Yeah, it depends on what your objective is really. Killing a lot of people is easy with nuclear weapons, but it doesn't necessarily equate to "winning". The i

Yeah, it depends on what your objective is really. Killing a lot of people is easy with nuclear weapons, but it doesn't necessarily equate to "winning". The impression I get as a non-expert in this area is that the only countries with a big enough arsenal to plausibly do counter-force are the U.S. (along with its NATO allies) and Russia. China doesn't have enough for counter-force so we assume their strategy is counter-value and it's mostly there as a deterrent because they'd expect to get obliterated as well. It seems kind of weird to expect Russia to conduct a nuclear war in a manner that's relatively humane, but I suppose there's also the possibility that in a nuclear confrontation with the U.S. they wouldn't want their own cities to get nuked either so maybe there's a sort of "let's not be the first to do counter-value" dynamic at play. Really, there's no way to know what's going to happen until it happens, and we can hope it never does. Best case for survivability in a nuclear war is probably just: don't live near a military base or near anything important. Most rural land is relatively safe, since there just aren't enough nukes in the world to evenly blanket a large country. Nuclear winter though might kind of doom everyone through food shortages if there's a full counter-value exchange, even if the cities are spared.