"Irradiated wastelands" -- surely you realize that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are large cities today? Harmful radiation usually doesn't stay harmful for very long.

In any case, I don't share your low opinion of future humans. They'll be as capable as we are; maybe far more capable.

You also over-estimate and over-weight how destructive nuclear exchanges really are, the readiness state of the world's nuclear arsenals, and the willingness of their possessors to lash out at effectively unaligned countries like Argentina, Chile, Austria, Morocco, Fiji, and I could go on all day.

I just recall how massively supply chains were disrupted by a few percent of the population having a very bad cough a couple of years ago and extrapolate to a situation where billions are dead, agriculture is fucked for years or decades and major infrastructure is destroyed.

> surely you realize that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are large cities today?

I don't think you understand the massive difference in scale between detonating a couple of atom bombs vs. thousands of thermonuclear devices, each with at least an order of magnitude (~16 kt vs hundreds) more destructive power. Nevermind the vast fallout dispersal that would blanket the northern hemisphere at least, as well as the ridiculous amounts of soot in the atmosphere from the resulting firestorms that would, to put it mildly, be a bit of a setback for agricultural yields for a damn long time. You might be okay in those unaligned places, sure, bit if you're in roughly half of the world you're pretty much effed.