Your first order is 3' of earth coverage for your shelter's wall and ceiling: this provides the most protection from initial nuclear blast radiation.
Second order is ammos and firearms: they too must be stored in shelter due to metal radiation.
Third order is 120-day iodine tablets per person: covers the residual radiation fallouts, prevents thyroid cancer.
Fourth order is water supply for a year or more. A buried tank. Rainwater runoff after 3 raining months in a clean covered barrel, distill those before drinking.
Fifth order is food supply, dry goods (beans, rice, corn meal) as well as seed supply for your Victory Garden (in your backyard); including garden tools and cookware
Sixth order is bartering; tiny bars of gold and silvers as well as salt (meat preservatives), sugar and herb, including saffron (for rare item barters with one who has it all). These should be buried instead of inside your home or safe.
Generators are a pain; learn to live without electricity. Cheap Chinese 2-way transceivers are good with rechargeable batteries. A solar panel or two is useful.
What is gold good for again? I haven't found any use cases where aluminum isn't just outright better to have around. Aluminum is a lot easier to find too.
It's for the future archaeologists who will excavate your cooked husk from its underground tomb, so that they can write papers on how people of our times would outfit the dead with valuable trinkets with which to bribe Charon to cross the river Styx.
Gold actually becomes a little more useful in an apocalyptic scenario. It’s one of the few metals that can be pounded into a thin foil with hand tools. Aluminum foil will disappear the moment we cant operate continuous casting machines any longer, but we’ve been hammering gold foil for ages.
Awesome! That is a real answer rather than goldbug sales propaganda! I still don't think gold will hold value very well outside of the context of our current prosperity though.
It definitely won't be anywhere near as valuable but I think it's easy to underestimate how important it would be to rebooting civilization. It's malleable, relatively chemically inert, resistant to corrosion, solders well, and can be easily used to gold plate other objects without a modern supply chain for reagents. There are lots of cheaper industrial replacements available now but once those are gone, its practical importance goes way up. Recycling all of our gold crap is going to be easier than restarting titanium mining, for instance, and that's pretty critical to getting modern industrial chemistry and biology working again.
My recommendation if you survive the apocalypse is to immediately go take control of a hydroelectric dam. They're usually easily defensible and as long as you have megawatts of power, restarting civilization is relatively easy. As long as the turbine windings haven't melted, they will last for years. Preferably find a dam that used to power a smelter on site so you can recycle all the now useless cars into new metal. That would quickly turn you into a post-apocalyptic kingpin.
You can also subjugate downstream communities by threatening them with sudden water releases. Bonus points if the only approach to the dam can be washed out with a release.
FWiW I'm pretty solidly in the "gold is mostly useless" camp .. and that's with a "real" Engineering background, decades in exploration geophysics, and even some contracts building bespoke instrumentation for one of the largest gold mines on the planet.
It's highly desirable for corrosion free stable sheilding and connections in high end space tech, other than that most jobs have cheaper more or less as effective alternatives - outside of religion and making pretty things .. which are nice but non essential.
Come the apocolypse it might have trading value, it might not .. in deeply rural farming areas handshakes have more currency than money in any case .. it's about making deals that you can trust to be held six months or eighteen months down the line that is of value .. whether these are tokenised via cash, cheque, or gold is a small detail aside.
You already made the case for gold (such as a case can be made). It’s rare(er). Also it’s prettier. But it’s sort of a bottomless question for any store of value. What is the dollar good for? It’s good bc you believe it will be accepted by others. The paper itself isn’t inherently useful beyond that. Since gold has been used as a store of value for millenia, it seems like a decent bet for the post apocalypse.
Economic forces swing in to play quite quickly. I'd expect after 12-24 months of status quo gold would start to regain value. It is hard to guess where it would sit relative to any other commodity in a post-disaster world, but gold being gold there are worse things to bet on.
Other metals might be better. Although Aluminium corrodes so there must be some situations where gold is superior.
