Protect and Survive: A Timeline

[LeoXiao]

'Well if there was a God, why would he do this?' + more stuff on religion

I'd say that a lot of people would think that the war was divine punishment for human arrogance and/or a test, and thus become more devout and form strong spiritual communities. These communities, since they work on a more emotional level than bureaucracies, would probably go a long way to support a wounded population and help them recover psychologically. Atheism can't really do that, although depending on the beliefs of the local leaders you could have regions of low religiousness that might look quite Soviet in the way they try to pull themselves together and rebuild society. Of course, after some time as the religious communities get larger and more powerful they will evolve into something that isn't about spiritual solidarity so much as plain and simple power over the masses. This is a sad thing personally speaking because IMO religion is great, just not when it tries to play government.

EDIT: Regarding the destruction of Germany, I don't think that every destroyable town would be targeted, namley because NATO and Warsaw Pact forces would not have been stationed in every settlement, nicely spread out all over the country. They would be concentrated in a few fronts, and that's where the nukification would occur. Strategic targets would follow the normal pattern of "everything with heavy industry or an airport".
To give an example of a surviveable town, Landshut (62,000 people) lies about 70km northeast of Munich and was not garrisoned by American forces after 1965. It also lies far enough behind the border that the WP would probably not reach it immediately. It's glaring issue is that there are nuclear reactors a dozen km from it, but I suspect these would be destroyed in normal airstrikes if someone bothered to take them out at all.

[Sam R.]

Originally Posted by ivfl

Nerds are not good at handling intense physical labour.

GULAG and holocaust memoirs pretty much refute this assertion.

What interests me more in terms of the reproduction of academic disciplinarity under extreme circumstances is the capacity for "self-healing" of various shattered disciplines. Some, like the humanities, will lapse into 19th century conceptions of disconnected scholars. Others, like law, engineering, medicine or military science will be fundamentally shattered in their disciplinarity and revert to on the job apprenticeship structures, again pre-19th century.

In all cases the community of scholars will have been evaporated, or rather, burnt out. One interesting case in point is that most deposit and research libraries are proximate to designated targets. The survival of research grade deposits is less than likely. The survival of diplomate instruction grade polytechnic libraries is more likely.

yours,
Sam R.

[modelcitizen]

Originally Posted by ivfl

...Nerds are not good at handling intense physical labour,nothing against them since i am also a nerd but jocks to use an american term are good at working the field.In this world the nerds lose badly.

I don't know if you've seen a thread called "667," an excellent narrative in which the jocks versus nerds dynamic crashes to a breathtaking conclusion.


edit: I think I'd like to re-read that

[ivfl]

For every scholar who survived the Holocaust or the Gulags there are probably 30 who didn't.I wasn't talking about killing them all but the vast majority would die.Plus many academic fields would have little immediate importance.No one would care anymore about astronomy for example,so any survivors in that field have a hard time justifying their own importance.Regarding Germany while not every place would end up targeted,the numbers would have been so high that it would make little to no importance.Alongside nuking the troops at the front there would be nuking of any troops away from the front lines,and once things really get out of hand any other targets with vague military importance:civilian airfields,administrative centers,industrial targets,main bridges canals.The interesting part is that in reality the superpowers never really targeted civilian populations per se but because the targets of interest are close or inside civilian areas it makes no difference whether they wanted or not to target.New York for example would have been targeted mainly for Laguardia,JFK and Newark international airports and a secondary targeting of New York-New Jersey port.But anyone who happens to know where these places are knows it pretty much screws most residents in the New York area except maybe for Bronx residents.So while a few german cities of less than 100000 would still be around they would end up devastated in the long term due to famine,disease or fallout.

[Indiana Beach Crow]

Originally Posted by Sam R.

One interesting case in point is that most deposit and research libraries are proximate to designated targets. The survival of research grade deposits is less than likely.

Well, just within 500 miles of where I sit I can think of five research libraries that should survive at University of Iowa, in Iowa City, IA; University of Missouri, at Columbia, MO; Southern Illinois University, at Carbondale, II; Purdue University, in West Lafayette, IN; and Indiana University, at Bloomington, IN. The most interesting of the five may be IU, because it might have one of the last copies of the Gutenberg Bible (New Testament only, and missing 12 leaves, but still better than nothing) left in this world, 700 books printed before 1500, a Dunlap broadside of the Declaration of Independence, and the first printing of the Bill of Rights, among other items in the collection. The research archives are impressive too, but some of the things in the collection are going to be the last of their kind left in the world.

Also, these college towns are going to be uniquely endowed with a surplus of young people in the prime of their lives, and with most work going back to being manually powered, that puts them at a distinct advantage in the post-war world. Additionally, these schools would have many students who grew up farming, and would be helpful with getting even the degraded farm systems up and running in the rebuilding era.

[stirlingdraka]

Hi Macragge1 I have read your tl twice since last month and I love it. It is just as scary as Threads. Just wanted to comment on that.

[Weaver]

I think that Germany's biggest problem in terms of national survival would have been the number of nuclear power stations there.

I possess many books published in the eighties about nuclear war, including likely targets, and power generation infrastructure always figures prominently in the lists, specially nuclear facilities.

Any such attack, involving ground-bursts that include the containment vessel in the fireball would involve a type of fallout many times more lethal and long-lived than even standard silo-busting ground bursts. Such areas would be lethal literally for centuries.

[Dunois]

Originally Posted by Sam R.

Permanent Emergency Rule will involve large fields, forced labour, food compensation units, limited private economy and almost no domestic economy, forced factory labour, absolute rule derived from a central principle, no taxation due to an "accounts" system. The ruling class is likely to look more like the Soviet Nomenklatura of the 1930s (including the high internal mortality) rather than the feudal ruling class of the 15th century.

