The elite wouldn't die so they don't care

How come we cant just shoot it and have it blow up in their face?

Because to initiate a nuclear reaction the physics have to be just right. You could probably blow up the propellant in it though it wouldn't really leave much of a hole compared to the nuke going off.

Also whoever said the fallout would be global... You've obviously never heard of the tsar bomba. It yielded 50megatons when it was tested. And the design was for 100. It didn't cause global fall out.

I think that person was including inevitable retaliatory strikes?

SRS question.... but with all this defense spending, can we be hopeful that the US government has a system of offshore defense stations etc that could shoot these things down mid flight before they can detonate?

I've wondered this for a long time. ICBMs have to go pretty high, and it's possible we have satellites that offer some sort of defense. Of course they would be secret so they wouldn't become targets themselves.

You're an utter idiot. Look up mutually assured destruction. The reason why there hasn't been a ww3 is because we'll be fighting ww4 with sticks and stones. Only a nihilistic dumbas would cheer this kind of stuff on.

No but if Trump is in power when this happens he might send a couple that way and just call it accidental collateral damage.

In the opening few hours, the vast majority of the population is wiped out in the immediate detonations. Many people die from the thermal scarring, but many, many more perish from the sheer force of the bombs, the resulting fallout, the collapse of structures, the fires, and the lack of oxygen. If you are in a major city, you are dead within 24 hours, even if you avoid the actual blast. The fires will start to consume the oxygen in the area, and you will quickly suffocate even if you found shelter. Furthermore, the drastic pressure changes of a nuclear blast basically tear the body apart from the inside, especially in concern to the lungs. In this way, you will not die quickly through fire or through being blasted to pieces, but by slowly suffocating. As far as burns, well, if a 1 megaton warhead is detonated within (if I am reading the chart right) 10 kilometers of your position, you are burned to bits. Further out, you suffer some extensive, but likely non-fatal, third degree burns. Within 2 kilometers, you get fatal raditiation poisoning. Within 3, you are pretty much guaranteed acute radiation poisoning.

Now, if you are inside a reinforced structure, none of this matters so much, so long as the building you are hiding in doesn't collapse. Several people survived within a few hundred meters of the epicenter of Hiroshima because they were in concrete buildings. Nuclear blasts now-a-days are so much more powerful though, that even a reinforced building at the epicenter likely won't save you, but buildings in the surrounding area will prevent the most harmful effects.

So by staying in a building, you survive the first few minutes. You won't survive the next few hours. The atmosphere is soon to be filled with radioactive fallout and, following a total nuclear exchange, this fallout it likely to spread throughout almost all of the Northern Hemisphere. The radiation within the epicenter of the blast combines with the matter around it, which is then blown away as dust and debris by the blast itself. This nuclear ash helps spread the radiation even further.

Meanwhile, the cities are burning. Massive conflagrations have started. In the cities, this means oxygen gets consumed at an enormous rate, and smoke chokes the atmosphere. Most people hiding in the buildings die due to a lack of oxygen. The fire storms can last for years, and they will put out enough smoke to harm the climate itself. The atmosphere gets crowded with smoke, and now the growing season is dramatically reduced, if not rendered completely unusable.

Thus, we enter nuclear winter. The winters grow longer in this period. Many crops die, and the collapse of infrastructure also means food cannot go where it is needed. Even a military intervention after the exchange would likely fail to save the urban population of America. There simply isn't a way to transport enough food, and for the first few years there is little to no agricultural activity. Meanwhile, clean water also becomes inaccessible, as treatment plants no longer operate and contamination becomes rampant. H2O itself does not absorb radiation, but the particles in it can, indirectly causing radiation poisoning. Medicine is also almost impossible to come by. Combine that with malnourishment, and even simple diseases like the flu or a cold can kill adults. Every disease becomes debilitating.

So the surviving population begins to starve, dehydrate, or die of pestilence. The desperate might try to fight for resources, but it is only delaying the inevitable. Even if the government mostly escaped, there is just to much chaos to control.

By this point, things look like The Road. The forests are lifeless, destroyed by massive firestorms. The few people you encounter are eating each other. The sky is perpetually darkened by massive smoke clouds. It is colder than **** out, even in the summer months. The winters exacerbate the problems. If the bombs dropped in October like Fallout suggests, the first winter would probably kill off almost all the survivors. Only an incredibly small fraction of the population makes it past the first winter.

Most of them begin the exodus south. The southern hemisphere is still in rough shape, though. Errant radiation still reaches them, and their climate it also completely ****ed, but at least they can grow food and have some clean water access. Still, chaos has ensued in the south long before the arrival of the refugees. The governments have likely collapsed, or are in the midst of doing so. The global infrastructure collapse results in shortages of just about everything. Isolated places like Australia do okay for the first few months, but once current supplies run out, it becomes clear that the Southern Hemisphere will have to become self-reliant, but many resources are only found in the north. Thus, the Southern Hemisphere is knocked back to pre-Medieval levels. Civilization is significantly reduced.

Then the refugees come from the north, seeking the last vestige of safety, sparking even more shortages and brutal conflicts in which thousands more perish.

After this culling, the human race has been reduced to 5% of the current population, if not less. Even though the folks south of the equator survive, there are concerns of the long term genetic problems our species faces, and concerns of the utter ecological collapse. While the first decade or two might not be a worry, the ripples of the ecological collapse reach the south eventually, causing more food shortages. Meanwhile, the species is reduced to a much smaller gene pool, and one that has been affected by radiation to boot. Thus, it could be that even in the Southern Hemisphere, civilization only gets as far as two generations before our species goes extinct in the massive upheaval. Even if we don't, the world would never be the same, and it is doubtful that mankind would ever rise to the heights it once did.

Make no mistake: if nuclear war occurs, we are all dead. The Four Horsemen will be riding, and the world will be in ruin. Fallout is an optimistic view of the future. Hell, in some ways even The Road is an optimistic view. The truth is that, if the nukes fly, our days are numbered. There is no way to recover from it. It would be a slow, agonizing extinction.