How long to rebuild civilisation after an all out nuclear war?

[eclipsenow]

The missiles are launched and all the big cities in the world are engulfed in nuclear fireballs. A nuclear cloud spreads around the globe, the dark settles in, and a nuclear winter spreads across the northern hemisphere. How long until civilisation rebuilds?

THE RISE OF WARLORDS - OR NOT?
As survivors dug themselves out of fallout shelters and started competing for food and ammo, my guess is that some more thoughtful types would already be thinking about what lay ahead. My guess is that as well as grabbing all the food and water systems they could set up, some would be trying to find out if anyone was in charge. Was the President alive (or Prime Minister if we're talking about Australia and other southern nations, which might avoid a lot of the nuclear winter.) Was the State leadership intact? What about the local Mayor? Because most of us have seen Mad Max and the Book of Eli and know that after the disaster, one immediately needs to set up the rule of law or the despots take over. Once the road warriors take over, many good things can be lost from sheer brutish stupidity.

I think sheer self-interest would have many of us pushing to vote for a local town mayor and body of laws. We know the rule of law is a fragile thing, and the horrors if we miss it.

(But even if some crazy warlord takes over – with their militias scaring everyone into submission - this can become a type of order. Even warlords want their food hot and beer cold, want power systems and some sort of order to keep the power on. Technical progress would be desirable, even if the political progress came through painful revolutions later on.)

DEMOCRACY
I would bet on Democracy making a quick comeback. We like the rule of law! Local citizens would vote on things, organise things, and get things done. Before the year was out I’d bet that even if the national government had completely collapsed in the nuclear holocaust, that local people would have set up their own local systems of democratic law. Local mayors would start to negotiate trade deals with other village mayors. Within a few years, enough mayors might have formed together to re-institute State laws and have a State police force and army to protect them from warlords!

INDUSTRIALISING AGAIN
Meanwhile there are scavenging and technical guilds as well as farming guilds forming. They're putting back into their local environment, their farms, their soil, and gradually building up a knowledge base to move forward. We’re most likely talking about rural survivors, as the big cities have been bombed out. In a way it’s a mercy that so many of the city population is wiped out at first, because agriculture is going to be radically reduced without regular oil supplies. Growing their own food will be the main technical and social concern for the first few years.

Surviving tradespeople like plumbers and carpenters and electricians would really be in demand! In some ways their next 'industrial revolution' would be much faster than the first industrial revolution, as we have already know the laws of physics and chemistry and biology that make the modern world possible. The mechanics and techs from the village would wait a while for the radiation to burn off in the big cities, and after a few months start exploring the ruins.

Petroleum only stores for about a year at most and then separates out so that it doesn’t work properly in a car engine. Wood gas engines can cook up fuel for priority engines like the harvester or tractor. Most transport would go back to cycling and horse drawn carriages - for a while. Rural villages would be mainly places where you walk and cycle for a the first few years. Let’s not forget that one man on a bicycle with a trailer can cycle a good 50km in a day to salvage some items. We might even see rickshaws make a comeback to transport the injured or elderly.

Technicians would be able to make local wind turbines and salvage solar panels for their workshops, and would also scavenge the tools and manuals that make them work. Even rural areas would have heaps of useless cars scattered around that could be scrapped for various metals for years to come.

There are primitive solutions for batteries and even refrigeration, so that life in a post-apocalyptic village with enough food and technicians could soon start to have some of the comforts of the modern world. Crucially, they’re salvaging knowledge, whether it is in books and manuals or DVD’s and hard drives. They'd get things up and running eventually, even if the local workshop had to stop working on cloudy days because their solar panels maxed out.

