I guess since I live in the Great Californian Maze I don't feel like the end is near--I mean, it's been thirty years since the war and we've got Las Vegas, Bakerfield, San Diego, Tijuana and just recently, Phoenix, connected by Subway.
I suppose its because then Governor Nixon insisted that California survive "The Big One" that we were so much better prepared than even the Northwest. It'll be a long time before we can hope to reach something like Chicago.
As for a lack of preparation--when we reached Sonora, the first thing we smelled was burning flesh. The Mexicans were starving, suffering from various ailments, and dying of containment breaches. While I hope I never have to see that sort of thing again, I suspect that this story has been repeated throughout the world. Of course, this was supposed to be the second part of the project that much of the world ignored--building a way out in case something goes bad. Much of the world never implemented such measures.
I am optimistic that we have survived the worst, and indeed, our standard of life is slowly rising as subway freight boosts industrial needs and scientific research in the University of California is ongoing.
Any chance of the Chicago-Pittsburgh Maze reaching you? Radio communication says they're close to meeting up with Boston-Norfolk.
The situation around the world would be better off without the nukes, this much is true. But there is a fundamental question in play here--is it better to be ready to kill someone or better to die? Our leaders then would rather kill than die, and that's what happened. If it were the other way around, humanity would never have launched the nukes in the first place. Perhaps a critique of sociology is needed, but once we were reasonably confident that we would survive the worst (at least many of us, before the various failures), we pushed without remorse...