A nuclear attack on America, including NYC, was discussed in the novel Warday by Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka.
It went into detail about salvage ops in the city.
Salvors were precluded from receiving any type of formal medical treatment due to the high rads they received. They were stripping all the buildings of valuable copper wire, which was no longer produced.
It is an odd book, written from an early 1980s sensibility.
Strieber wrote some prescient stuff. I remember reading 'Nature's End' in about 1981, wherein his characters carried around a 'laptop computer' that could access other computers and facilitate communication on a vast, global network. The antagonist was a guy named 'Singh' IIRC, who's forces could track your access to this network and locate you. I read that and Warday back then.