Hrmm....well...in the last century there was two major wars between most of the major powers on the planet and the end result was a population boom that you might sometimes hear about called the "baby boom". Lots of people who are about 16-27 right now are the echo of that boom time after WWII. Wars are absolutely terrible and destructive things and yet out of the ashes often rises even more people.
One of the things that people tend not to realize is that, speaking from a practical standpoint, the use of nuclear ordinance was not in fact necessary for the US to have inflicted the kind of massive, millions-dead-conservatively damage normally associated with mushroom clouds. Russia undertook several massive hydroelectric power projects, resulting in series of large dams.
The US developed the Tomahawk and B-2 for very specific targets intially. In the event of a general war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, the only thing that would have stood between millions of Russian citizens and being drowned in a flash-flood when those dams broke was the possiblity that loss of life on that scale might trigger a nuclear response...and realistically speaking, NATO could not have reached all the Soviet ICBM/SLBMs in time.
This scenario is alive and well, by the way. China has undertaken similar projects...and unlike Russia, China's strategic nuclear deterrent is small enough to kill it all before it can retaliate. Should the People's Republic ever decide Taiwan would look better with some black glass, this is probably a more likely, but no less devastating, scenario then a US nuclear response.