Sure aluminum oxidizes fast, most of the time that actually protects it. There is just so damn much of the stuff laying around, melt it down every few years, pull off the slag and cast it again. Toss in an extra can after a year or two to make up for the loss.
Without global oil infrastructure for refining and shipping it around, every single vehicle will be useless except for its scrap value and anyone with a little knowledge of backyard casting would be able to recycle it.
Gold is good because people will barter valuable things they have for gold because they expect in the future to be able to barter the gold for valuable things they need. I.e., gold is expected by most people to continue to be considered valuable by most people.
I think you are assuming that after the nuclear war, survivors continue to live in fallout shelters and need to focus all their energies on personal survival for years and years whereas I believe that society and technological civilization reconstitute itself over months.
For one, paper currency have finite lifespan (modern or caveman civilization). They will dwindle in circulation, coupled with a deafening booming demand for such "In God We Trust".
Credit card, debit card, and gift card are all expected to be unusable even in long term (lookup EMP)
So you think gold has value only because other people think it has value, not because it has any other intrinsic use? I bet you like fiat currencies too!
How about a supply of fuel for cooking and warmth? You would also need a lot of fuel for water distillation if you don't have a less energy intensive way to filter.
According to Kearney, distillation doesn't remove dangerous radioactive iodines (iodine is relatively volatile). He instead recommends building a clay-based earth filter, using a freshly-dug hole and taking material from more than 4" underground.
I have 2022 edition. it is conspicuously absent on distillaton.
However, distillation may or may not remove iodine which occurs in many forms but, with chlorinated water supplies, the iodine is likely to be present as iodate molecule state which isn't volatile so it will be easily removed by distillation.
Of the > 500 above ground atomic bomb tests only a very few generated clouds of radioactive dust that travelled very far .. those were the ones detonated at ground level with "additional reactions" (eg: Castle Bravo being the obvious example).
In the event of modern nuclear exchange how many ground level blasts with extended daughter cain productions will there be?
Wouldn't most missiles be be preset with MiRV type targets for air burts over cities (to knock them down with the shock wave) and relatively "clean" reactions?
Airburst is something that behooves one to get a blast door to their shelter, complete with air vent connected to a reservoir of non-flammable liquid as a buffer.
If outside the wood-constructed residential air blast range (16.4 miles for airburst 20Mton load), a simple plywood-reinforced wooden door will do.
Chinese Civil Defense outlines using wooden poles in the A-frame over 3' deep trench then cover with 3-feet dirt. Only need to shut the door once you see a "spotlight" shining your way as its 2.4 seconds from light to the blast wave for an airburst, longer as you're further way.
Half life of radioactive oxygen (70 seconds) atom is incredibly short.
Tritium (H) half-life is 12.32 years, found naturally in exosphere (highest altitude) by cosmic rays but is even incredibly rarest to be in contact with even when released by a nuclear bomb. Some antique watches uses tritium for their glowing properties and hence even rarer (banned in 1998).
Tritium (H+3) can bond with oxygen to make heavy water and is easily pee'd out ones' bladder.
Distillation ensures that only dust-free water molecule rises for collection and rarity of tritium is essentially a non-issue.
You've clearly thought about this more than I have, so I'm curious about how you consider whisky (or other alcohol) fitting into the sixth order?
It stores well, will not be trivial to resume production post-apocalypse, and is valuable not just to friendly people but especially to would-be unfriendly people. Main downsides that come to mind are that it takes up more space, is heavy in large volumes, and is generally more challenging to transport in appreciable volumes surreptitiously.
edit: I've always thought it'd be wise to set up some sort of a distillery ASAP and be known for quality and fair prices. They're a bit complicated to run so people won't kill you for it, you can start with small vintages and run up to large vintages, they can operate on human-scale levels of energy pretty effectively, and the actual manual labor and input resources involved to bootstrap are not massive.
