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I think you are pessimistic about the consequences of nuclear war. I do not think that there are enough nukes in the world to glass the US.
Popular depictions involve the survivors either donning spiky leather straps and becoming raiders or turning into man-eating mutants. I am a bit more optimistic. The United States does not seem like the kind of institution you can destroy simply by turning DC into a parking lot. Nor do I think that starvation is inevitable. If the 50 biggest cities are gone, it seems like the US would have a huge food surplus.
Nor would the industrial capability drop below that of Argentina. Some sectors (finance, insurance, software development, liberal arts) would be devastated, but plenty of factories seem to be located in smaller towns, and there would be no reason to mothball them until some vault-dweller discovers them centuries later.
Absent cobalt bombs, I don't think radiation would wipe out the US population either. Anchoring on Hiroshima, it seems that more people are killed by the blast and heat than radiation poisoning, and cancer deaths are a distant third. If cancer rates in the midwest increase by 10x, that is not nice but also not enough to collapse civilization. And billionaires would be exempt anyhow because they could afford to consume more expensive low contamination food.
That is not to say that nuclear war is fine. The QALY costs are enormous. The US could well lose its exceptional status in the world. The disruption of international supply chains might throw the country back to the tech level of the cold war. The voter base of the Democratic party would be devastated. The political system might not survive intact, and would likely be replaced by something more authoritarian.
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