It’s a nightmare scenario but we need to be prepared, the certain death option is fine if you live near a target, but some of us live a long way from plausible targets and would probably survive for a while. Then what we would face is not so much radioactive poisoning (although that could come) but a general breakdown of society.
Ask yourself this, if elites push this situation to the extreme where the nukes fly, what does that suggest about their ulterior motivation? Many of them have been on about massive population reduction for years, and a full nuclear exchange would basically leave us in about the situation of the mid-19th century except that few of us have any familiarity with that sort of life.
Some aspects of government and law enforcement would remain in place, albeit without much contact with any remnants of central government. Those elites in bunkers aren’t going to come streaming out in a month to save our asses, they are going to come out to move into fortified remote locations where they would hope to outlive almost everyone else.
That might not be the case for lower level governments who might attempt to address the social welfare of survivors, but I wouldn’t count on that being widespread or uniform. There will be opportunists creating local dictatorships and hogging whatever food remained. It would take months for a functioning electricity grid to come back on line, and we don’t know whether the country might be over-run by foreign armies that our elites don’t plan to fight.
You need to have at least a year to three years of basic supplies and lots of blankets in northern climates, get back in touch with your woodsmanship skills if you had any once upon a time, and I would think weapons to fight off predators. A lot of the urban refugees (assuming there were any) would die off fast, in this new challenge without any relevant skills and probably without more than a few days worth of food. Some might survive for a while through predation, you don’t want to be part of that.
I believe that we should have some plans because it would seem likely to me that of the few survivors a year or two in, quite a few would be rural conservatives.
The other question of course is religious. Many would say an event like this pretty much has to be armageddon and a prelude to the end of days, but what if it turns out otherwise, let’s say we’re 2-3 years into this nightmare and no sign of any religious prophetic fulfillment. Then we won’t have that aid and assistance that many might think would be coming our way. I hope that’s wrong. The one good thing about this nightmare is that it could be a necessary part of the end times.
As to where might be safer, I would think maybe smaller towns in the west, away from military bases. You also need to think about strikes on large dams creating brief catastrophic flooding, for example, Grand Coulee on the Columbia in WA, and the Hoover Dam. Those strikes might not be nuclear but you would expect the Russians (or the Chinese) to go after them.
A little more detail on our chances of having electricity at any point after the exchange ... you would have to assume that a pulse weapon would take out the grid in the early stages of this exchange. If by any chance that did not happen, then after a while the grid would probably come back up, once the remaining experts figured out how to deal with all the grid disruptions around then destroyed large cities.
We would no doubt be living in some emergency social order like a military dictatorship. The banking system would more or less cease to function for some time, and this government would need to provide electricity on an emergency basis.
I would hope the basic orientation of this government (or maybe more like a network of state or regional governments) would be closer to MAGA than globalist, in fact, if this happens I think the elites would be wise to stay well out of sight of the survivors. If we think the southern border is in bad shape now, imagine what things will be like when central Americans (who likely won’t be nuked) start streaming across an entirely undefended border. But it may not be entirely undefended if the right sort of post-war government exists.
When I say post-war, I imagine that as bad as things are in North America (and western Europe no doubt) things will be worse in the countries who attack us; they will be reduced to a stone age situation but then I am not all that confident that our globalist government would fight China and they might come streaming in to take over our resources. A cynic might say that’s the actual end game of this nightmare. I think Russia and possibly Iran will be gone in this post-exchange world. At the very least they will be in our situation and in no position to threaten survivors with very much, there won’t be much if any communication. No point in the UN trying to remain relevant, much of it would be gone too.