Sure, if you’re limited to mining. But why would you mine anything? Surely the easiest way to get metals would be to salvage them from existing finished products.
If the survivors are doing the salvaging relatively quickly, that will work. However, existing materials can quickly break down. If the iron in a car turns to rust and is washed down a river and out to sea, it will not be a simple task to recover that metal and make it useful again.
So if we’re talking about 20 years of hard times and civilization gets back on its feet, then salvage will probably work fine. A 200 year dark age is a different story. That might prevent us from ever fully recovering the kind of civilization we have now.
I would think the more important question would be, “Can humans prevent themselves becoming extinct as a result of nuclear war?”
Personally, I certainly hope not. But, I fear that may be inevitable.
Various articles in the 70s said that, in the event of an all-out nuclear exchange between the US and USSR, there will still be survivors on both sides, with the USSR having more survivors as a % of pre-war population (due to the bigger dispersion.)
OK. But, tell me.
What do you think the quality of life would be like for those survivors?
I have heard it said that after a nuclear war, “The living will envy the dead.”
There was an article on the Drudge Report site the other day that quoted a report and said that even in the case of a small regional nuclear exchange (such like between India and Pakastan) the effects would cause the extinction of most all life on earth.
I have no idea just what the truth is. But I sure do hope that I never find out first hand.
Here is the link to that story that claims a small regional nuclear exchange could end human civilization.
This may not be correct.
There are still places in Northern Iraq where oil pools to the surface on its own (the fields haven’t been exploited due to the Gulf Wars and the years of sanctions.) The Voisey Bay mine in Labrador is remote, but still quite accessible for nickel. Bog iron,limonite and meteoric iron are found around the world is sizable quantities which aren’t commercially viable now, but could be easily mined in the wake of an apocalyptic disaster.
One the major “advantages” that would be had by survivors of a nuclear holocaust is that much of what was done during the Industrial Revolution was well documented. That will save them weeks,months and years of trial and error as if they find a well stocked library (especially an engineering library) they can recreate much of what has been built without significant amounts of time being wasted upon trial and error.
Hyperbole. The estimate is based on the outsized impact of a south Asian nuclear exchange on overpopulated, food scarce China. It might well cause mass famine in China, but as for the rest of the world, it would mean meat becoming god-awful expensive for about a decade.
That was said by Herman Kahn. See above.
Actually, it has been attributed, with questionable veracity, to Nikita Khruschev. A similiar phrase (“Those of you who will stay alive will envy the dead!”) came to public consciousness from a Russian translation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and commonly applied to both the Red Terror and the subsequent persecutions and deliberate famines in the pre-WWII Soviet Union.
A small regional nuclear exchange, provided it remained limited, would not come anywhere close into causing the extinction of the human race. Despite hyperbole, both the Soviet Union and the United States engaged in the above ground and in-space testing of nuclear weapons including the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated (the Soviet ‘Tsar Bomba’ at 52 megatons), with a total energy and radioactivity release comparable or greater than the most extensive regional exchange with no discernable extinction-level consequences. The increase in atmospheric radioactivity may or may not be linked to increases in cancers and various birth defects, but there is far from a conclusive case given the other co-related factors (increases in tobacco consumption, groundwater contamination from industrial sources, the use of radioactive material in consumer goods, et cetera).
Stranger
Questionable, indeed.
Ask Not Where This Quote Came From
The actual quote is “Will the survivors envy the dead?” the title of Chapter 2 of On Thermonuclear War and used elsewhere in the text. Although the phrasing is different, it’s clear that Kahn meant the reader to answer it in the affirmative - *unless * his steps for preparations were taken.
In fact, he gave a specific answer about the result of a nuclear war on p. 21.
We might get our hair mussed, IOW.
Depending on the breaks.
Orion Shall Rise.