I don’t see anything like this lasting until TTL 2011 though there is a definite potential for this to last a few years at the very least. The ruling class will rule absolutely for a while indeed, but things won’t be the same everywhere in the land. We have already seen areas where the local magnates rule like little dictators but we have also seen comptentish ruling by the Controller around Newcastle. The real problem the country is facing at the moment is that there are only losers and not winners to any decision made “above”. This in itself will be a huge cause of latent instability; it already boiled over to an extent in the North East with the Officer rebellion. Hopefully it won’t happen in too many places, but for it not to happen in too many places, you need strong leadership and strong leadership creates dissent …

The system of Paid State Labour has spread outwards from Military and Police detachments towards Doctors, Engineers and high skill workers operating in the mines and metal fabrication plants. These workers encourage a small market in petty luxury items. Alcohol is viewed as a starve my neighbour product, and so is rarely consumed by PSL workers (though often enjoyed by PER officials and other individuals strangely not subject to personal labour requirements yet not officially part of government). Prostitution is rife, but the market is saturated as most women outside of the elite attempt to supplement calorific and cloth intake by this route (though with differing euphemisms at different levels). Non calorific and cloth consumption items tend to be decorative fabrics, pottery, printed material.

Re-establishing a cash based economy will become a huge issue in time and an issue never faced by a society before. Bartering and carnal and non-carnal exchanges of favour will be the rule of the day for a long while. For a year maybe even two, a pack of cigarettes, a can of tinned food and a bar of chocolate will be much more valuable than anything else. As has already been mentioned, prostitution for food will be extremely common around military bases, pretty much in the same way as things were in Germany back in 1945/47. However Germany and Japan were only islands of destruction in a relatively prosperous world and money was worth something elsewhere. Here, this won’t be the case, expect in places like Sweden and South America. Sooner or later international coordination on the matter will be paramount at least. Pinging New Sterling to gold or a basket of commodities could be an option in order to re-establish trust in money.

Successfully raising more than four children to the age of five is one way out of the corvee labour system and into paid labour such as weapons manufacture.

The birth rate will massively increase in due time for several reasons and down the line I would certainly expect some form of government encouragements. More likely in cash and hard goods like easier housing though once things go back to normalcy.

While early attempts to enforce a vicious Anglicanism have failed, the Church hierarchy plays a significant role in life. This is primarily due to the entertainment factor and the relief from work that observant Anglicanism brings on Sunday mornings. Sports are often played illegally, often with the covert support of the security apparatus. Blood sports, in particular "cat baiting" and dog fighting have become popular.

Religion can honestly go either way, but I suspect that a religious revival of some kind will occur. Especially as the Churches will be one of the few bodies than retain a coherent organisation on local and regional levels.

GULAG plus Late Georgian England with elements of War Communism and Napoleonic extraction thrown in. Technology is mixed and uneven, particularly in terms of power for agricultural purposes. Attempts to resurrect Steam power are restricted by access to non-radioactive raw materials. We are talking about a barbarous and deformed version of capitalism at the moment. Further backwards slippage in the 50-100 year time frame depends ultimately on the rate of agricultural productivity. Corvee labourers could well become a permanent bonded-labour, serf, or antiquarian slave class. (I doubt that people will have forgotten legumes, field rotations, motive power, manual fertilisation, single fields—I'm thinking that any real backwards slip will be through Afro-American slave status and then into permanent serfdom). I find a permanent backwards slip unlikely—look forward to new Peterloos in the 2030s.
yours,
Sam R.

Non-radioactive raw materials, you are kidding us here? How could coal at 100m underground be radioactive? Well actually it already is to a very small degree, since there is uranium and plutonium in coal in small quantities …

Before we all start thinking about what things might be in detail in TTL 2011 I feel that it is very important to clear out one thing and that’s radioactivity. I must admit that I am kind of annoyed by the view of some posters that radioactivity should be a byword for halting any recovery. In order to cleat the debate once and for all could you please provide us Macragge1, with some form of estimate as to what the radioactivity levels are in the United Kingdom at the moment. Levels Sieverts or rems would be perfect in order to get an understanding of things.

As I have said it before on this thread, nuclear explosions from thermonuclear devices are CLEANER than a reactor meltdown a là Chernobyl. You will get some long lived isotopes but not as many as you might think. To say it bluntly, radioactivity and fallout from the bombs won’t be a problem anymore after a few months or just to be careful a year. Any suggestions that coal for example would be contaminated to an extent which would make it unusable, are scientifically impossible. Not that there won’t be some highly contaminated areas for a while, but not for very long. After all both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bustling and thriving cities once again mere years after the bombings. In TTL 2011 99% of Britain will be fully liveable once again!

With regards to how recovery will go from now on and how TTL Britain will look like in 2011, it is important to divide this large time period in smaller chunks. I would label them as such:

Survival – That’s where the TL is right now, the priority is to survive another day and very little can be achieved beyond this. Despite this however, key decisions have to be made regarding the future, especially with regards to agriculture, transportation and law and order. How well survival goes and how well initial planning succeed or fails will be crucial for the future. I would say that this initial survival stage can last anywhere between one to five years depending on how things go. Two years would be my own estimate.
OTL equivalent: Japan in 1945
Reconstruction – That’s where the basic physical infrastructure of the country will be rebuilt, of particular importance will be reestablishment of transportation links domestically and of some amount of trade with the outside world. Life will be though but stable at that stage, a grim routine of agricultural work, labouring clearing roads and rebuilding tracks with little else. I would expect schooling and the like to start again, albeit not to same levels as before and to have a strong practical bias. I would say that reconstruction will last from anywhere between five to ten years.
OTL equivalent: Japan and Germany during the late 1940s
Recovery – Here we are talking about society rebuilding itself anew, social and national mobility will once again be possible in some form. Normalcy will have returned albeit in a different form from OTL, holidays abroad won’t happen for a while, bananas, oranges, citruses, pineapples, tea, coffee and chocolate won’t be available in supermarkets for a while yet or more likely will be luxury items. Industrial rebuilding will take place on a large scale here, industries like steelworks, locomotive works, machinery works and textile will boom. The growth rates will likely depend on how much international trade exists. This stage will last for upwards of ten years.
OTL equivalent: Try and imagine a poorer and grimier version of German and Japan during the late fifties with less international trade and more autarky.
The New Normal – As Macragge1 said society will be influenced by what existed before, but it won’t end up being the same as it once was. Further down the line and by TTL 2020s and 2030s I could see generational clashes happening. The kids born during the 2000s and the 2010s will never endure the hard and grim lives of their parents and grandparents, life won’t be as good as today but it won’t be bad either. Their childhood will in many ways be comparable to the ones of baby boom kids during the 1950s and 1960s. Another “youth rebellion” akin to the late 1960s is therefore definitely possible during the late 2020s. The philosophical ideals and underpinnings of it will be drastically different however, the sixties counterculture was Marxist in inspiration, this one likely won’t be. A libertarian counter-culture movement then? Not so unlikely I would say …