Bit by bit society would build up again, but in a more walkable, human based city plan. Energy would be more valuable and prioritised for the most important survival and salvaging efforts. Finally, some regions might rebuild the local hydro dams or get the nuclear power plants running again. Once they get breeder reactors up and running, any nuclear waste in that country becomes an incredible asset that could power the reformed nation for centuries to come. For more detail, see Isaac Arthur on Post Apocalyptic civilisations. The bottom line? I think within a generation or two, civilisation would be back - in a different shape and with much more energy efficient town plans, but back. What direction do you think it would take after rising from the ashes?

 

[ewq1938]

The missiles are launched and all the big cities in the world are engulfed in nuclear fireballs. A nuclear cloud spreads around the globe, the dark settles in, and a nuclear winter spreads across the northern hemisphere. How long until civilisation rebuilds?

Depends on the whole covid-19 thing. It will be slow no matter what but slower if people have a SARS type of sickness.

 

[Radagast]

The missiles are launched and all the big cities in the world are engulfed in nuclear fireballs. A nuclear cloud spreads around the globe, the dark settles in, and a nuclear winter spreads across the northern hemisphere. How long until civilisation rebuilds?

It's a frequently explored concept. It depends on how much damage was done.

Because most of us have seen Mad Max and the Book of Eli and know that after the disaster, one immediately needs to set up the rule of law or the despots take over.

But it's likely that the military forces that you need to exercise control would be the targets of the worst bombing.

Electronics would take a big hit as well, and without communications, nation-wide control would be impossible.

Food riots would be massive (COVID-19 has shown us how fragile the food distribution infrastructure is).

I think sheer self-interest would have many of us pushing to vote for a local town mayor and body of laws.

A "tough local town mayor" pretty much is a "warlord."

How sensible the mayor is will depend on how much PTSD everybody has.

Meanwhile there are scavenging and technical guilds as well as farming guilds forming.

Technical guilds will need textbooks from before about 1930. The 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica will be in high demand. Few of those exist now, never mind post-apocalypse.

In some ways their next 'industrial revolution' would be much faster than the first industrial revolution, as we have already know the laws of physics and chemistry and biology that make the modern world possible.

Education would take a big hit. Much science would be forgotten. Without good education, many ancient books would be misinterpreted.

There's a clue in the way Muslim civilisation treated Aristotle. Some of Aristotle's writing on rhetoric concerned theatre, but there were no theatres in Muslim civilisation. So everything that Aristotle said on the subject was just totally misinterpreted.

 

[Gene2memE]

This is actually a subject I've done a lot of reading and thinking about. The answer is "it very much depends" on the initial conditions you're faced with in the immediate aftermath.

The idea that humanity would revert to some pre-Industrial Revolution agrarian state or anarchic free for all, even in the short term, exists mostly in the minds of bad science fiction writers and Hollywood screen writers (but, I repeat myself). History has shown, repeatedly, that in widescale crises humans band together and tend to be less selfish than in other times.

However, the pace of any return towards our existing industrial-technological peak would depend on a myriad of factors. Attack type, initial and secondary casualty levels, extent/persistence of nuclear winter, state of hard infrastructure, prevalence of medical facilities, ect ect.

Given the persistent threat of nuclear war from the 1950s through to the early 1990s, there has also been a large volume of (mostly US) official estimates about how a reconstruction would occur. Some light reading recommendations

Nuclear Winter: The Anthropology of Human Survival https://fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/lib-www/la-pubs/00173165.pdf
The Consequences of Nuclear War: An Economic and Social Perspective The Consequences of Nuclear War: An Economic and Social Perspective - The Medical Implications of Nuclear War - NCBI Bookshelf
Medical Supply and Demand in a Post-Nuclear-War World Medical Supply and Demand in a Post-Nuclear-War World - The Medical Implications of Nuclear War - NCBI Bookshelf
US Office of Technology Assessment: The Effects of Nuclear War https://ota.fas.org/reports/7906.pdf
Atmospheric Conditions After a Nuclear War Atmospheric Conditions After a Nuclear War - ScienceDirect

 

[Radagast]

History has shown, repeatedly, that in widescale crises humans band together and tend to be less selfish than in other times

Yes, COVID-19 is really proving that, isn't it?

