Survival of the richest: Inside the short-lived fallout shelter bubble
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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.
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.
You will be first ditching your gold rings and jewelry preferably as your first big barter before people get wise.
Unless you absolutely had them buried under 3' of earth.
Looks like the half-life of radioactive aluminum is only 2.3 minutes, should be safe after a day or two.
edit add: https://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/2003-03/1046983737.Ph.... And gold would only be unsafe for a month or two.
(Hint: gold is a useless metal in the modern era)
Shiny and rare is enough for some people.
Credit card, debit card, and gift card are all expected to be unusable even in long term (lookup EMP)
I would need a LOT of gold to convince somebody to give me a few chicken fledglings in exchange for them in a "after the fall" situation.
It sounds like no matter how you look at it, stocking up on gold is a kinda dumb waste of money.
It's still handy as jewelry, the core use for several thousand years in the past and probably several thousand in the future.
The use as currency has always been a secondary thing. Try getting married with a plastic wedding ring if in doubt.
Other metals might be better. Although Aluminium corrodes so there must be some situations where gold is superior.
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.
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.
The TVA made them good!
I know what I'm up to, i just really like trolling goldbugs.
How do you propose to accomplish the takeover and operation? What about security? What scale of dam?
There are glass blowers that love gold foil for picking up as surface decoration (although it's tricky to get right).
Jewellers use foil for surface finishes.
I could go on, but there's three common uses.
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.
It'll be a bit like that "WWII is still going" delusion that held out deep in the jungle on isolated islands.
A signal mirror (with a hole in the middle) would be the next best thing
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.
This is why distallation (forced evaporation) of water is a crucial skill.
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?
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.
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.
- https://www.britannica.com/science/oxygen-group-element/Isot...
Chapter 8 (Water), pp78 https://ia902306.us.archive.org/19/items/NuclearWarSurvivalS...
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.
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.
What a great time it was to grow up!
A farming community could survive, until an army of 100000 hungry people overruns it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.ted.com/talks/douglas_rushkoff_how_to_be_team_hu...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is this true? Could you elaborate on this?
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.
Libertarians are not anarchists. Libertarianism requires a functioning government to protect our fundamental rights.
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.
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.
Wow, the bill attempts to make the case that nuclear shelter is like other building codes and housing standards. It's a stretch.
1. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80B01676R0037000...