Quote:
Originally Posted by Ransom
For example, in the United States, the governors of the individual states have the power to appoint senators to temporarily fill unexpected vacancies in their state's delegation. So even if you anhilliated congress, if the governors of the individual states survived it could be replaced almost overnight. Each state also has its own line of sucession to replace deceased governors, so you would need to take out all the state governments as well. Even if you managed that, elections here are managed on an incredibly local level, so it would probably take a total collapse of our society all the way down to level of individual towns to stop a new government being elected within a short time.
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Once you have a new Senate, they can elect a new President Pro Tempore of the Senate, who in the absence of any surviving Speaker of the House or Cabinet member, then becomes the President of the United States until new elections can take place. Likewise, if all the generals and admirals die, the most senior colonels and Navy captains get promoted. With the type of system the USA has, and had already in the 1960s (and to a degree, even earlier, though the 1950s & '60s were when people started really considering this kind of thing), you can't get a total societal collapse like PTTG suggests from a
highly restrained nuclear war, even if you add in a lot of assassinations (a fairly
unrestrained nuclear war is another matter, but leaves you with all kinds of fallout to deal with). Creating a collapse like that is damn hard, by design, because a lot of people thought about the possibility, and worked to prevent it.
If you set it in the mid-to-late 1960s, and have it as a war between the PRC and the USSR, though, you'll get a collapse like that, because neither country was that stable at the time.