 

[eclipsenow]

Yes, COVID-19 is really proving that, isn't it?

It's a mixed story, but I hear you. There are some heroic actions, clever actions, and downright weird and scoundrel actions at all levels. As always with us human beings!

 

[eclipsenow]

Hi all, I have a new summary of points.

With the Coronavirus Pandemic, people have been buying various pandemic novels like Emily St John-Mandel's "Station 11". In this novel, a super-virus wipes out 99% of the human race. That's like the recent reboot of Planet of the Apes! Only 1 in 100 survive.
The Disaster Artist

A: What would be your political and population strategies? (We'll discuss technical challenges after.)

1. Law and order

If a disaster wipes out the absolute majority of your population the survivors need to maintain law and order. Any surviving cops or authority figures need to get in charge and encourage belief in the system - belief in concepts like States and Nations for the benefit of all. The British started their colonisation of aboriginal lands with the first fleet and believed in the colony of New South Wales with just 1480 people - most of them convicts. How much more motivated would the survivors of an apocalyptic super-plague be? It's about supporting basic legal structures for the safety of all and the outlawing of warlord tyrants.

To be honest, I’m not even sure the fall of a National government is as inevitable as it appears in most post-apocalyptic stories. Most national governments have brainstorming groups (like America’s DARPA) and security agencies planning survival of their own government and quick recovery plans for the nation for all manner of horrible crises. But assuming the National government fell, eventually local survivors would form villages with local Mayors, and these would look to trade and form regional security pacts, gradually building up to a State – and I imagine this more or less occurring across the country ASAP as the search for survivors and resources grew.

In the western world we know the rule of law is a fragile thing. We know the benefits of democracy and checks and balances in government. As cynical as the modern world is about our politicians, in a real crisis we know we need law and order and an authority to call on to stop the descent into anarchy and warlords and mob violence. Without the distractions of Netflix and busy social lives, there is a lot more time for thinking. Collapses are long, boring affairs, with short bursts of extreme terror interspersed with months of boredom and general nagging anxiety. People will want to feel safe. They’ll want a local leader, an authority figure to report infractions to and decide matters. I imagine them quickly appointing a mayor. It’s one of the first steps on the road to recovery.

And if it descends into warlords and tyranny, – even warlords hate total anarchy! Even if some crazy tyrant takes over somewhere, not all hope is lost. Even they want some sort of order. Think of warlords in Afghanistan, or Mexican drug cartels forming alliances. They want hot food and cold beer, and a means to achieve their ends. They can organise enormous lines of supply and have their chains of command, all the way down to administration and accounting divisions. Technical progress would be prioritised – even if the political progress came through painful revolutions later on.

2. Consolidate and concentrate your population into a few core towns

Once law and order was established, the new government would take stock. The population has absolutely collapsed from 7.5 million people down to only 75,000. The loss of trained professionals is profound. How many doctors and nurses have survived - or were most wiped out in the pandemic? How many electricians and plumbers have made it? How many power station engineers? What does all of this mean? The government would need to assess all this.

Now we get down to it. Many post-apocalyptic books and movies, like David Brin's "The Postman" (interesting book, apparently a terrible movie!) all focus on small villages. Indeed, "The Postman" moves from village to village looking for somewhere that has power tools operational and isn't strictly Medieval in technology. Why are they stuck so far down the technological ladder? Because the post-disaster village flattens out our ability to specialise. When the population is down to the village level, many people become general labourers. They're all trying to grow the food, maintain the homes, and weave stuff. When everyone has to master the basics, no one can specialise into the more technical trades.