The most important thing to have in a disaster scenario is a community of people willing to help each other, unless you want to spend two years struggling to learn how to be a subsistence farmer alone in the middle of nowhere before dying of diarrhea.
A lone family with pawpaw’s shotgun is not going to be able to fend off a gang of 10 thugs following a local warlord who wants their fresh water and victory garden.
I was a young child in Eugene, Oregon around 1960. Our house was one of the first on the block.
The next lot up the hill hadn't started construction yet, but they had cut down the trees. We made paths under the fallen trees, brought in blankets and had picnics there. We called it The Rough Country.
The house just down the hill was under construction, but for some reason the construction paused for several months. They had built the foundation and the most awesome feature: a bomb shelter!
We made this our clubhouse, brought snacks and held our neighborhood kids' meetings to discuss important issues like Duck and Cover.
And of course we made frequent field trips up to The Rough Country.
Something I read about six months ago was somewhat disturbing to me. It seems there was a commission formed to determine the likelihood of survival after an EMP attack on the United States. I don’t know the name of the report, but I know it was published in 2008. At any rate, the report concluded that if the United States was hit with an EMP attack within one year 90% of the population would die. This was back in the 2000s when we weren’t as dependent on technology as we are today. I can’t imagine what that report would be like for today’s world.
I happened to read a short story called "Foster, You're Dead!" not so long ago - which appears to have been Philip K. Dick's reaction to exactly these kinds of efforts.
Something I worry about: I imagine rich people who mostly wouldn't concern themselves with long-term outcomes of environmental destruction or global catastrophe may still feel a bit of a pause going full force into risky plans for the future if their personal fortresses would require human labor for upkeep. They may feel a bit of a reluctance to pursue policies fearless of shit hitting the fan due to the chance that in a post-law world, nothing would stop their army of servants from killing them without remorse. That reluctance won't exist once humanoid robots are a sufficient replacement for human labor.
The notion that rich people aren’t concerned with long term outcomes seems like one of those things that isn’t true. In fact the reverse is often said the poor have, “nothing to lose”. Many wealthy people have gotten where they are by focusing on the longer term. The promise of your comment just doesn’t seem true.
I largely agree with you, but there's a kernel of truth in the OP's comment. Many of the very rich got to be very rich because they are very good at optimizing for money. They understand economics, business, and the financial system extremely well. And that's a weakness in a post-collapse world because it is very likely that money will be worthless and we won't have much of a financial system to speak of. They probably also pissed a lot of people off on the way up, or simply by virtue of being filthy stinking rich. And that sort of wealth is hard to hide, painting a target on them for millions of people.
The folks who will do the best in a collapse scenario are likely the next social class down; the folks who perhaps sold a company for 8-figures (but not billions), or are in reasonably high-level managerial positions for 7-figure annual salaries. This class is pretty heavily networked and also knows how to work together. It's held together by social bonds of trust, geographic proximity, and mutual interest as much as by money. So when money goes away, those bonds remain, and you have a class of people who are long-term oriented, highly-skilled, but also communicate and cooperate with others. They are also relatively invisible (could you name a bunch of directors at major corporations, or solopreneurs with successful bootstrapped businesses?), so they can blend in and avoid becoming a target until defense systems can be established.
After WW2 in Germany, society had a total collapse. At one point, the occupying Allies decided to "zero out" the existing Mark (German dollar) and replace it with a new Mark. To bootstrap the economy, everyone was issued 50 Marks.
Within two weeks, the folks who had had money before the war had money again, and the people who had no money before the war had no money again.
Unsurprisingly, the people who knew how to make money made money, and those that didn't, didn't.
It's really sad that the American public school system does not teach how to make money.
In 1948 the accounts in Reichsmark, Rentenmark and Besatzungsmark were converted into Deutsche Mark accounts, although in different proportions. Cash was 100 RM to 6,50 DM, stocks in 1:1, other stuff in 10:1.
