At what level of crisis does one country with a large enough arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles target the largest population centres of the world as the last resort to reach sustainable levels of humanity?
Is this being war-gamed at the highest level of any of the big three world powers that have this kind of arsenal?
Countries that are net exporters of primary materials and foods would be more valuable than those which are net importers.
Try to minimize effects on arable land and base ecosystems - limit the damage to the boundaries of worthless cement and asphalt.
How many times in a row with the likeliest variables does the modeling have to result in
"them or potentially everyone" before the decision is made to press the big red button?
Who decides the variables? What population numbers are we talking? What about retribution?
What about more subtle alternatives? Taking out an entire country's power grid under the guise of a terrorist act, let the ensuing chaos be it's own form of population control, then comes the big bang under cover of chaos it is more difficult to attribute.
This sounds like a dystopian story which would get turned into a bad movie with a happy ending starring The Rock or Tom Cruise being reunited with their daughter who was at college in one of the targeted cities but as luck would have it was visiting less fortunate rural orphans when it all went down, and she still had her makeup clutch.
I really don't know if I should have posted this or not. I've spent the last hour reading the other comments and the overwhelming feeling i get is that there's very little hope. Someone even quoted Peter Watts, so i can't be going too far thinking that this a real future option can I? I don't even know if i think its a remotely realistic scenario, but i do know that war is humanity's most effective population control with historic precedent.