3. Population means specialisation.

The key to getting technical guilds of experts up and running is a decent population. Just as with computers, towns have a kind of "Moore's law" in which the more people you have living close together, the more you can get done. The basic rule of thumb? Every time you double a city's population you get an extra 30% for free. EG: 5,000 people in one town and 5,000 people in another separate town produce the GDP of 10,000 people. But if they were all together in the one town of 10,000 people, they get the productivity of 13,000 people. That's the work of an extra 3000 people 'for free'. You don't have to feed and clothe and house them. They're not real people. It's just the efficiency gains of living together in shared infrastructure.
Why innovation thrives in cities

4. So you can't get sentimental and try and save everything.

Now imagine how important this would be in a post-disaster world where your population has crashed from 7.5 million down to 75 thousand! The future government would have to pick winning towns and ask people to move there. There might be a few towns out in the agricultural areas and a winning township picked in Sydney to salvage all those shopping centres and abandoned suburban homes. Indeed, just as we saw in the recent reboot of the Planet of the Apes trilogy, we might see people moving into semi fortified shopping centres to maintain walkability and mutual security. It depends how the government are going dealing with security issues and outlaws. You might appoint a few curators and guards for art galleries and museums - or even move the contents to be guarded in your new towns. But sentiment can't get in the way. A small townships within Sydney would win, and the rest would be salvaged. Solar panels and tech and tools and clothes would all be scavenged and stored and hopefully if stored right, no one would need to make new clothes for generations to come.


B: So now the next question: how long for technological civilisation to recover after an all out nuclear war or high mortality pandemic? What would be your technical strategies?

5. Energy rationing, agriculture, and cycling culture.

Given that I am optimistic that *some* form of governance would develop within a year of the disaster – how long to industrialise again? The first step would be prioritising fuel for agriculture. Petroleum has a one or two year shelf life at most. Fuel would be the new gold, enabling some initial agricultural output. While scavenging all the fuel you could find and transport, the farming town/s at Orange or Griffith would get their tinkerers to develop wood gas engines for harvesters and tractors. It's a primitive system but in a world of only 75,000 NSW citizens, trees would start to grow back and could be harvested for agricultural fuel. Most personal transport would go back to cycling and horse drawn carriages – for a while. Cycling and rickshaw culture would make a huge comeback. Bikes with trailers can move modest loads by good old fashioned pedal power, enabling some level of scavenging to begin.

6. Technical guilds.

This is where the book World War Z has some interesting insights. (I hate zombies as a concept, but it’s a rich apocalypse genre). The book is quite different to the movie and follows the decade after the initial Zombie outbreak. The survivors fortify the Rocky Mountains, get organised, and simplify the economy so that former CEO’s and Hollywood celebrities have less status than a good plumber. In a similar way I imagine we would see various guilds quickly formed. There would be farming, scavenging, and technical guilds. At first, any decent carpenter or plumber or electrician would be treated like celebrities. They would be sent to retrieve solar panels and batteries, and make local small scale wind turbines and tools and gear for their workshops. Even rural areas would have heaps of useless cars scattered around that could be scrapped for various metals for years to come, let alone the bounty waiting for them in the abandoned cities.

Eventually plans for the future would emerge. Scavenging would look to not just tools and resources, but the manuals that teach future generations how to make stuff work. With limited time for education and a requirement for as much labour as possible, young people would be educated maybe up to middle high school and then apprenticed to guilds to learn on the job. In some ways their next ‘industrial revolution’ would be much faster than the first industrial revolution, as we already know the laws of physics and chemistry and biology that make the modern world possible. The techs from the village would soon form scavenging parties that would collect and centralise the most important power systems to keep the power tools running.

7. Luxuries and toys.

There are primitive solutions for batteries and even refrigeration, so that life in a post-apocalyptic town could soon learn how to build from scratch some of the comforts of the modern world. While there might be a generation or so of solar panels and batteries, as these start to wear down other more primitive locally made technologies can take over. Bit by bit society would build up again, in a more walkable, human based town plan. Energy would be more valuable and prioritised for the most important survival and salvaging efforts. Small scale wind turbines can be built.

