/collapse/

Something really fatalistic about this can remember being like this all the time, and probably still have some of it in me on really bad days.

You won't be able to reproduce your light industry products as they all contain heavy industry inputs. Without extensive infrastructure you will not get energy or key resources either. And you can at best bootstrap an incredibly primitive economy until your left-over tech is worn out.

I tend to agree that most casualties of a nuclear war will be from secondary causes. There isn't going to be any controlled extermination of "unwanted populations" there's going to be very chaotic warlord-ism, and not much else for quite a while.

This is utterly delusional, after a nuclear war, it's going to be a multi century long dark-age, nobody will have any capacity to prevent the return of all the superstitious nonsense, Your ambition to rebuild a technological society will be derailed by religions that will conclude that technology caused the apocalypse. The master-minds that emerge from the bunker complex to establish a new order will be hopelessly overrun, within a very short time after their stockpiles of goods they can use for bribing people runs out.

What about chicken, worms/insects, some species of tiny fishies I forgot the name of?

The most ethical and efficient food source would be synthetic.

Unless a nuclear war involves every single industrial or post-industrial nation (It won’t) the unaffected advanced nations will just colonize the wasteland.

limited nuclear war ? you can't possibly be that stupid. Every scenario where somebody "wins the earth" after a nuclear war is going to be turned into a cause for retaliation.

I don’t think a nuclear war would involve all Industrialized/Semindustralized nations. Some would be neutral.

I really don't think a single nuclear missile going off would set off a world wide nuclear war. If for whatever reason NK lobbed one at Japan or Israel lobbed one at Syria, do you really think China or Russia or the US or whatever would just send them out willy nilly and wait for retaliation? Does anyone give a shit enough about those countries to risk having their own glassed?

Ok what you are describing here relates to what is usually called the nuclear threshold. Basically what actions and circumstances will lead to nuclear annihilation.

If somebody uses a nuke in a conflict and gets away with it, then this will make nukes usable, which means that nukes will be used not only in that particular instance but also other instances and other actors, which will start a chain of events where eventually you get a retaliatory escalation, that results if full scale nuclear war.

Keep in mid that every nation on earth capable of producing nukes will do so, also keep in mind that not every nation will be able to miniaturise and create tactical nukes, leading to situation where tiny nukes will be reciprocated with giant ones.

In addition there is the possibility for creating shaped charge micro nukes that could be fired from a tank, which means that conventional ground forces are now potentially as dangerous as a nuclear bomber/submarine, being capable of levelling cities. The likelihood of conflict escalation will dramatically increase. Consider that usually parking a conventional force next to someone's else's border gets you sabre-rattling military exercises, which could result in a border skirmish, which can usually be de-escalated as long as no side suffers significant losses. The error tolerance for such situation will go to zero.

For your examples, you are proposing war scenarios where it is likely that larger nuclear power will be dragged into. While the nuclear strikes you mention will not directly trigger thousands of nukes being launched it will probably create a series of conflicts that do will culminate in this down the line.

I know militaries think about nuclear warheads as just very energy dense explosives, and from a rational point of view this is true. However the capitalist economic system creates this retarded overlay for reality where everybody, has to play that game of leverage and domination. So the nuclear threshold is likely zero nukes.