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Old 01-27-2023, 05:41 AM
Ursus Maior Ursus Maior is offline
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Originally Posted by castlebravo92 View Post
Just as an aside, Texas got 20% of the raw megatonnage...and that's without counting the Robison and Lemont "TX" strikes.

[...]

Howling Wilderness states the population of the United States was reduced to 68% of it's prewar level by Jan 1 of 1999, or about 87 million dead after 13 months. If we use a rule of thumb and say half of the injured in the above table died from their injuries, and throw in another 5 million deaths from fallout, that gets you to ~20 million dead, so you need to fill in another ~67 million dead due to famine, disease, and civil unrest through 1999.

And then another 50 million dead through June of 2000. That's a lot of narrative writing to fill in the handwaving details that GDW left to the referee (or Chico in this case).

And if you go with the Howling Wilderness bleakness, another 100 million dead once the drought induced famine winds it's course, landing you at ~34 million survivors by 2002-2003 timeframe.

[...]
That goes in the direction of my thinking as well. Texas will probably take decades to clear and clean up, but it would be an important project for the generation of T2K-millenials in the US, due to resources and LOCs across the Americas and the Gulf.

The drought seems extremely over-written. By that time, most survivors would likely have been relocated to arable lands or found themselves a plot to farm. The US would de-industrialize heavily, but small workshop industries would soon spring up in the newly found farming communities and nearby larger cities. The knowledge is still there and some of the tech-base and critical infrastructure as well. Rule of thumb might put the US at 150 million survivors in the early years of the 21st century. They would boom incredibly fast, probably generating the largest generation since the baby-boomers, due to available space, food and lack of social security. Infant mortality would be much higher, of course, but with local antibiotics and vaccine production (it's not that hard technically, if you know what you're doing), that'll be manageable as well.

It would be interesting to narrate, how the survivors incorporate the inevitable rise in misformed infants due to radiation damage to parental genomes. That could go very different, depending on the local community.
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