> Storing 1 year of calories takes so little space and is so cheap it isn't even a consideration.

Please explain. My gut feel intuition is that you have to sacrifice at least a typical American closet's worth of space to do that.

A 50 lb bag of rice would feed you for 50 days and you can fit about 8 of them in a grocery store cart.

> A 50 lb bag of rice would feed you for 50 days and you can fit about 8 of them in a grocery store cart.

So that would be like 1/4 of a US closet for one person? I know rice will get bugs if you don't eat it in a reasonable amount of time, so that would be a concern.

> Beyond that things will not really be that bad.

Apart from a gigantic global food crisis for at least a decade - see this comment for just a "small" nuclear war, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34448255 - and the disruption of the supply chain that makes what happend during COVID look like nothing at all happened there? Which means you can also forget about a lot of daily necessities like lots of chemicals and medicines, even if you yourself don't use them directly.

Good luck going into forests trying to get enough wood - together with tens of millions of other people from around you. Never mind food, after the first year, which can probably be covered from the reserves. Asia and Africa will be quite busy dealing with a large population they can't feed any more, anybody who can attempting to flee and they won't take "no" for an answer at the borders.

> After 6 months trains will be running again and there will be plenty of food,

How, magic? (see linked comment and the study there, and remember that's only a "small" nuclear war they are talking about there)

.

[silent sigh] Why am I even participating in this kind of discussion... I guess it's early morning and I'm procrastinating.

Again, you only need enough food to feed the people who are still alive. You don't need international supply chains to grow food. In fact, here in the US we have far more food than we need, not exporting it will mean we have an absolute glut. The rest of the world will lose access to that, but that doesn't effect me.

Enough wood? I live in a forest.

Tens of millions... Sorry, this state has 50 people per square mile. There aren't 10 million people within a 100 mile radius of me.

Supply chain? They didn't have an international supply chain 100 years ago. They barely had one 50 years ago. The world will be fine without one for awhile.

You are just not correct on any level here. People were trading and able to survive perfectly fine and even thrive 2000 years ago, with iron age technology and not much of that. 1 year after a nuclear war people would be rebuilding, 10 years after and day to day life will be very much like it was before the war.

Here is a map of the amount of rail in the Soviet Union in the 20th century. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/54/Ra... You can see that they went from basically 0 rail to a massive amount of rail in 20 years. How did they do this without a global supply chain and while fighting 2 world wars? It turns out people are more than capable of addressing problems even under trying circumstances. They don't just say "supply chain disruption!" and give up and lay down and cry.

> How did they do this without a global supply chain and while fighting 2 world wars?

Apparently by working hundreds of thousands of gulag prisoners to death:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-63332...

Which we won't have to do to just repair the existing railroads. My point is if they can build railroads with almost no industry and no `international supply chains` then we can get the already working rail system started again, no?

PS: even in more humane phases of the Soviet Union I doubt very much that self-sufficiency had worked. For instance large infrastructure projects, like the Baikal-Amur railway or the Drushba pipeline were built with massive support from all Eastern Bloc countries, not just financially but by sending entire construction teams over (I remember well the propaganda campaigns for this in Eastern Germany).

The VAZ factories were built by the Italians, and the early Shiguli/Lada car models were phased out Fiat models.

The MiG-15 prototypes famously flew with English jet engines.

The Tu-95 turboprop engines have been designed by Germans.

Etc etc... my point being that self-sufficiency doesn't work in the modern world (unless the people are content with living like medieval peasants).

> Supply chain? They didn't have an international supply chain 100 years ago. They barely had one 50 years ago. The world will be fine without one for awhile.

Yes, because they used to have local factories and mines that they built up over decades. Then as globalization and direct international investments were encouraged instead of trade, factories and mines were closed down and production moved to China/India/S Korea/Japan/Taiwan etc. Going to the point that cloth masks couldn't be produced in any significant numbers in the USA or Europe when a pandemic hit.