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Assume that the either of the 1983 nuclear close-calls (the Able Archer incident or the false alarm spotted by Stanislav Petrov) and the went bad and there was a full nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. Would the United States government survive in any meaningful sense?
By "meaningful", I mean:
a) Either the President or someone in the legitimate presidential line of succession survives and is giving orders.
b) The military chain of command remains in control of at least some portion of a surviving military.
c) Members of Congress have survived and are at least trying to reassemble, and are in touch with the President.
d) Some of the agencies of the federal government (the FBI, for example) are still in existence and trying to help recovery.
e) Some state governments have survived and are in touch with the remnants of the federal government.