Now on to some more thoughts:

Economy:
With regards to the economy of post war Britain as the years go by, I think that we can say for sure that it will be agricultural for a while but not as much as it once was during the Middles Ages or even the late 18th century/early 19th century. Agricultural productivity will be lower than OTL without tractors and fertilisers, but not necessarily drastically so, especially after a few years. The accumulated knowledge of the last few centuries is still there, so is a good chunk of the know-how and a good deal of machinery. During the first year agriculture could perhaps just about take a majority of the national workforce, but I would then expect this to drop quite drastically for a variety of reasons. Tractor power either through steam or through diesel fuel will be back at some point, especially as the government and the authorities would consider this a high priority area. Machine power alone will lower the manpower requirements of agriculture. Fertilisers are not a new invention either and I strongly expect more basic fertilisers to make a comeback, the most basic of which is well human and animal excrements. Crop rotation won’t be forgotten either and that alone will have a massive impact on agricultural productivity. Just to tale up an example I know a bit about, French agriculture needed FIVE centuries in order to become a net food exporter. Why did it take so long? Because innovations like crop rotation, new seeds, new breeds of grains and new practices like artificial pastures and so on took decades if not centuries to get adopted (the potato took almost TWO years to be adopted!).

TTL Britain how badly affected it might be by the war still has centuries of agricultural knowledge which our forebears did not have. This alone will have a massive positive impact on agricultural yields and on what is farmed and where things are farmed. Due to sheer necessity, some past decisions about favouring sheep and cattle rearing in Britain will be reversed as well. This will free up a huge amount of land for grain vegetable and potato farming. The British diet will change as a result and become more like what it once was, based around potatoes, vegetables, grain and some amount of meat. Livestock farming will continue however, but decisions will have to be made regarding which breeds and which animals to favour. I personally feel that pigs should and will be favoured, as they eat almost anything and don’t need a lot of care unlike cows and sheep. Pig meat is also easier to conserve to a degree, since it is simply a matter of making sausages. Dried sausages can last for months without a need for refrigeration are very nutritious and can provide the necessary protein intake for a day. Stuff like Haggis will become more widespread for that reason too, in a country where refrigerators are few and far between, anything which can be conserved easily and without a need for them will gain favour. The possible long term developments are numerous; might dried pork sausages become a lot more popular in Britain down the line? Possibly, though there is some wishful thinking here too (why is it so hard to find saucisson in Britain!). Food poisonings will sadly become more common in TTL Britain during the years after the war, the knowledge of germ theory and of basic food hygiene will improve things true. But in a situation where refrigeration is scarce, we are bound to see more of this.

Increasing fishing catches is another option in order to increase food production. The lack of oil will become a huge problem though. A positive impact of the war down the line might be to allow some time for the Grand Banks and other fishing grounds to recover somewhat. Alternatively things could be even worse than OTL as survivors desperately fish everything left alive. Whales would be a juicy target among other things; their oil has interesting uses too in the absence of petroleum derived lubricants …

Overall agriculture will do fine by itself a few years down the line; there is enough land in Britain to feed the entire population; even more if Ireland and western France are added to the mix. Maintaining and spreading agricultural knowledge will be paramount however and this is the weak point on which recovery hinges. Formerly city dwellers thrown to the countryside with instructions to farm a plot with potatoes will be at a loss as to what to do, so spreading knowledge will be key. The same would be true in the case of formerly sheep farmers instructed to convert to wheat farming.

With regards to industrial production, market forces alone won’t be able to restart anything for a while. It is tempting to think that someone would start making more steam tractors, but the infrastructure allowing for this to happen is simply not there. Central planning will be a necessity at first, quite an ironical thing considering both the British government of the time and the communist enemy the war was fought against … Industry will be stuck to the level of maintaining and repairing what currently exists for a good while. Metalworking and machinery making will likely restart first as there will be some demand for this, restarting locomotive production will be a necessity at some point in the future. It would not be farfetched to imagine steam locomotive production to restart again, in the lack of the scarcity of diesel fuel. Weapon making and ammunition manufacturing will restart sooner rather than later too. Downteching will be an imperative at first, making 7.62mm rounds for SLR rifles will likely be too complicated and too resource intensive. Expect bolt action rifles of WW2 vintage to make a comeback. They are easier to maintain, manufacture and resupply than modern assault rifles. Reusing and later on restarting their production makes perfect sense.

The motor industry won’t restart for a good while and when it will, it will inevitably focus more on Lorries, vans, buses and coaches rather than private cars. A nice side effect of the war is the fact that the entire industry could end up resurrected and regain its former glory. While robots and such are common in car factories, this has not always been the case and is still not the case everywhere today. There are still places in the world like Romania where companies like Renault will invest in a manual assembly line as opposed to a robotic one, since the latter is more expensive than the former. Designs will be basic of course and favour efficiency and usability over aesthetics and fancy accessories.

