So, Seattle has an advantage that it actually gets rainfall. Some urban areas like Phoenix, it's going to be tough going.
Also, LLMs don't do math THAT great yet. At their core, they are glorified "what's the next probable word" regression algorithms, so a number that sounds somewhat realistic is impressive enough (to me, but I'm easily impressed).
Also, with a limited strike, yes, the national power grid goes down for good, but in intact cities, water service would run for a while off portable generators (until the gas ran out).
I expect there would be a panic and evacuation of at least 50% of the population in any cities that weren't hit out of the expectation that "we're next". The other 50% would be either be people who couldn't leave (old, sick, young, taking care of old, sick, young, or like in any weather disaster, staying behind to loot).
The immediate die off would be from people who need meds to stay alive. Total wild ass guess, but I figure 10% of the pop.
For cities part of the critical defense industrial base, the military would be sent in to secure production facilities and workers (congrats, you're drafted into the "army").
In the T2K v1 timeline, the water and the military in the cities (probably) lasts until about Aug-Sep 1998 when the fall harvest fails and the military unceremoniously pulls back to defensible cantonments. Incidentally, the US keeps 1 to 2 years of grain on hand, so this accelerated famine timeline only makes sense if combined with something like the US depleting its grains stores by sending it to war torn Europe to keep the flagging war effort alive.
If you take a city like Dallas, it has a land area of ~385 square miles, which translates into 245,000 acres (right now, it has about 90,000 undeveloped acres). It couldn't self-feed a million people (city limits pop in 1997), but 90,000 acres could give 200,000 people a fair go of it. Of course, it wouldn't be a "city" at that point so much as multiple communities, neighborhoods, or camps defending a piece of arable land or a salvage area. 200,000 gets you to 760 people per square mile or what I consider the max rule of thumb density without trade (~2 to 2.5 people per acre).
Long winded way of saying an 80% population reduction of an "intact" (non-nuked) urban area is a decent rule of thumb in areas with agricultural potential. 90-95% reduction for areas with lower food production potential, more violence, etc.
I think the EMP / Carrington 90% die-off projects are a bit off.
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