North Eastern Wastes

[specialdead]

As a fan of almost anything post-apocalyptic, I often wonder what would happen to my home state of VT and the surrounding New England/New York area. Most fiction depicted in arid wastelands is in areas that are normally deserts. Mad Max in the Oz Outback, A Boy and His Dog takes place in Arizona, Fallout taking place in the remnants of California, Nevada, and Oregon.
I am looking forward to FO3 being placed in a more temperate climate. It isn't entirely impossible that a lot of greenery would survive along the Eastern Corridor, so long as rain fall cycles persisted. In Chernobyl there is a type of Blood Pine or Blood Cedar that has mutated out of the radioactivity that grows blood red bark on it's branches and trunk.
Would society as we know go through less of a collapse due to the verdant valleys and meadows of New England? What would likely happen after NYC, Boston, and Montreal, the three largest population centers in the area got hit with nuclear war-heads?
Just wondering if anyone has ideas on what fertile areas would be like after going through a cataclysmic event.

 

[Kanhef]

Assuming weather patterns don't change much, I'd expect it to stay fairly green. There's moist air coming from the Great Lakes to the west, warm air from the south/Gulf Stream, and cold air coming down from Canada, which results in plenty of storms and precipitation. Western Mass., upstate New York, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine - not a lot worth bombing there, so I'd expect it to be fairly intact. Some fallout, depending on location and how many smaller cities get hit, but it wouldn't be too bad. There's enough farmland that the food supply would be adequate for the (now reduced) population. The technology level would still drop back a century or so, but overall I think society would remain fairly intact.

 

[Ah-Teen]

The east is fucked... Sorry.

That said, most of the greenery will be intact. Large swaths will die because they will be weakened and after they are weakened, the cold will kill off the rest.

Not all though! In a couple hundred years things will get back to being green.

Keep in mind it's possible to survive fallout.