Finally, some regions will eventually rebuild hydro dams. The bottom line? I think we’d be more or less back to close to today’s technological capability, if not population and industrial output, within a generation or two. What do you think?

For more detail, see Isaac Arthur:

What do you think?

 

[Warden_of_the_Storm]

According to the Metro Series of books and games (the latter are well worth a play, on so many levels, unless you're a stickler for biology), by author Dmitry Glukhovsky, then about 30 years. Although having an city spanning underground network of tunnels that were almost fully revamped by the government to withstand a widescale nuclear attack helps somewhat.

 

[Radagast]

According to the Metro Series of books and games (the latter are well worth a play, on so many levels, unless you're a stickler for biology), by author Dmitry Glukhovsky, then about 30 years.

Not terribly realistic. It's very hard to keep university education going, and its very difficult to keep industry going.

Inevitably there's a roll back to some past level of both, and a slow, slow, slow climb from there.

The obvious roll-backs are to the age of diesel (if you can still build lathes & internal combustion engines and do large-scale iron and steel manufacture) or the age of steam (if you can at least still do large-scale iron and steel manufacture) or the middle ages or the stone age.

 

[Warden_of_the_Storm]

Not terribly realistic. It's very hard to keep university education going, and its very difficult to keep industry going.

Inevitably there's a roll back to some past level of both, and a slow, slow, slow climb from there.

The obvious roll-backs are to the age of diesel (if you can still build lathes & internal combustion engines and do large-scale iron and steel manufacture) or the age of steam (if you can at least still do large-scale iron and steel manufacture) or the middle ages or the stone age.

I kind of think you ignored the second part of the quote there:
"Although having an city spanning underground network of tunnels that were almost fully revamped by the government to withstand a widescale nuclear attack helps somewhat."

 

[Radagast]

This is where the book World War Z has some interesting insights. (I hate zombies as a concept, but it’s a rich apocalypse genre). The book is quite different to the movie and follows the decade after the initial Zombie outbreak. The survivors fortify the Rocky Mountains, get organised, and simplify the economy so that former CEO’s and Hollywood celebrities have less status than a good plumber. In a similar way I imagine we would see various guilds quickly formed. There would be farming, scavenging, and technical guilds. At first, any decent carpenter or plumber or electrician would be treated like celebrities. They would be sent to retrieve solar panels and batteries, and make local small scale wind turbines and tools and gear for their workshops. Even rural areas would have heaps of useless cars scattered around that could be scrapped for various metals for years to come, let alone the bounty waiting for them in the abandoned cities.

Eventually plans for the future would emerge. Scavenging would look to not just tools and resources, but the manuals that teach future generations how to make stuff work. With limited time for education and a requirement for as much labour as possible, young people would be educated maybe up to middle high school and then apprenticed to guilds to learn on the job. In some ways their next ‘industrial revolution’ would be much faster than the first industrial revolution, as we already know the laws of physics and chemistry and biology that make the modern world possible. The techs from the village would soon form scavenging parties that would collect and centralise the most important power systems to keep the power tools running.

World War Z is an interesting scenario in that the catastrophe doesn't damage the books and leaves a lot of salvageable spare parts. You have the option of rebuilding rapidly, under the guidance of people who were experts before.

For the opposite scenario, consider the "Dragonriders of Pern" fantasy novels of Anne McCaffrey. The background premise is that a space colony gets hit by a major catastrophe that means that everybody is focused on survival. Society is knocked back to a medieval level with guilds. Most knowledge is lost. Surviving writings give clues, but people at a medieval level can't understand the clues.

Or, alternatively, consider what it would take to make a developing country self-sustaining in industry and education.

Or, indeed, any country. Here in Australia, if we were magically cut off from the rest of the world, we could rebuild the steel mills we outsourced to China. We no longer build cars, but people who worked in car factories are still alive. We could restart that easily enough. Aircraft too, probably. Making our own silicon chips would be a lot tougher, and the kind of chip manufacturing plant that the world can only afford two of -- that would be beyond us. We would never be able to mark smartphones. We would probably roll back to the mid-20th century -- and that's with no catastrophe on our own soil!

