Though the question of what the actual dead-to-living ratios would be is a trickier one than those stories make out. They usually imagine something like 90% mortality which is very high, even for full Cold War exchange scenarios. (Even 25% would be catastrophic.)
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To put this into perspective, the most deadly American war — the US Civil War — killed 2% of Americans living at the time. Japanese deaths during WWII was around 4%, German around 8%, Soviet deaths around 14%.
(And I'm *not* saying that those aren't high numbers. If 1 out of 10 people, chosen at random, you knew suddenly died, that would be more death than you'd know how to cope with — it would be the major tragedy of your life.)
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(Consider how many Americans have personal connections to 9/11 victims or close survivors; ~3,000 out of 300 million Americans = 0.001%. In a society where people can know hundreds if not thousands of people, something that kills 1/1000th of the population at once is still huge.)
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