The consumer goods industry apart from textiles and very basic items won’t restart anytime soon and certainly not until a currency based economy exists once again. White goods like washing machines, ovens and kettles will sooner or later be produced anew. But designs will be crude at first and contain very little electronics, expect mechanically based devices to make a comeback and durability to be favoured over fanciness. The electronics industry will be the greatest casualty of the war. Making a computer is many times harder than making a car, and making a single transistor is much harder than making a manual clutch transmission for a lorry. The knowledge and theoretical understanding will still be there that’s true. But the demand won’t be there for a long time and the industrial base won’t be there either for a while. Whatever is left of the industry will focus on maintaining things like military radars and communication systems at first. Once society is at the reconstruction stage, the manufacturing of radios and televisions for sales to consumers will start again. Again, the first newly produced radios and TVs will be basic, I would even go as far as saying that television might go back to black and white only for a while. Growth will be slow but steady; once again people will have to watch TVs in pubs or at their neighbours place like it used to be during the fifties. Eventually the industry will recover fully but will never ever be the same as it once was. When computer development will restart, we might end up with a plethora of national standards, computing languages and internal architectures. If there is an Internet TTL, it won’t exist until the 2020s or perhaps even the 2030s.

The textile industry is the one which I think has the potential to restart first. Historically the industry was small scale and a cottage industry operating from people’s homes and workshops. You are bound to have some form of small scale cottage industry restarting soon after the war once things are settled. It just takes one seamstress to get things up and running in a way. She has a skill which few will have and that alone will guarantee a steady source of income for her and her family. Cloth mending and repairing will be the first step. This will create a demand for yarn and thread, two things which can be done WITHOUT machines, though doing so manually takes times and a lot of effort. The first machines built to mechanise these tasks during the late 18th century and early 19th century where crude, but mechanically they are relatively easy to understand and so building them should not be a problem. The availability of raw materials will be an issue for restarting the textile industry however. Historically cotton was used, but wool played an important part too and this is why Britain took up sheep farming on a large scale. I would expect some if not a lot of recycling to occur sooner rather than later, but at some point getting more raw materials will be a necessity in order to really quickstart the industry. However the increase in agricultural yields I described earlier coupled with the lower number of mouths to feed, should free up enough space for sheep farming once again. Wool and recycled cotton will be the only viable raw materials for a while as world trade in raw cotton won’t restart for some time. Dyes will be scarce at first so brightly coloured clothing will become a luxury during the first few years/ the first decade. But further down the line coal derived synthetic dyes will take care of this.

Chemicals will always be needed and as someone mentioned earlier, cottage production of basic antisceptics/anaesthetics like ether and so one will take place soon enough. You would be surprised at the amount of chemistry one can do with just seawater. The petrochemicals industry will be drastically reduced in scope, but the inorganic chemical industry which produces soda ash and other similar things will survive and thrive as there will be a demand for its products. Likely it will be a cottage industry at first, soap-making will certainly be a thriving one months and years after the war (you need very little to make soap). But as recovery and rebuilding progresses reindustrialisation will occur. The once thriving coal based chemical industry; especially dye making and town gas manufacturing will sooner or later make a comeback as coal production increases once again. The knowledge base is there in Britain and a good deal of the chemistry is actually quite basic too.

To conclude I would say that the main challenge economy wise will actually be the reintroduction of currency and of moneyed exchange. As it stands a pound is worthless and this has to change at all costs if we want the economy to recover long term. I would say that a form of gold standard, metal standard or a currency pegged to commodities is probably inevitable. Pre-war, the world financial system was indirectly based on the dollar but the dollar is not there anymore, along with the Deutschmark. On the other hand everyone knows the value of gold, silver or even copper. Reintroducing the pound sterling as a fiat currency would almost inevitably lead to hyperinflation. But a pound sterling backed by gold or any other hard physical asset won’t inflate and would provide a stable medium of exchange. The annihilation of Wall Street and London also means that most debts and bonds owned by countries, businesses and individuals will effectively be instantly cancelled. International coordination will be needed regarding this question sooner or later. But for better or for worse the world financial system will be starting anew from a completely blank sheet.

Transport:

The reestablishment of effective transport links is of paramount importance at all stages of the process, whether it is survival and more importantly rebuilding and recovery. The very good thing here is that we are not starting from scratch as a lot of the physical infrastructure is still there.

I would expect most of the main A roads and motorways to be cleared soon, though only a single lane will be usable for a while. The nice thing about roads is that you can always find a way around obstacles, so the various bombs on larges cities won’t have a massive impact on the national road network. The motorway network will be severely impaired however, but this is not a huge problem in itself. The main problem with road travel will be the lack of fuel, so I think that we are bound to see motor travel restricted to the military and other essential services for a long time. When civilian motor travel restarts, it will be confined to buses, coaches, and Lorries delivering goods. The car culture is now for better or for worse a thing of the past and won’t come back until the 2020s I would say if ever at all.

Once we are firmly at the recovery stage, public transport by bus and coach will be common and a lot more popular than it was before the war. In the post war environment it is a tossup as to whether services especially for coaches would be publicly or privately operated. Public operation will be commonly accepted as a necessity for fostering recovery at first. But on the other hand with regulars wiped out or greatly weakened, it would not take a lot for private companies to enter the fray once currency is re-established and oil privately available.

Restarting the railway network is of paramount importance in re-establishing effective transport links. Sadly, with the Beeching closures, a lot of avoiding lines skipping large cities and such are no there anymore. The situation is far from completely desperate however, since partial operations of lines is definitely doable and in fact happens already in the North East. After a year or even nine months, reconnecting the different parts through the bombed out cities should be doable. Nevertheless, clearing out the way for trains to run again will require a lot of effort and a lot of work and most of it manual. The loss of London, Birmingham, Bristol and Manchester/Liverpool is nevertheless a massive blow to the network. Birmingham and the West Midlands railhub cannot be bypassed, whereas Bristol, Liverpool and Manchester can to a degree. In a similar fashion, there is no way to connect by rail East Anglia to the West Country anymore with the loss of London. Sooner or later, a lot of clearing up will be required in London and Birmingham in order to re-establish the connections.