The core of your urban legend is the Kopfgeld, a cash starter kit like the Euro 50 years later. It consisted of 40 DM in cash and later an additional 20 DM. Those 60 DM were not free but calculated into the converted accounts.
What did happen was that shopkeepers were hoarding goods, especially luxury goods, and only suddenly started selling them after the Währungsreform.
That is simply not true. The same families that were wealthy before the Nazi time (say Quandt, Flick, Krupp, ...) made a killing during the Nazi time and retained and expanded their fortune after Nazi Germany was no more.
It is absolutely not the case that everyone started with 50 Marks and quickly the people who are good with money came back to the top. The same people simply stayed on top throughout.
I've heard this before, and I don't know your background so for sure will not judge. But I think it is best to consider this story that you have been told as propaganda.
I was told this by Germans who lived through the war and the aftermath. I didn't have reason to believe it was propaganda.
A year ago I met a local Afghanistan refugee, and we got to talking. He was a wealthy businessman in Afghanistan, and escaped with nothing but his skin during the American pullout. He immediately went into business again in the US and was thriving.
Making money is a skill that can be learned. One is not doomed to circumstance.
My argument is based on the revealed internal memos from Exxon regarding their awareness of CO2 and its effect on climate change, the number of world leaders who have been revealed to have aggressively pursued strike-first policies for nuclear war, anyone involved in environmental degradation, pollution, dumping chemicals into water supply, etc. All horrible long-term and even short term policies for the masses but provide short term profit to a class insulated from the worst effects. Of course it's not all rich people but there are enough of them with disproportionate influence that their influence is a sizable negative factor on overall human welfare.
On the topic, stupid people in the military are a much greater threat. Groupthink in a strategic command force for example, or any similar mob psychology, could be catastrophic.
Neither party has provided empirical data, so it’s hard to say if I should agree with parent comment or grand-parent comment.
I think it’s likely that a third variable like stress level, political affiliation, or time spent outside more greatly correlates with long term environmental concern. Both of your pure-theory discussions don’t feel convincing.
Thinking that anyone with significantly more money than you are alien beings with evil tendencies is an unhealthy belief. It's both wrong and self limiting.
If I had a couple of multiples of what I had, I'd build a bunker, but I'd still much rather live on a planet where I can go outside, play golf, visit national parks, do woodworking in the yard etc.
The bunker is a backup to protect against outcomes you can't control, not the plan A to intentionally destroy the world.
It's not about them opting to aggressively pursue world-destroying policies, it's that, if some decision they make carries a long-tailed world-destroying risk, the weight of it in their mind is lower if a scot-free outcome still exists for them in the event that that happens. This is a psychological influence that would exist just as often in the poorest as it does the richest, it's just that the richest have the means to avoid the negative outcomes of their lack of more cautious foresight.
The whole economy is like that. Most people derive most of their societal power and relevance from labor. Structural decreases in demand for that labor are, by default, extremely bad.
I think this knowledge is at the base of their identity. That's why they push the narrative that their success is driven by personal merit. Having spent weekends with some of the rich, they are pretty aware of what is happening in a way that the rest / the poor are not.
Maybe the first generation wealthy, like William Gates Jr, but it looks like the inheritors of amazing wealth don't know that. They appear to think they just deserve it, based on some magical criteria.
None. Just to state the obvious. If you are in for the fight, you do know the rules, so you know that there is no divine authority coming for your support.
Douglas Rushkoff talked about how the bunker billionaires specifically asked about hot to maintain compliance by their “security forces” and asked him about how to withhold food rations. Putting aside the fact that there are always lackeys looking to show sempai how much the love him. The most effective way to not get killed an eaten for sport, is simply maintaining a community and stop trying to horde everything. But then again, I wouldn’t expect dragons to understand that.
There are many scenarios where just being able to be safe for 24 or 48 hours makes a big difference, like the people in Kfar Aza who were able to secure themselves during the Hamas massacre.
