I have a real-life contingency plan for this. The first thing is to loop around the Boston area and pick up my daughters no matter where they are. The second is to make a circuitous route into New Hampshire to their grandparent’s farm. If that isn’t far enough to avoid impending hostilities, remote northern New Hampshire, Vermont or Quebec would be next. I carry basic survival items with me at all times so we can last for a few days with no issue.
I live in the state capitol and I work for the state. My bank is a local credit union headquartered here. Let’s assume financially, I got nothing.
Belongings: Nothing major. I mean, I own the condo, but with no job and no money, the mortgage owner can lay claim to that radioactive rubble. Fine. Most of my friends are actually elsewhere, so I’m good there.
I have family nearby - a couple of hundred miles away. The goal is to get there, and then for all of us to leave there for relatives further away. That city’s going to be overrun with refugees. Also, nearby family banks with national banks so should, at least, have access to funds of some sort.
If London is nuked, it’s probably reasonable to assume that there’s been a total nuclear war, and much of the rest of the country is hardly likely to be habitable, nor much of Europe anyway. If I happened to be in Australia visiting my best friend, I’d have to declare myself a refugee and throw myself on their mercy. Anywhere else in the UK or in Europe, there probably isn’t much more to be done than to curl up and die in a corner.
Divorce had almost the same effect on my social life and finances Didn’t phase me. Got drunk for a couple of months and bounced right back.
Shit - I better write that down. The rest of my plan is still solid, though, right? I mean, driving around the country solving mysteries is something that still happens, to the best of my knowledge.
I assume I would die a horrible death of starvation or radiation sickness, or perhaps be eaten by a pack of feral dogs.
Rub my hands together while I cackle gleefully, “Burn baby, burn!”
I’m guessing I would think that someone was playing an Orson Wells on me and refuse to believe it happened.
When I tried to drive back and was denied entry by the military, it would probably sink it that it was real. I’d probably start swearing and vowing revenge on the people hat did it.
I would then probably find an online site to donate money to for someone to find and bring to justice the people that did it. I’d probably be willing to offer any price to make it happen.
Then I’d probably sit down and cry until I was sick from crying.
I suppose eventually, I would wipe off the last of the tears and begin rebuilding my life one day at a time.
Your job? Gone.
Actually, my job probably just got a lot more important, even if more stressful.
My hometown is my national capital. The Rest of the Nation isn’t just going to let the entire government stop existing, and whoever ends up running the political side of things will need all the career public servants they can find to re-establish the various government departments.
And my department exists only at the Federal level, so they couldn’t even bring in provincial level equivalents to do the job. I’d be the man, pretty much. Head honcho, Chief instructor, Hiring Manager, everything to bootstrap us back up to the level needed to do the job. I could probably hire people away from some foreign offices, but they’d still need training on the quirks of our national system.
Point of order: A thermonuclear device is not something that gets built in a garage, nor even something that gets built in North Korea. Nor is it what leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those were fission bombs, but “thermonuclear” means fusion. And there’s no realistic scenario under which a single US city gets hit by a fusion bomb. It’d be all-out take-no-prisoners war, and every nation with fusion bombs knows that. Which means that there’d be hundreds of cities hit, at least.
That said: If I’m out of town at vacation, it’s probably at the home of relatives who live in a relatively rural area. Note the word “relatively”: They’re still too close to Pittsburgh for long-term comfort. Fortunately, we’re probably there for a family get-together, so there will be a lot more of us there, and we have a diverse set of skills that would probably be quite useful for surviving in the post-apocalyptic wasteland. First thing, we’d probably all move to the home of a different aunt, who lives in a more rural area, and owns more land. Then we’d start setting up our stronghold. Long-term prospects would probably depend a lot on the time of year when this happened: We could probably subsistence-farm if we got started in the spring, but I doubt we could scrounge more than a month’s supply of food before then. I think we’d be able to get some filter masks, Geiger counters, and off-road vehicles for raids into the ruins of the cities, though.
Well, if it is indeed an Alas, Babylon type of scenario, then my original post of becoming an exotic dancer is what I’ll stick to.
JUST the hometown, tho, is what I read the OP as. If he wants it to be global thermonuclear war, then he should say so, clearly and distinctly.
But if somebody somehow managed to steal a thermonuclear bomb, it’d be plenty small enough to carry around in your car trunk. And while a fusion bomb would be genuinely very, very hard to build, a uranium gun bomb should be within the reach of someone with a fair amount of engineering/machining skills, assuming again that they manage to steal sufficient enriched uranium. You would probably even be able to make it lighter and more compact when it doesn’t need to be in a bomb housing and ruggedized. Maybe something that would fit in a car trunk.
Thank you. Because my original answer upon seeing the thread title was: “Die, I suppose”.
(0) Be highly pissed off that whoever was the terrorist group/rogue state leader/supervillain thought that was the sort of “big enough to get their attention, but minor enough that we can threaten worse” target you want for a demonstration shot. That’s damning with faint praise.
(1,2,3) Make that extrordinarily, Mad Max in the last reel, Hulk Smash pissed off. Though of family members Mom and Bro and a couple cousins would be immediately at risk, depending on day of the week, *most *of the family would be outside the immediate hit zone *but *well within the heavy fallout/civil chaos zone.
(pi) Now that I think of it… some skeletons in the closet would get incinerated with the closet, or at least scattered in tiny fragments thoroughly enough that they can no longer be tied to me. 
(4) Ah, as of a few days ago I am now employed by an entity headquartered elsewhere that will have a LOT of work in the aftermath of that, so at least during the initial crisis I may be of use to them relocated to a different office maybe even assigned to the teams managing the mess.
(5) As others have said, the Insurance companies will weasel out under the “acts of war” clause and FWIW the biggest chunk of the insurance would have been going to a mortgage bank that is now a smoldering abstract sculpture anyway. Let them foreclose on what’s left after the firestorm and looting (the reinforced concrete load-bearing walls will probably survive at this distance from downtown).
(6) I have accounts in an institution in an entire other city and state as well. Until I can rearrange to make them now my primary banking provider, I’ve friends there and in other locations who’d be willing to let me couchsurf a couple months until I re-stabilize.
(7) Well, sort of by definition my permanent address would now be changed elsewhere, right?
Wouldn’t the electronics only be fried if they were in operation at the time of the EMP? I thought electronics were safe if they were completely off. Or is this something that keeps ticking along, like a digital clock would.
Well, I live just outside Washington DC, so…
I’d think the “best case” scenario would leave the world economy in such a shambles that I couldn’t count on having any way of earning a living or, if retired, receiving Social Security checks.
More likely, anything event that took out DC would result in numerous other cities getting obliterated as well, either at the same time or in retaliation. So my personal plan is to step outside, get my bearings, and start walking toward that mushroom cloud to get it over with.
Add in the spouse and kids (both adults, but both living with us) and we’d make a merry little family party heading up I-395.
I recall that fairly minor snowfall could shut down the metro, I wouldn’t count on train service during nuclear winter.