Even after 30+ years I still recall Carl Sagan from the Cosmos episode "Who Speaks for Earth":

"In a full nuclear exchange, in the paroxysm of global death, the equivalent of a million Hiroshimas would be dropped all over the world. And, in such an exchange not everyone would be killed by the blast and the fire storm and the immediate radiation. There would be other agonies. The loss of loved ones; the legions of the burned and blinded and mutilated; disease; plague; long-lived radiation poisoning the soil and the water; the threat of stillbirths and malformed children; and, the hopeless sense of a civilization destroyed for nothing. The knowledge that we could have prevented it and did nothing."

http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/sagan-carl_who-speak...

I found the idea of being someone left around with "the hopeless sense of a civilization destroyed for nothing" particularly appalling.