While a huge number of locomotives and carriages and general equipment has been lost. A sizeable number of locomotives of various types will still be available. Steam engines will make a comeback and as I have said before, I don’t think that it is impossible to have new ones built from scratch at some point. Should steam come back on a large scale, the associated water+coal infrastructure will have to be rebuilt, but it is simply a matter of building coal dumps and water towers here, so no big deal. Railway signalling done by semaphores will survive and thrive here; in any case there will be so few trains on the network at first that operational concerns won’t really matter that much. Once the network is reconnected and goes from being used for emergencies, to more regular goods and then passenger transportation. Some infrastructure will have to be rebuilt; sticking to mechanical signals and semaphores is an option however. In a way the railways will be thrown back fifties years into the past, but the good thing is that what worked then still works now and requires very little in the way of complicated infrastructure, electronics and so on. I definitely think that passenger transport can come back once we reach recovery stage, it will be limited to a few trains a week at first, but things will pick up from here. Once we reach the later 1990s and the 2000s I even think that there is the potential for the railway network to expand to a degree, Portsmouth could very well see the Gosport spur re-established. The new centres of industry could see additional lines; bypasses might be rebuilt and reopened.

Once the economy picks up and society goes back to normal, electrification will be back on the agenda as might high speed lines and so on. Expect things to proceed with ruthless efficiency if decisions are made, TTL Britain even in the 2020s won’t be like todays one where it takes ten years, to design a scheme, ten years to get the approval and ten years to build it.

Regardless the railways can emergence as another “winner” of the war ten or so years down the line. The competition from cars will be gone for a while and British Rail will likely run like clockwork and not a political playtoy.

Air travel, especially intercontinental air travel will be a thing of the past for a LONG time. While there will be an incentive for the motor and even the electronics industry to restart sooner or later, there won’t be any for the aerospace industry. Repair and maintenance will be the order of the day and that’s pretty much it. If the military needs new aircrafts in the future, these will likely come from Embraer in Brazil (if they have survived). If and when British Aerospace ever manufactures anything again, they will have to restart small and this means trainers and small transport aircrafts, piston powered of course. As Toulouse is gone, so is the French aerospace industry, so they too will be restarting from an abysmally low base. A new and fully combined Franco-British industry will be the only hope for both countries if they ever want to regain some strength in this field.

I don’t see any new airliners being made until the 1990s if not 2000s in the entire world. The first newly made one might be piston or turboprop powered, both for ease of manufacture and for fuel economy reasons. The worldwide fleets of jet airlines have been significantly lowered regardless and the lack of spare parts will then cripple the rest. In effect, the entire aerospace industry has been thrown back to the 1930s in the space of a single day and in the entire world. The first newly made airliners in Brazil, or with some luck Spain-Italy and France-Britain or maybe India during the 1990s will likely resemble the DC-7 Lockheed Constellations and Boeing 377 Stratocruisers of our 1950s. Jetliners like the sixties vintage Boeing 707, BAC 1-11 or Caravelle, might be made during the 2000s if not then almost definitely during the 2010s. New widebodies like the Airbuses, or Boeing 747 won’t see the light of the day until the 2020s or possibly even the 2030s. In a way, the aerospace industry will be almost FIFTY YEARS BEHIND compared to today’s courtesy of the war.

Commercial air travel when it restarts will be based on small hops between for example Portsmouth, Newcastle, whatever the new French capital will be (Rheims?) and whatever main cities are left on the European continent by then. Of course, we are talking about the 2000s decade here. There is no incentive for transatlantic air travel anymore, New York is a pile of ashes and so are all the main US cities. Airport and airplane design will be massively impacted as a result. To go back to what I said earlier, a new DC-3 and later on a new BAC 1-11 look way more likely than a new transatlantic airliners. If the circumstances are right, the industry will boom during the late 2010s and during the 2020s. But large scale low cost air travel to spend a weekend away in Barcelona won’t happen for a while even then.

Sea travel will restart once international relations begin anew. There are enough ships and shipbuilding capacity left in the world for this to happen. Portsmouth harbour will need to be massively expanded at some point to replace the losses of Southampton and so on. Building a new deep water harbour from scratch in the Somerset Levels would be a better idea though.



Right its almost 2.00am more stuff on Energy and in other subjects will follow tomorrow !

[Orville_third]

Did I mention that one of the largest collections of Christian religious art in the world could be Bob Jones University's in this TL?

[Sam R.]

Originally Posted by Dunois

Non-radioactive raw materials, you are kidding us here? How could coal at 100m underground be radioactive? Well actually it already is to a very small degree, since there is uranium and plutonium in coal in small quantities …

Coal isn't the problem. Can you point out where the United Kingdom's strategic rubber and gasket quality leather reserves were held? Non ferrous metals? What is already fabricated is not readily repurposed without machine tools that are in limited supply and not concentrated. You're not conducting an adequate process analysis.

Survival… Two years would be my own estimate.
OTL equivalent: Japan in 1945

This is rather hopeful due to constrained processes. Japan had a massive domestic craftshop economy survive. People were producing high grade industrial acids at home on tatami mats.

Reconstruction… I would say that reconstruction will last from anywhere between five to ten years.
OTL equivalent: Japan and Germany during the late 1940s

Both Japan and Germany offered wage labour within a context of massive unemployment and external direct military rule. Neither country's agricultural economy failed (though the distribution of food stuffs did in both). In addition both Japan and Western Germany were deliberately developed by direct overseas investment, in Japan's particular case, its industry economy was developed by the Korean war. Such outside factors don't apply to the United Kingdom which is having to fund its own occupation, and can't offer wage labour in any meaningful sense.

