A post nuclear conworld - decades and centuries afterwards

[Torco]

what'd it take for communities of survivors to revive the lost art of gunmaking? I don't think a lot. at least in the places where the bombs didn't directly fall... there's still lathes and mills and all the rest of it, and even if your survivor colony doesn't have any machinists... they're not that hard to figure out, power tools. i'd expect some level of low-lever warfare in post-state societies, guns or no guns: neither the mad max everyone shoots everyone all the time condition, nor the peaceful vibes of solarpunk. people in feudal societies, as well as hunter gatherers and other "primitives" by all accounts lived in a world where you just had a war sometimes, it was kinda part of everyday life for most people. not a total world war 2 scorched earth war necessarily but, you know, some kind of war. the sorts of raiders and looters situation we're imagining are just wars between people who grow barley and people who don't for, you know, the barley. it's likely those raiders over there beyond the highway also plant barley, they just had a bit of a shitty crop twice in a row, and your wife has family there. and yeah, it's totally plausible that they'd be using muskets for a good while. also no gas, forget computers, and most people go "back" to subsistence farming.

but i wonder how does that transformation come to pass, socially? agriculture isn't a spurr-of-the-moment thing, people aren't gonna panick for the hills to start their own microagriculture parcelas. though. capitalism isn't good, as we all know, at planning: and are people going to buy plots of land? how? money probably collapsed, and most people are poor anyway. family might come to the rescue. anecdotally, here: even in highly urbanized chile, most everyone, poor or rich, knows someone who has land. an uncle, aunt edith's husband. maybe people will decide, as food starts becoming more and more expensive, let's ask uncle bob if he'd like some help with the veggies. plus, uncle bob's sure to need a lot of extra hands on deck, especially without gas, without electricity, without tractors and all the rest of it.

Warlordism would be rampant

okay likely, but what does that mean, precisely? people would still be trying to stay alive and well fed and relatively warm, as they always do, not playing doom. even if a warlord invades and annexes uncle bob's farm into his empire...bob's gonna keep growing them taters, even if half end up going to the warlord. plus, as the warlords kill each other, they'll have to replenish their forces with boys from *somewhere*, the neo peasantry is the logical choice. warlords aren't psychos... okay, not all of them, and not even most. warlords would probably be just regular people, maybe ex military or gun nuts or drug dealers, or cops... all violent people prone to abuse, but not to the extermination of their entire support base.

what *would* make *war* ubiquitous is the inviability of agriculture. that's where the degree of the winter part in nuclear winter comes into play. areas where nothing can grow the first, say, 10 years would... oh, wait. those people would migrate towards the equator, wouldn't they? as they find it's harder and harder to get food, plus the cold... okay, depending on just how much of the world becomes not-somewhere-you-can-farm, the mortality of those movements of people alone might be staggering.

[hwhatting]

The question would be how much of the modern technology and machinery would survive that allows less than 5% of the people to work on farms and to feed the other 95% who do other jobs in a modern post-agrarian, post-industrial society. If we go back to traditional, low-productivity agriculture, billions of people would starve even if they survived the catastrophe, and social structures would go back to 80% peasants and 20% non-peasants (which include specialized craftsmen, merchants, artists, scholars, priests, soldiers and bureaucrats), ruled by extractive elites wherever agriculture is grain-based and the terrain doesn't help the farmers to resist central rule by people with guns.
If all that is possible is hunting and gathering, even more people won't survive.

[Otto Kretschmer]

The question would be how much of the modern technology and machinery would survive that allows less than 5% of the people to work on farms and to feed the other 95% who do other jobs in a modern post-agrarian, post-industrial society. If we go back to traditional, low-productivity agriculture, billions of people would starve even if they survived the catastrophe, and social structures would go back to 80% peasants and 20% non-peasants (which include specialized craftsmen, merchants, artists, scholars, priests, soldiers and bureaucrats), ruled by extractive elites wherever agriculture is grain-based and the terrain doesn't help the farmers to resist central rule by people with guns.
If all that is possible is hunting and gathering, even more people won't survive.

My guess is not much.

Agricultural machinery requires both fuel and spare parts to operate and a lot of farms in 1980s used artificial fertilizers. In a nuclear holocuast, supply chains would break down completely. A decade long nuclear winter and fallout wouldn't make things any easier.

Now, things might be somewhat better in the Global South but I suppose even those countries would lose 50-80% of their population due to nuclear winter (less water evaporation from the oceans = droughts), cessation of food, fuel and fertilizer supplies etc.

[Torco]

global supply chains would certainly collapse, but that doesn't mean returning to medieval tech. people know how to operate lathes, how to build rudimentary forges, how to make basic steam machines. not everyone does, of course, but there's a fair amount of people who can get started with a vast headstart vis a vis a pesant from 13th century bohemia or something.

[Otto Kretschmer]

global supply chains would certainly collapse, but that doesn't mean returning to medieval tech. people know how to operate lathes, how to build rudimentary forges, how to make basic steam machines. not everyone does, of course, but there's a fair amount of people who can get started with a vast headstart vis a vis a pesant from 13th century bohemia or something.

How much of that knowledge will survive though?

I agree about forges - but building even the simplest useful steam engine requires knowledge of physics and engineering far beyond the reach of an average person.

The first 40-50 years after the war will be about bare survival. A lot of books that survive will end up eaten by mold or burned as fuel.

The Industrial Revolution didn't spring into existence out of thin air - it was a result of centuries long process of accumulation of knowledge (enabled by the combination of paper and the printing press) and - crucially - wealth/capital accumulation.

[Torco]

technologies will vary as to their degree of preservation for sure. knowledge of chipmaking? it'll all go the way of the dodo, for sure. welding? probably lost, since you need advanced factories to make the little rods with the coating that makes the inert gas and protects the metal from quickly oxidizing, let alone the energy. but riveting? that's just a forge, a well made die or two and some fellas with hammers. and riveting enables boilers. and boilers enable, even with very basic tools, a piston. even if a community forgot the way steam pistons work, there's bound to be some book or other they can consult in the non-bombed areas. a steam tractor is a very advanced thing, but you can use a basic piston to power a bellows, or a grain grinder, or a basic lumber mill, or perhaps even a boat, using fairly basic techniques.

internal combustion, on the other hand... yeah, goodbye. but windmills and watermills are much easier to revive. electricity? if you can procure magnets and copper wire you can make a little bit of it [and copper wire is relatively plentiful] sanitation? almost certainly not lost: almost everyone knows about boiling water to clear it of pathogens, and that in itself will be a great help to survivors.

like, this may be a latin american or third world thing, but the other day i had to fix my car and we (me and the mechanic) needed a part. the guy literally made the part we needed (just a die to turn a bolt that had a weird shaped head) right there in his backyard with a lathe, some calipers and a file, in something like 30 minutes.

[Ares Land]

I don't know about agricultures. The crops themselves have been selected to be more productive (there's the issue of terminator seeds, but I don't know if these are that widespread), and we have a much better grasp of what works as fertilizers. Agriculture would go back to being labor intensive, I expect, but the yields would still be better than pre-industrial ones.

Torco maks a good point that processed materials would still be lying around -- copper wires, certainly.
Resourceful people could get a great deal out of a car.