[castlebravo92]

Originally Posted by Raellus

This sort of thing will certainly be true in some cases, but it would probably be more exception than rule.

The Hobbesian view of human nature has been belied time and again by real life events. More often than not, in a crisis situation, strangers cooperate and help one another to get through it rather than devolve into self-serving, dog-eat-dog rapaciousness.

I'm not as optimistic, and in any event, you sort of need the Hobbesian view of things to fit the plot of the canon Twilight exchange - which was a pretty miniscule exchange (73 megatons, roughly 130 dgz's) compared to what the US government has prepped for since the 50s.

In World War II, during the Blitz and, later, the bombing of German and Japanese cities, episodes of urban refugees descending on rural farming communities like locusts were few and far between. Evacuations were largely orderly and peaceful. If anything, farmers gouged evacuees for food and shelter.

The problem, from an response analysis standpoint, is nuclear war is highly stochastic. We have a sample size of 0 when it comes to the number of flattened American cities and how Americans would react. In the face of disaster, the Japanese and the Germans tend to act pretty orderly (Fukishima is a great example on the Japanese side), Americans less so. I was going to make the thesis this is because of lower trust levels in the United States, but initial research suggests Japan is just as bad as the US is in that regard, so there goes that theory.

I'm a little more pessimistic than you, but it's hard squaring the circle of the level of the attack and the level of subsequent disorder...you kinda have to channel your inner Hobbes to make it work. I think in reality, there would still be plenty of people left alive (around 92% of the population) who would know how to: re-wire a generator and rebuild refineries, and I'm guessing EPA regs and environmental impact studies would reduce the lead time and the NIMBY lawsuits precluding the construction of new generating capacity. Electricity may not be widely available for general residential use for a couple of years (transformers being the weak link), but IMHO we'd have enough generation capacity to have an industrial base at least on par with early 1900s, which would be sufficient to keep people from starving and the economy recovering and expanding existing capital rather than everyone eating the seed grain and having nothing left for next year's harvest.

For a more recent, American example, look at the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. At the time, the media made post-Katrina New Orleans out to be a hell-scape, Mad Max style free for all, but there's little evidence that widespread looting, rape, and murder took place in the days and weeks after the levees broke. Instead, strangers helped one another evacuate to higher ground, and shared the basic necessities of life until FEMA arrived in force.

Katrina was plenty bad in pockets. There were vigilante/cop murders of unarmed blacks, there really was widespread looting, there was heavy handed government confiscation of weapons, and things were bad and lawless in the Superdome. But with Katrina, everyone had the expectation that things were going to get back to normal. If that ceases to be true, then who knows how people will act, especially when food gets low for everyone.

Using Africa as an example, we can see examples of a paroxysm of violence in the Rwandan civil war, but the more common scenario of hard times is starvation, civil war, DP camps, and warlords, but not plagues of locusts stripping the land bare. The starving get displaced or cut off from food, and then mostly die or are saved by NGOs or the restoration of food production and distribution...but either death or salvation takes months.