Recovery…
OTL equivalent: Try and imagine a poorer and grimier version of German and Japan during the late fifties with less international trade and more autarky.

I think you're going to find dependent paths seriously constrain this outcome by 2006. One of the dependent paths you've not examined is class structure. Germany and Japan were ruled in the 1950s by preened sections of former fascistic elites. In Germany social discontent was regulated by access to a large Social Democratic party. In Japan communism cemented itself into industrial workplaces.

These democratic and pluralistic solutions aren't open to the remains of the government of the United Kingdom. Even the economic escape valve which made the second five year plan more tolerable to Soviet citizens of migrating out of a corvee labour situation (the collectives) and into a wage labour situation (industrial locations) which high labour mobility doesn't exist.

Formerly city dwellers thrown to the countryside with instructions to farm a plot with potatoes will be at a loss as to what to do, so spreading knowledge will be key.

I see this economic problem far more as a labour discipline issue than as a skill and information issue.

The motor industry won’t restart for a good while and when it will, it will inevitably focus more on Lorries, vans, buses and coaches rather than private cars.

I'm finding it extremely difficult to conceive of such a constrained economy, governed by a highly military autarky, producing these vehicles. Given the high constraints on steam motive production through lubricants, gaskets and non-ferrous metals, the constraints on combustion engines are massive. Further, by the time construction of fresh vehicles becomes a viable economic decision the extensive steam tram and railways already have a transport dominance.

Such transport methods are controllable and policeable.

The textile industry is the one which I think has the potential to restart first. Historically the industry was small scale and a cottage industry operating from people’s homes and workshops. You are bound to have some form of small scale cottage industry restarting soon after the war once things are settled. It just takes one seamstress to get things up and running in a way. She has a skill which few will have and that alone will guarantee a steady source of income for her and her family. Cloth mending and repairing will be the first step. This will create a demand for yarn and thread, two things which can be done WITHOUT machines, though doing so manually takes times and a lot of effort.

From what sheep? From what cotton? From what hemp? From what flax? I agree that domestic industry can develop; but, the historical domestic industries developed where Britons had access to overseas raw material and a tax credit in the form of smuggling. The largest path dependency here is the lack of fibrous raw materials.

Given the early heavy bias towards food stuffs production; under diverse local central planning with national planning under military officers unused to production flow problems; fibrous production is unlikely to have been prioritised early enough.

The former Government of the United Kingdom was remiss in preserving flocks, basically relying on hope, and sheep production is unlikely to have been a priority: wool clips aren't adequate. Breeding stocks aren't adequate. This is an area where dumping accountants in a field and shooting the failures is not going to successfully transfer agricultural skills. Shepherds and shearers, due to their geographic mobility, are also likely to be subject to inquisitive policing. If Australian shearers are any indication of job specific indicators for union militancy, wool is likely to be a heavily policed industry.

Hemp and flax require significant lead times. They're highly labour intensive. They draw labour away from, for example, weapons grade nitrates production.

I won't deal with why cotton is a non-viable post-exchange textile for Britain.

Your discussion of coal derivatives chemistry is probably apt, coal will be an encouraged industry and related to the problem of motive force.

Generally though, you're acting as if liberal democratic capitalism is a base state of economic life; rather than dealing with the political economy of a military autarky that is occupying its own nation at worst, and at best, is somewhere between an inefficient central planner and an inefficient illegal requisitioner.

Government will have a romance with money; but they'll entirely fuck it up. Particularly when the means and tools of production are in government hands, and the best kind of boss is Schindler ("little hands"). If the privatisations in the historical United Kingdom and Soviet Union are any indicator, they'll sell it to themselves. This will reduce productivity further. And in both cases the United Kingdom and Soviet Union had cash or semi-cash consumer economies.

Even if a cash economy is introduced, it is likely to be at least as bizarre as the production economy of Nazi Germany, if not more so. Economically things are going to get weird, and stay weirder. Particularly during any attempt to transition to "normality."

yours,
Sam R.

[Macragge1]

Wow, Dunois - this is a really fascinating read. I'm going to try and take it bit by bit in order to deal with it properly. Suffice to say, it's all really helpful analysis with regards to keeping the timeline going.

Originally Posted by Dunois

I don’t see anything like this lasting until TTL 2011 though there is a definite potential for this to last a few years at the very least. The ruling class will rule absolutely for a while indeed, but things won’t be the same everywhere in the land. We have already seen areas where the local magnates rule like little dictators but we have also seen comptentish ruling by the Controller around Newcastle. The real problem the country is facing at the moment is that there are only losers and not winners to any decision made “above”. This in itself will be a huge cause of latent instability; it already boiled over to an extent in the North East with the Officer rebellion. Hopefully it won’t happen in too many places, but for it not to happen in too many places, you need strong leadership and strong leadership creates dissent …

Kind of how I see it - there's going to be a few years of War Communism style requisitioning and chaos combined with an NEP style hard reconstruction happening at the same time; eventually, though, this is going to burn itself out. There is a problem with strong leadership causing dissent and dissent needing strong leadership; eventually though, the boys with the biggest guns are going to be the only ones still breathing, so there'll come a stability of sorts.

The problem with all these analogies is that whilst they can help to explain the basis of what's going on, the fact is that a lot of the situation we find themselves in is a strange new world, with all that this entails.

Originally Posted by Dunois

Re-establishing a cash based economy will become a huge issue in time and an issue never faced by a society before. Bartering and carnal and non-carnal exchanges of favour will be the rule of the day for a long while. For a year maybe even two, a pack of cigarettes, a can of tinned food and a bar of chocolate will be much more valuable than anything else. As has already been mentioned, prostitution for food will be extremely common around military bases, pretty much in the same way as things were in Germany back in 1945/47. However Germany and Japan were only islands of destruction in a relatively prosperous world and money was worth something elsewhere. Here, this won’t be the case, expect in places like Sweden and South America. Sooner or later international coordination on the matter will be paramount at least. Pinging New Sterling to gold or a basket of commodities could be an option in order to re-establish trust in money.

