How destructive are nuclear weapons really?

Despite being the most terrifying depiction of nuclear war that I've ever seen, and it is probably overoptimistic.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, a general in charge of UK's nuclear strategic defense met with his Soviet counterpart and asked the latter what he thought of Threads and the latter laughed and said the entire UK was an overkill zone.

In the US you are either by major population areas (as most people are) and will probably be targeted by many weapons in the megaton range, and if you're in remote areas you're probably near some missile bases and will be wiped out too. Nuclear winter and fallout will get the rest.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Srqyd8B9gE

That's not how technology works. You can't rewind things arbitrarily backwards any more than than you can wind them arbitrarily forwards. The technology required to recreate my grandfathers feed and fuel business simply doesn't not exist anymore. The horses that pulled the wagons no longer exist and would have to be bred up again. All the manufactured fittings no longer have factories and there is no one that knows how to design the machines.

If there is a slip it would be to the level of small manually run farms. Those that could not manage that particular technology would die. Which would be almost everyone.

It would make a lot more sense to recover as many machine tools as possible and then try to recreate the existing technology from the wreckage

This is assuming the person wielding the nukes is attempting to use them for normal military activity. However, nuclear weapons are generally wasteful for this purpose; regular missiles work just as well, cost less money, and do not poison the land you want to invade for weeks out. If you could use nukes in an ordinary military campaign, then all the nuclear disarmament over the last 30 years would not have happened.

The only thing nuclear weapons are really good at is killing lots of people really quickly. Thus, my current bet is that if Russia attempts to use their nukes, it will specifically be a last-ditch effort to kill as many pro-EU Ukranians as possible on their way out of the country. Their current actions are consistent with this; when their initial blitzkrieg failed, they proceeded to slaughtering as many civilians as they could.

I otherwise generally agree with the article's contention that nuclear war will not be a species-destroying event. It is, however, still something worth avoiding; because in an all-out war Russia will absolutely be going after population centers first and not militarily-valuable targets. Russia's goal is not to win the war. Their goal is to make Putin look tough and powerful while goading the west into making the mistake of counterattacking so we can bleed faster than they are.