""It's safer to administrate from a small city" - The US capital was first located in Lower Manhattan (GW's first term), then it moved to Philadelphia for Washington's second and last term. Meanwhile, an entirely new entity with land ceded from both Maryland and Virginia was established as (at first) what they called Washington City", later the District of Columbia. Nobody wanted it to be a city-state, so it was limited in how it could view itself. For decades afterwards, it was seen as a sleepy Southern town full of what JFK called "Northern charm and southern efficiency" , and the lack of air conditioning in summer meant that everyone left during that season.
Because of how the country ran before railroads, states were far more powerful than the federal government, except that little by little things like technology changed that. One example was the need for capital to build canals and infrastructure which crossed state lines. The rivers too had attempted state monopolies for steamship companies, in special relationships with states. Then a Supreme Court case in 1824 asserted that the federal government regulated inland navigation, that rivers were not the possession of a single state (often they were the boundaries). All these early "working it out" problems would have to be revisited after attacks like those in Jericho. I suspect most places would have more in common with New Orleans after Katrina - although its message, that you have to be self-reliant even if there is a FEMA - doesn't mean that unforeseen tragedies would not rack up (as in Jericho, which is almost optimal). The early hopes of the Republic still inspire us, but their implementation in times of trouble are not a foregone conclusion."

"Just seeing the map I realized that NYC is way to near south and north of two nuke sites, so, it may be possible that people in NYC may perhaps have not survived the fallout. What about that? Casualties would have been high in the north east coast. Besides, winter would hit hard those millions that where left, powerless, whit no food or clean water supplies, maybe Canada would try to intervene, or Europe."