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How to live like a caveman in a post-nuclear age. Your first order is 3' of earth coverage for your shelter's wall and ceiling: this provides the most protecti
by egberts1 2y ago
How to live like a caveman in a post-nuclear age.
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.
- nemo44x 2y agoYour list is missing weapons and ammunition. Those are probably the most important.
- egberts1 2y agoNot disagreeing with you there. Edited grandfather comment.
- ryandrake 2y agoWell, and a gang, too. 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.
- nemo44x 2y agoAt the very least they can be used to easily destroy your existence in the new, terrible reality.
- kibwen 2y agoThe 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.
- nemo44x 2y agoYes, an armed community ready to defend each other.
- Rhapso 2y agoWhat 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.
- egberts1 2y agoMetals are problematic after radiation exposure. 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.
- Rhapso 2y agohttp://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q13412.html http://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q13412.html 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.r.html https://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/2003-03/1046983737.Ph.... And gold would only be unsafe for a month or two.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Rhapso 2y agoWhat are the other people going to do with the gold? what could they use it for? (Hint: gold is a useless metal in the modern era)
- tekno45 2y agoPeople liked it before we had the internet, people will like it after. Shiny and rare is enough for some people.
- egberts1 2y agoFor 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)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- fortran77 2y agoAll those preppers with their BaoFengs thinking they will be able to do something with them when TSHTF
- egberts1 2y agoOf course, if you can make a business model out of supplying anything mentioned, your prominence within your community too shall rise.
- gen220 2y agoYou'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.
- egberts1 2y agoIf you can make sugar out of fruit, corn, rhubarb , grape, beet, you too can makeshift a distillery and rise up within the community.
- xattt 2y agoMuch appreciated but given the (presumed) level of nuclear armageddon, wouldn’t rainwater be affected for months?
- egberts1 2y agoYes. It has to do with dust (think the Great Saharan sandstorm that can blow dirt as far as US or Amazon). This is why distallation (forced evaporation) of water is a crucial skill.
- defrost 2y agoOf 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?
- egberts1 2y agoAirburst 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.
- xattt 2y agoWould irradiation of the water by whatever nucleotides in the dust render the water radioactive to some extent?
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- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- xyzzy123 2y agoHow 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.
- egberts1 2y agoSolar distillation, solar distillation.
- schiffern 2y agoAccording 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. Chapter 8 (Water), pp78 https://ia902306.us.archive.org/19/items/NuclearWarSurvivalSkills_201405/nwss.pdf https://ia902306.us.archive.org/19/items/NuclearWarSurvivalS...
- egberts1 2y agoI 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.