You may be able to survive an invasion or massive civil unrest if you had a safe-room that was relatively resistent to gunfire, small explosives, or fire for even one day.
These scenarios are so rare as to not be worth the money or effort. Meanwhile people don't take the slightest effort to defend against things ruin lives on a wide scale - saving for retirement, exercising, eating healthy food, quitting toxic (jobs|relationships|habits)...
Fallout shelters seem flawed because, although they allow an individual or single family to survive, they don’t provide an enclave where civilization can regroup and rebuild collectively. They just assume that a bunch of surviving, rugged individualists would just magically -function- after the war. A very libertarian-optimist view of humanity.
I think the more likely dystopian-post-apocalypse looks more like Elysium, with a small number of rich people grouped together, living in relative luxury, served by robotics and automation, physically separated from the rest who are barely surviving, subsisting in the wasteland.
Way back when, community fallout shelters were a thing too. Some buildings may still have civil defense fallout shelter signs on them.
But, it's a lot of expense to build, maintain, and stock those; and there was no desire to keep it going. Same thing happened with pandemic supplies after 2009's H1N1 pandemic; it was a big deal, supplies were gathered, and it cost too much to maintain, so by the time covid rolled around, there wasn't a suitable stockpile of ppe for medical workers.
Unless the shelters and the stocks for the shelters are in regular use for something else, it's just not reasonable. There's also questions about time from detection to detonation vs time from detection to dissemination and if it would be better for people to shelter in place, wherever that is, or travel to better shelter.
It doesn’t make any assumptions about what happens after the bomb. All it does is propose the question: how else do you plan on surviving if a nuclear bomb is headed in your direction. Some people are just fine clocking out in that event. Others decided that whatever was on the other side of the explosion, that would prefer to be there than not.
Funny enough, historically anarchists have been called libertarians and were not against institutions and governance per se. Maybe you are caricaturing a bunch of movements that you do not agree with or are not well informed about?
People often conflate anarchists with libertarians. They are quite distinct, and the post I replied to clearly was referring to libertarians as not having a government.
The US was a reasonable approximation to libertarian up until perhaps FDR or so.
> The US was a reasonable approximation to libertarian up until perhaps FDR or so.
Wouldn't it be great if somehow the titans of Silicon Valley could figure out a way to bring back sweatshops, company towns, employment sharks, Pinkertons, and child labor? Oh, wait.
I'm not going to claim the US then was a paradise.
But when you're complaining about conditions in the US in those times, the fair thing to do would be to compare with conditions before 1800, not after 1930.
The fact remains that 1800s US raised several scores of millions of people from poverty in the middle class, and achievement that occurred nowhere else in that time. You can also see it in the statistics - average height improved dramatically throughout that time period, as did longevity.
The immigrants to the US had barely enough for a ship ticket. The wealthy did not immigrate here, the poor did to escape the miserable poverty in Europe.
You can see for yourself if you take a tour of Fort Henry. They have an exhibit of clothing from the Revolutionary War period. They look sized for children. Then visit a museum in Gettysburg where they have uniforms on display. They look like uniforms for boys.
That'll give you some idea of how live improved in the US.
Expecting the US to go from 0 to 60 in a month is absurd.
>They don’t provide an enclave where civilization can regroup and rebuild collectively.
Your model of nuclear war is flawed, which is understandable given the immense amount of misinformation out there.
If Russia and China launched every nuke they have at the US, about half of Americans would survive even without any use of fallout shelters. Most vehicles would "survive" (continue to operate or fail in ways that are easy to fix even under the new, degraded conditions in the country). At any given time, the US has enough food stored (mostly in the form of grains and soybeans intended to be fed to livestock) to keep the survivors alive for 3 years.
