Ahh, you and another commenter pointed out multiple targets, I supposed that alone would be reason to need a functioning crew after the detonation. It's interesting stuff.
It definitely is interesting, in a horrifying sort of way.
Those of us who grew up towards the end of the Cold War (I'm assuming most of the participants in this conversation fit that) got exposed to nuclear war as The End of the World As We Know It, a brief, rapid orgy of destruction that leaves everyone dead. And by the 80s, that was probably about right unless the superpowers could figure out some way to keep the war limited in scale.
But there were two or three decades before that stage where the situation was pretty complicated. Nuclear bombs started out envisioned as being an improved version of the strategic bombing campaigns of WWII. (And indeed, neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki were the deadliest ones.) As bombs grew in number and power and bombers got better, there was a whole series of moves and countermoves involving better bombers, better interceptors, better radars, short-range ballistic missiles, tactical weapons up to and including nuclear bazookas, ICBMs, ICBM countermeasures, ICBM counter-countermeasures, ICBM counter-counter-countermeasures, submarines armed with ballistic missiles, submarines armed with nuclear torpedoes....
There are three fictional treatments of nuclear war which, to my limited and imperfect knowledge, appear to give a pretty realistic picture of what a real war would have looked like.
Two, surprise surprise, focus on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Everybody knows that it came close to a nuclear war, but until I read these, I didn't realize that it literally came down to a single officer objecting to the launch of a nuclear torpedo while on a submarine, while two other officers were in favor and tried to convince him.
Spoiler alert: both end up with the US largely intact and Russian reduced to an extremely niche language, as the disparity in nuclear arms between the two nations in 1962 was enormous.
No doubt all three have inaccuracies, but I think they paint a much more realistic picture of the situation than the more typical "mutants everywhere" or "literally every single human being dies" treatment.