Yeah - it's the Germany 1946 thing again. The big difference of course is, as you say, one can't just hop on a plane and catch a movie in London or see the lights on Broadway. Most of the hemisphere is as bad as anywhere else, and it's a sick irony that the biggest aid-giving nations are without fail the hardest hit. This is going to have a psychological effect, and probably a tangible one; combined with the much heavier destruction/lack of an occupying (but feeding) army, I can see this state of affairs lasting almost twice as long as it did in Germany and Japan.

Originally Posted by Dunois

birth rate will massively increase in due time for several reasons and down the line I would certainly expect some form of government encouragements. More likely in cash and hard goods like easier housing though once things go back to normalcy.



Religion can honestly go either way, but I suspect that a religious revival of some kind will occur. Especially as the Churches will be one of the few bodies than retain a coherent organisation on local and regional levels.

Nothing more to say here; you're right.

Originally Posted by Dunois

Non-radioactive raw materials, you are kidding us here? How could coal at 100m underground be radioactive? Well actually it already is to a very small degree, since there is uranium and plutonium in coal in small quantities …

Before we all start thinking about what things might be in detail in TTL 2011 I feel that it is very important to clear out one thing and that’s radioactivity. I must admit that I am kind of annoyed by the view of some posters that radioactivity should be a byword for halting any recovery. In order to cleat the debate once and for all could you please provide us Macragge1, with some form of estimate as to what the radioactivity levels are in the United Kingdom at the moment. Levels Sieverts or rems would be perfect in order to get an understanding of things.

Coal is safe, of course. There might be some problems in the short term resulting from radiation around the pitheads, but this will clear up soon enough.

Speaking of radiation, I for one was surprised by how quickly radiation dissipates, at least in fatal doses. Note that when planning for restarting agricultural activity, it was estimated that, after one year, radiation levels would be 0.00001% of D-Day.

Whilst obviously there are going to be pockets that are going to be unhealthy for a very long time (especially where nuclear power stations have been hit), fallout is soon going to become a background problem. In terms of hard measurements, I reckon that, after a year, most places are going to be receiving doses of less than 100 mSv; to put this into context, this is the sort of level that nuclear power workers receive ITTL. It is just at the point where there is a higher cancer risk, but it is no longer a whispering death. Note that it is less than 10% of the mSv levels of the recent Fukushima disaster.

Originally Posted by Dunois

I have said it before on this thread, nuclear explosions from thermonuclear devices are CLEANER than a reactor meltdown a là Chernobyl. You will get some long lived isotopes but not as many as you might think. To say it bluntly, radioactivity and fallout from the bombs won’t be a problem anymore after a few months or just to be careful a year. Any suggestions that coal for example would be contaminated to an extent which would make it unusable, are scientifically impossible. Not that there won’t be some highly contaminated areas for a while, but not for very long. After all both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bustling and thriving cities once again mere years after the bombings. In TTL 2011 99% of Britain will be fully liveable once again!

Maybe like, 95% if Sellafield and a couple of other reactors have been hit, but yeah, the vast, vast majority of the country will be 'clean'.

Originally Posted by Dunois

With regards to how recovery will go from now on and how TTL Britain will look like in 2011, it is important to divide this large time period in smaller chunks. I would label them as such:

Survival – That’s where the TL is right now, the priority is to survive another day and very little can be achieved beyond this. Despite this however, key decisions have to be made regarding the future, especially with regards to agriculture, transportation and law and order. How well survival goes and how well initial planning succeed or fails will be crucial for the future. I would say that this initial survival stage can last anywhere between one to five years depending on how things go. Two years would be my own estimate.
OTL equivalent: Japan in 1945

I would lean towards maybe three to four years at the very latest, for the reasons i mentioned above. Still, you're right in saying that any mistakes made here will be exaggerated and regretted later on.

For example, many have pointed out that not feeding the very young (in the NE Region at least) is going to cause big work-force problems in the long term, to say nothing of the amount of resentment it is already causing.

Originally Posted by Dunois

Reconstruction – That’s where the basic physical infrastructure of the country will be rebuilt, of particular importance will be reestablishment of transportation links domestically and of some amount of trade with the outside world. Life will be though but stable at that stage, a grim routine of agricultural work, labouring clearing roads and rebuilding tracks with little else. I would expect schooling and the like to start again, albeit not to same levels as before and to have a strong practical bias. I would say that reconstruction will last from anywhere between five to ten years.
OTL equivalent: Japan and Germany during the late 1940s

Yep; transport is the biggest thing in the short term of reconstruction for the same reason that the Romans built roads; troops (and supplies) can be moved around the country and, in doing so, further stabilise it.

Education at this point is going to be broadly practical. There'll be relatively few infants about (even when they're fed, there's such a disease/radiation vulnerability amongst the very young) and so literacy/numeracy education will be rudimentary home-schooling at best.

Originally Posted by Dunois

Recovery – Here we are talking about society rebuilding itself anew, social and national mobility will once again be possible in some form. Normalcy will have returned albeit in a different form from OTL, holidays abroad won’t happen for a while, bananas, oranges, citruses, pineapples, tea, coffee and chocolate won’t be available in supermarkets for a while yet or more likely will be luxury items. Industrial rebuilding will take place on a large scale here, industries like steelworks, locomotive works, machinery works and textile will boom. The growth rates will likely depend on how much international trade exists. This stage will last for upwards of ten years.
OTL equivalent: Try and imagine a poorer and grimier version of German and Japan during the late fifties with less international trade and more autarky.

