I’d like to recommend the game DEFCON by Introversion Software. It’s not a proper war simulation but it is an excellent game/simulation regarding the concept of MAD. It’s fundamentally a game where you win by not being the biggest loser. It covers the building tensions and eventual first send and even third strike nuclear warfare quite well from a simplistic high level.
There is a recent (2019) Princeton study of a large scale nuclear war between NATO and Russia [1]. They assume most strikes would be against military targets and predict immediate fatalities of "just" around 3% of the NATO+Russia's total population. While that does not count fallout and indirect effects, it seems far from apocalyptic (although some areas/countries are certain to be absolutely devastated). The more I read about it, the less clear it is to me that globally, a nuclear war would be worse than a large-scale WW2-style conventional conflict (during which, for example, over 20% of Polish population died).
On a more granular scale, Nukemaps [2], which probably everyone knows by now, shows the area of fallout for a given blast based on real-time wind data.
Not a nuclear war simulation, but what you’re asking about is the mission of NARAC at LLNL: https://narac.llnl.gov
NARAC monitors and predicts the spread of wind/water carried nuclear, biological, chemical, and other hazardous materials in emergencies. You can see videos of recent responses on their website; the highest profile one was probably the Fukushima disaster (if you remember the various evacuation recommendations, NARAC guided the US ones). Here are some more: https://narac.llnl.gov/about/timeline, including the Eyjafjallajökull volcano.
They run in some of their own (comparatively) smaller clusters for quick turnaround simulations, as well as on LLNL’s bigger HPC systems (https://hpc.llnl.gov/hardware/compute-platforms) when there’s a need.
not really a simulation but the movie “threads” gives what seems to be a very crude and realistic potential scenario viewed from the population standpoint.
I still have nightmares about threads - the interesting thing about threads is that it shows the expect tactical flow of nuclear war at the time where they expected a big city, but not london to be the first target. It was always presumed Birmingham, UK would be hit first
When the wind blows by Raymond Briggs is scary too as its so matter of fact
Also the US movie "The Day After", and the Soviet movie "Letters from a dead man" come to mind. We discussed those in school in East Germany in the 80's. TL;DR: not much point in "simulating" a nuclear war, it will be the end anyway.
This is a serious question. I'm asking because I find the hobby-level interest in nuclear war kind of offensive. It trivializes a profound threat to humanity.
Some folks want to be prepared. Sure in a full fledged nuclear war, everyone will die but consequences don’t have to be binary. There could be smaller scale weapon attacks directed a 1-2 cities, etc and chances of survival could be high if you are prepared on what to do next
It's good to inform yourself. For starters, evwn WWIII nuclear war really wouldn't be the ebd of humanity, just nuclear winter for a couple of decades.
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