Re: A post nuclear conworld - decades and centuries afterwards
Posted: Tue May 13, 2025 10:03 pm
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.
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.
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.
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.Warlordism would be rampant
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.