In contrast, you seem to think that most people in attacked countries would die. Either that or you think most of the survivors would degenerate into a distinctly uncivilized mode of living, which is also unlikely IMHO. I can elaborate on this point if there is interest. My prediction is that the period of social chaos lasts only as long as it take for the radiation from the fallout to diminish to non-lethal levels, which is about 3 weeks after the last weapons exploded. (Less than half of the area of the US would be covered by lethal concentrations of fallout in the first place: fallout shelters are a good idea because there is no location guaranteed not to receive lethal levels of fallout: it literally depends on which way the winds are blowing.)
The big unknown in an all-out nuclear war is nuclear winter, which might end up causing most of the deaths, i.e., after the silos full of livestock feed are used up, but IMHO it is unlikely that nuclear winter would be that severe.
In summary: nuclear war will not cause a collapse of civilization or societal order, at least not one sustained for more than a few weeks or possibly a few months.
Seems quite difficult to predict what would happen at a psychological level. Think what 9/11 did to the American psyche, that was 3k deaths, about the same as die every year from accidental food poisoning and < 1/10 the number of people who die in car crashes every year.
I'm not sure but I also wonder if you are under-estimating the overall supply chain complexity that underpins modern urban living. There might be 3 years of soybean supply in the US under ideal circumstances, but how do you distribute that to people when communications, roads, pipelines, electrical generation, fuel refining, private & commercial vehicles etc are all damaged at the same time? Plus the supply chain required to keep those things running? Not to mention record-keeping and the political fabric itself.
9/11 didn't do much to the American psyche. It did a lot to American discourse. But discourse != psyche, and most ordinary people just went about their business the way they did before 9/11 while rolling their eyes (privately) at the new government policies.
It seemed to have a pretty big impact on domestic and foreign policy. Perhaps homeland security, gitmo, TSA, expanded NSA powers and the global war on terror were just "on trend" and inevitable? I find it hard to tell.
When people feel threatened there's typically a drive towards authoritarianism and top-down control, a desire for a sense of security and certainty. I find it hard to predict how this would play out vs the US's unique cultural takes on freedom.
Again, there's a big difference between "the government" and "the people". The government used 9/11 as an excuse to push through a bunch of surveillance-state policies. The people acquiesced at the time because, well, wartime & terrorism, but they didn't necessarily like it. One of the things it actually did was drive a wedge between the government and the people, fueling mistrust between different groups. And so here we are 20+ years later with a former president who was elected on the premise of "draining the swamp", openly feuded with the surveillance state during his time in office, and is now a convicted felon running for president again.
Please elaborate on the likelihood that China (if not Russia) has shown the willingness to go all out and wage a nuclear war, whether or not Chinas hand is forced by Russia.
The Chinese despite appearances and false bravado have never really demonstrated their resolve to indiscriminately kill millions of foreigners ( say Americans and Brits for example )- now have they?
Don't war strategists have a pulse for these things? Some experts in the past decade have said the reason we deal with President Xi despite setbacks is because whoever will replace Xi is bound to be more ruthless and bloodthirsty than Xi.
Your first order is 3' of earth coverage for your shelter's wall and ceiling: this provides the most protection from initial nuclear blast radiation.
Second order is ammos and firearms: they too must be stored in shelter due to metal radiation.
Third order is 120-day iodine tablets per person: covers the residual radiation fallouts, prevents thyroid cancer.
Fourth order is water supply for a year or more. A buried tank. Rainwater runoff after 3 raining months in a clean covered barrel, distill those before drinking.
Fifth order is food supply, dry goods (beans, rice, corn meal) as well as seed supply for your Victory Garden (in your backyard); including garden tools and cookware
Sixth order is bartering; tiny bars of gold and silvers as well as salt (meat preservatives), sugar and herb, including saffron (for rare item barters with one who has it all). These should be buried instead of inside your home or safe.
Generators are a pain; learn to live without electricity. Cheap Chinese 2-way transceivers are good with rechargeable batteries. A solar panel or two is useful.