinois, but in that general area, so still dead.
Ocala, FL - again, looking at the map, very likely dead. Looks like the Orlando area was a major target, and that was pretty close.
So, yeah, pretty much dead until I moved to Australia. Maybe surviving in Ocala, but probably catching misses from the Jax/Pensacola/Cape Canaveral area.
So, you never read On the Beach? 
Soviets nuke Detroit…causing millions of dollars of improvement (sorry).
Probably not dead, at least not immediately. I grew up in a 100 souls village in the middle of nowhere. The nearest town was 20 kilometers away, and it was a small 20 000 people town. Military assets were sorely lacking in the whole region (I think a regiment was headquartered 80 kms away, don’t think they target infantry regiments). There wasn’t any significant industry, either. I can’t think of any plausible target in a 100 kms range.
Also, I was brougt up by my retired grandmother, so no direct access to food here, but it was a farming community, and most of our relatives there were farmers. So I suspect there hardly was any safer place in the whole country.
Weirdly enough, I rarely, but sometimes, dream of a nuclear war. And in these dreams, I’m always there, in the village I was talking about. Contrarily to my assessment here, I don’t feel safe in these dreams. I see the nuclear mushrooms in the distance, hear the radio, see planes flying over, etc… I never dream of it in any other context.
Ok, then there was a target 20 kms away and another 40 kms away. Still probably the safest place I could be. I’d probably just slowly die from radiation poisonning and starvation over the course of several months.
I grew up in Queens, and it looks like my house was right at the center of a mass fire zone in the linked document. Crispy critter. Even worse if one of the missiles targeted at Manhattan went off course a bit to the east.
I’m of the put my head between my knees and kiss my ass goodbye generation.
Except we’re talking about the Cold War. You can bet if we had released WMDs, they’d have come sailing right back at us. Remember, back then, Russia was still a world power – they had the means and then they’d have the motive to retaliate. The Soviets didn’t fuck around.
This. I’m farther away, but the wind direction isn’t favorable. I always assumed, that, no matter where you were, the radiation would get you eventually.
I grew up in central Pennsylvania. Several military bases close enough that they might have gotten hit, though both are secondary facilities, mostly for supplies / administrative tasks, so they wouldn’t be prime targets. So I’m assuming that it’d mostly be a “which way the wind blows” thing.
Of course the longer-term damage to the infrastructure and economy and/or cancer might have finished things off in a slower and ultimately more unpleasant way - I mean, from what I understand, death by radiation sickness is pretty ugly but it’s over in days / weeks, not months / years.
Where we live now? Well, DC suburbs, and within a mile of a fairly major military facility (not Pentagon, but with similar employment levels) so we’d be pretty well fucked. If the blast didn’t kill me, I’d go outdoors as soon as the blast was over and start walking toward the nearest cloud - no sense waiting for things to happen.
Huh - looking at the map, we might have been in a target area after all. Hard to judge but it looks like the dark splotches hit my town or at least just east of it.
I voted dead by initial radiation, but looking at the maps in post 3, I would not have made it that long. I always knew that NYC was a primary target, but at 20 miles from Manhattan I figured that the desk might save me from the initial blast. The Map shows several warheads hitting most of the length of Long Island, so that desk would not have helped.
London. City to the left of me, docks to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with a giant megatonne blast. At least it’d be quick.
I grew up in Lexington, KY, which appears on the map to be a target. When I was a kid I didn’t think it would be a target unless the Russians didn’t like horses and ragweed, but there was another kid at school who said Lexington was number 50 on the Russians’ hit list. We didn’t know where he got this information; we just assumed we would be toast but the hillbillies in Eastern KY would survive by hiding in caves and the Russians would leave them alone because even they wouldn’t mess with angry hillbillies.
Clevelander here.
I know that a lot of rinky-dink places have stories about how “We were on the list of bomb targets because…”, but the fact is, it was a very long list, and being last on that list really isn’t much different from being first. I suppose that the cities on the bottom end of the list would have only gotten one nuke each, so there’d be some chance that the one with your name on it would malfunction, or be intercepted, or destroyed before launch… but it’s really not something you’d want to count on. And I’m pretty sure that a metro area of a million people, with an airport, a NASA center, and a port, would have gotten at least two or three.
On the other hand, if we somehow managed to survive the initial blast (bombs significantly off-target, or maybe we were out of town at the time), I’m pretty confident about my long-term survival, mostly because of my immediate and extended family. There’s enough of us to get some major benefits from banding together, many of us live in rural enough areas that they wouldn’t get hit immediately, and we tend to have a lot of the practical skills that “survivalists” tend to ignore.
Dead. Most of my childhood, I’d have been part of the mushroom cloud, since we usually lived on base. (Dad was Air Force and had a habit of getting posted to SAC bases.)
About the first point in my life that any of that changed is about halfway through my own Air Force career. I also had a habit of getting of getting posted to SAC/StratCom bases, until I got assigned to work inside a mountain.
At that point, my fate went from “vapor” to “buried in a collapsing mountain”. My family would have continued to be vapor, of course.
Grew up just northwest of Wright Patterson Air Force base. Would have blinded by the light and received lethal dose of radiation or killed by debris.