 

[Radagast]

I kind of think you ignored the second part of the quote there:
"Although having an city spanning underground network of tunnels that were almost fully revamped by the government to withstand a widescale nuclear attack helps somewhat."

No, I didn't.

I just don't think those tunnels would help much.

You need these things, and the tools for making them:

 

[Warden_of_the_Storm]

No, I didn't.

I just don't think those tunnels would help much.

You need these things, and the tools for making them:

Okay, let me give the synopsis of the Metro 2033 series books to you:
In an alternate timeline, after a decades spanning cold war that eventually turned hot between Russia and NATO, a nuclear war happened, which destroyed the large cities of Russia. In Moscow, a portion of the population fled underground to the Moscow Metro which, following the orders of the Soviet government in the Cold War proper, saw many of the stations revamped to have tight locking gates on the station tunnels and also life-sustaining systems to double their function as nuclear fallout shelters. This was true of other large cities in Russia too.

Come the following nuclear winter, the population of Moscow that survived began to eke out a living which then saw many stations become... well, city-states in a way. For example, the stations on the so-called Koltsevaya Line or Ring Line of the Metro became known as the Hanseatic League or Hanza, establishing themselves as traders and a sort of defacto government in the Metro.
Other factions included the obligatory Fourth Reich Nazis and the Red Line Communist line (you can guess what the conflict from them is), the paramilitary Rangers of the Order of Polis (defacto peacekeepers), obligatory bandits and independent stations.

Technology in the story runs the gamut of simple radios with car batteries, left over diesel engines used on boats and makeshift rail trolleys, coal burning rail trolleys and hand push cars too.

Also, there is obviously no way that human civilization is going to return fully after only 30 years after a nuclear war. All the book does is show humans surviving in a civilization they have created with what they have in the metro.

I will say that the books are good, though the Russian style of writing sometimes translates a bit weirdly into English, but the games are good.

 

[Radagast]

Technology in the story runs the gamut of simple radios with car batteries, left over diesel engines used on boats and makeshift rail trolleys, coal burning rail trolleys and hand push cars too.

Oh, I get the idea. I'm a big fan of post-apocalyptic literature.

In that kind of scenario, there's a long road downhill as people cannibalise the old tech.

But think of the grandchildren of the men and women in the tunnels, as they emerge. Can they make radios? Is there anybody left capable of teaching an electrical engineering degree? Can they make a new diesel engine? That requires making and casting metal, and cutting holes to micrometre tolerances, using precision tools (and you need precision tools to make the precision tools).

All the book does is show humans surviving in a civilization they have created with what they have in the metro.

There's a real positive "we can do anything" vibe to that kind of novel, which is rather fun. But it's not actually a civilisation that's described there; it's not self-sustaining.

Mind you, the people living in it probably wouldn't realise how much their knowledge base was eroding with each passing year.

 

[Warden_of_the_Storm]

Oh, I get the idea. I'm a big fan of post-apocalyptic literature.

In that kind of scenario, there's a long road downhill as people cannibalise the old tech.

But think of the grandchildren of the men and women in the tunnels, as they emerge. Can they make radios? Is there anybody left capable of teaching an electrical engineering degree? Can they make a new diesel engine? That requires making and casting metal, and cutting holes to micrometre tolerances, using precision tools (and you need precision tools to make the precision tools).

That's a point that is brought up, in that children born in the metro know nothing about the old world except from books they have, and they don't know anything about the old world animals and such.

There are elements of training and people being able to make stuff, mainly helped through the people who are willing to go up to the world above to get tech and other stuff that's needed.

There's a real positive "we can do anything" vibe to that kind of novel, which is rather fun. But it's not actually a civilisation that's described there; it's not self-sustaining.

