As long as you are not in major target city ... you will be fine.

That seems pretty complacent tbh.

First of all even just the top 30 cities in the US are home to about 41 million people. Which seems a lot of folk to simply write off.

Also, the destruction of the major cities would cause huge/complete economic, social, infrastructural and legal collapse for the rest of the country.

Plus, even for those outside the immediate blast radius, there'd be the massive environmental impact of pollution to land and water, not least the potential for a nuclear winter killing off crops, and then animals.

Turns out my house was outside the blast radius if the base was nuked.

Without knowing the size of the bomb, how could you know you would be outside it? Not that blast radius is all that matters anyway.