Sigh. Add this to the list of datapoints that show we are headed towards a cyberpunk version of our inevitable dystopian future — rather than a post-apocalyptic one — where the company you work for is more important than the country you live in. Corporations and oligarchs are running our governments. Are they really going to put up with their governments nuking each other?
I suppose the ones in concrete and steel wouldn’t mind, as we try to rebuild, but the majority of manufacturing now is in consumer and luxury goods, which no one would be buying after a wide-spread nuclear exchange. How does Apple sell people a new phone when they’re too busy planting food in their backyards and building chicken coops? How does Microsoft move more “seats” of Office when people are building windmills and damming up streams to generate enough power to listen to the local co-op radio station?
I suppose reality — as usual — will wind up somewhere in the middle between a single strike that knocks sense into everyone and a full exchange that would set us back 1000 years.