Mind you, the people living in it probably wouldn't realise how much their knowledge base was eroding with each passing year.

There is an element of self-sustaining, in that people farm mushrooms underground as well as grow pigs and chickens. But as is pointed out in the story, these animals aren't the perfect specimens they were before they nuclear attacks.

It definitely does fit the whole "we can do anything" vibe that humanity in general has, and the old Russian "we'll never surrender" spirit too. But it's pointed out a lot in both the books and the games that if humanity in Moscow stays confined to the metro then they'll die out.

Though remember, this series is largely based around Moscow more than the world in general. The latest game, Metro Exodus, does a point of showing the humanity in Russia does exist outside of Moscow and... well, it's a whole thing.

I'll admit, the Metro series is one that is kind of hard to explain without seriously going through the wiki for it, or playing the games and/or reading the books.

 

[Radagast]

There are elements of training and people being able to make stuff, mainly helped through the people who are willing to go up to the world above to get tech and other stuff that's needed.

That was the point of my post about World War Z. With less damage in that scenario, they can go from the cannibalisation lifestyle to true rebuilding while enough experts are still alive.

There is an element of self-sustaining, in that people farm mushrooms underground as well as grow pigs and chickens.

You misunderstand me. Life is obviously self-sustaining. What I mean was that technology would not have been. Self-sustaining technology means that you make all the stuff you need, and keep alive all the knowledge you need.

For example, the Amish of the US don't have a self-sustaining civilisation, because they rely on iron tools which they themselves cannot make.

For a different take on civilisation and technology, see this book:

 

[Warden_of_the_Storm]

You misunderstand me. Life is obviously self-sustaining. What I mean was that technology would not have been. Self-sustaining technology means that you make all the stuff you need, and keep alive all the knowledge you need.

Ah, okay. Gotcha.
As I said, there is the element of the people who do actively work to fix and make stuff they need, albeit in a very slap-dash, haphazard way, since we see things like people making a Panzer IV on a railcar. I am not joking.

It's not perfect, but it's better than say... Fallout. And yes, I know Fallout is weird because everything is a true alternate timeline with weird science fiction stuff in it.

 

[Radagast]

Ah, okay. Gotcha.
As I said, there is the element of the people who do actively work to fix and make stuff they need, albeit in a very slap-dash, haphazard way, since we see things like people making a Panzer IV on a railcar. I am not joking

Cool!

One level of technology that it might be possible to stabilise at is 1911.

There was a rather good Encyclopædia Britannica from that year, if you can still find one. And it was extremely practical: it told you how to do stuff and make things. Full of useful tips, like how to cut the stone blocks to make a lighthouse:

 

[Warden_of_the_Storm]

Cool!

One level of technology that it might be possible to stabilise at is 1911.

There was a rather good Encyclopædia Britannica from that year, if you can still find one. And it was extremely practical: it told you how to do stuff and make things. Full of useful tips, like how to cut the stone blocks to make a lighthouse:

Well... again, the whole situation is weird.
But, you're not wholly wrong in the assessment that just after an apocalyptic event that everyone is just going to be able to just leap from wrack and ruin to perfect level of technology.

 

[eclipsenow]

According to the Metro Series of books and games (the latter are well worth a play, on so many levels, unless you're a stickler for biology), by author Dmitry Glukhovsky, then about 30 years. Although having an city spanning underground network of tunnels that were almost fully revamped by the government to withstand a widescale nuclear attack helps somewhat.

Yes - but Metro was a super-apocalypse with weird psychic forces loose on the surface and weird new biological / psychic / vampire monsters. When your whole food ecosystem is in the dark, it's a major disadvantage. That was a surrealist nightmare more than traditional post-apocalyptic literature. My son played the games and then told me about the books and I read the first two. They were both intriguing and deeply, deeply sad. I understand other authors now contribute to that world and that it is now absolutely huge - like the Star Wars universe?