Having Seattle, SF and LA nuked would obviously suck huge ass, but it would be substantially less devestating than all out war with SU/Russia would be. The former would be more like a really really bad 9-11, it's going to hurt, bad, but it wouldn't even be the end of those cities, much less the end of us. The latter would put the human race in the ropes.
I know conventional wisdom says that 3 nukes on the west coast means everybody west of Denver that was lucky enough to survive the blasts would no doubt be mutants or dead from radiation poison. The facts are very different from that.
Are you kidding? Only 2,500 people on 9/11. That's nothing. The population of L.A. alone is 3.8 million. That's not even counting the metro area, with a population of 12.5 million. So even if only people in the city proper died and everyone in the metro area survived (unlikely given the radioactive fallout), that would still be 1,500 times worse than 9/11. Now let's add the San Francisco population of 800,000 and the Seattle population of 600,000. We're assuming the North Koreans only have 3 nuclear ICBMs (they could easily have more) and the weapons are so weak that only the cities proper and destroyed, with no additional accounting for radioactive fallout.
The total casualty count is 3,800,000 + 800,000 + 600,000 = 5,200,000.
Now let's compare this with the great events of U.S. History
9/11 - Equivalent of 2,080 9/11's
The Iraq War - Equivalent of 1,468 Iraq War's
The Vietnam war - Equivalent of 110 Vietnam War's
World War II - Equivalent of 18 World War II's
Total American Wars - Equivalent of Six Times the total casualty count in all wars in U.S. history combined.
So basically, think of any episode in U.S., any historical event deemed to be a crisis or a serious matter (war being generally agreed to be the worst). Now take the most serious possible, out of all of those.
This is at least six times worse than all of them combined. It's actually more than that, because nuclear strikes also render vast amounts of territory to be uninhabitable, whereas wars would not. Also, nuclear strikes destroy the entire physical infrastructure of an area more comprehensively than wars do. The Eiffel Tower, St. Peter's Cathedral, and Big Ben are still standing even though battles were fought over these cities in World War II. However, in the case of a nuclear strike, every bit of Hollywood, for instance, would be wiped out.
Additionally, many U.S. casualties in wars were sustained by troops that went overseas to fight. While their deaths are tragic, they occurred on foreign soil and not U.S. soil. The mass death of millions of people on U.S. soil, particularly civilians, is not something the U.S. has seen since the civil war, and on the scale we are talking about, really never.
Basically every thread on this forum, is moot compared to this issue.
Now compare to threat with the Soviet Union circa 1982. The US population in the 1980 census was deemed at 200 million. Now let's say in the worst case scenario, the Soviet first strike is extremely effective and manages to take out every single American (highly unlikely, particularly since U.S. ballistic missile submarines were already deployed then 24/7 specifically designed to retaliate against such a strike). Sure, this is orders of magnitude worse than 5 million dying, by a magnitude of 40. However, it wouldn't be the end of North American civilization, let alone the end of the human race.
A magnitude of 40 is a lot less than a magnitude of 2,000 which separate the scenario I'm talking about from 9-11. So if anything, it's your analogy which is problematic, my comparison is actually a lot better than yours.