Yeah. I sort of see this as all the bad bits of Britain in the late '40s/early '50s. I can't remember who said this, but he likened the time to 'a rainy Sunday afternoon, every day' (this quotation inspired a Morrissey song, for what it's worth). There won't be any oranges for Christmas for a long time, but there will be queues, grey and then some more queueing ('queueing' has got to be one of my favourite words; 5 vowels in a row, motherfuckers!). Speaking of autarky, I see just the slightest hint of North Korea in the equation; not so much in the repression stakes, but rather in the vast, empty boulevards of the cities and the back-broken countryside.

Originally Posted by Dunois

The New Normal – As Macragge1 said society will be influenced by what existed before, but it won’t end up being the same as it once was. Further down the line and by TTL 2020s and 2030s I could see generational clashes happening. The kids born during the 2000s and the 2010s will never endure the hard and grim lives of their parents and grandparents, life won’t be as good as today but it won’t be bad either. Their childhood will in many ways be comparable to the ones of baby boom kids during the 1950s and 1960s. Another “youth rebellion” akin to the late 1960s is therefore definitely possible during the late 2020s. The philosophical ideals and underpinnings of it will be drastically different however, the sixties counterculture was Marxist in inspiration, this one likely won’t be. A libertarian counter-culture movement then? Not so unlikely I would say …

The crystal ball gets murkier the further we go, of course, but these are some very interesting thoughts. On a more practical note, there's some interesting stuff in the epilogue of The Cuban Missile War v1.6 about post-war architecture. Long-story short, it's Brutalism all the way. Also, every house has to have a fallout shelter, Swiss-style, and a hoard of supplies for emergencies.

Jan mentioned something way up-thread about every city, town and village in the country having a World War III memorial. It struck me that these would probably be distinct from WW1/WW2 memorials, given the apocalyptic nature of the last war. I have this vague idea of some sort of stylised device becoming a standard memorial in each town; something like a super-stylised stone mushroom cloud, but a less crappy idea than that.

By the '20s and '30s the last people who remember the pre-war world will start dying out. This could be both a good and a bad thing.

Originally Posted by Dunois

Economy:
With regards to the economy of post war Britain as the years go by, I think that we can say for sure that it will be agricultural for a while but not as much as it once was during the Middles Ages or even the late 18th century/early 19th century. Agricultural productivity will be lower than OTL without tractors and fertilisers, but not necessarily drastically so, especially after a few years. The accumulated knowledge of the last few centuries is still there, so is a good chunk of the know-how and a good deal of machinery. During the first year agriculture could perhaps just about take a majority of the national workforce, but I would then expect this to drop quite drastically for a variety of reasons. Tractor power either through steam or through diesel fuel will be back at some point, especially as the government and the authorities would consider this a high priority area. Machine power alone will lower the manpower requirements of agriculture. Fertilisers are not a new invention either and I strongly expect more basic fertilisers to make a comeback, the most basic of which is well human and animal excrements. Crop rotation won’t be forgotten either and that alone will have a massive impact on agricultural productivity. Just to tale up an example I know a bit about, French agriculture needed FIVE centuries in order to become a net food exporter. Why did it take so long? Because innovations like crop rotation, new seeds, new breeds of grains and new practices like artificial pastures and so on took decades if not centuries to get adopted (the potato took almost TWO years to be adopted!).

That's the key thing, of course - it's not like we'll go back to the Middle Ages because we know about crop rotation, genetics and what have you, which immediately puts us miles and miles ahead of ye olde peoples.

The majority of coal/coke is going to go to agricultural machinery (if I was the government, I would have listed every single traction engine in the country during the Transition to War and would round them up before, if not after); and a good amount of diesel is going to go to it too. At the moment, it's basically them and the military using all the fuel anyway.

Originally Posted by Dunois

TTL Britain how badly affected it might be by the war still has centuries of agricultural knowledge which our forebears did not have. This alone will have a massive positive impact on agricultural yields and on what is farmed and where things are farmed. Due to sheer necessity, some past decisions about favouring sheep and cattle rearing in Britain will be reversed as well. This will free up a huge amount of land for grain vegetable and potato farming. The British diet will change as a result and become more like what it once was, based around potatoes, vegetables, grain and some amount of meat. Livestock farming will continue however, but decisions will have to be made regarding which breeds and which animals to favour. I personally feel that pigs should and will be favoured, as they eat almost anything and don’t need a lot of care unlike cows and sheep. Pig meat is also easier to conserve to a degree, since it is simply a matter of making sausages. Dried sausages can last for months without a need for refrigeration are very nutritious and can provide the necessary protein intake for a day. Stuff like Haggis will become more widespread for that reason too, in a country where refrigerators are few and far between, anything which can be conserved easily and without a need for them will gain favour. The possible long term developments are numerous; might dried pork sausages become a lot more popular in Britain down the line? Possibly, though there is some wishful thinking here too (why is it so hard to find saucisson in Britain!). Food poisonings will sadly become more common in TTL Britain during the years after the war, the knowledge of germ theory and of basic food hygiene will improve things true. But in a situation where refrigeration is scarce, we are bound to see more of this.

It's going to be curing and salting galore, as you say. Haggis and stuff is going to become more common (if not more popular) as every part of the animal is now going to get used. Look forward to eating gristle and those soups where they just boil a pig's head.

Agree on the pigs thing; it's more efficient than other ruminants; crops are going to be the big winner though, returning to Britain like never before - this is far more efficient, of course, as you say.

I like saucisson.

Originally Posted by Dunois

Increasing fishing catches is another option in order to increase food production. The lack of oil will become a huge problem though. A positive impact of the war down the line might be to allow some time for the Grand Banks and other fishing grounds to recover somewhat. Alternatively things could be even worse than OTL as survivors desperately fish everything left alive. Whales would be a juicy target among other things; their oil has interesting uses too in the absence of petroleum derived lubricants …

I think a big problem will come when desperate survivors a)use a huge amount of fuel oil and b) overfish massively in the first few desperate months. It will be very difficult to lock down every small private craft sitting in a harbour with a bit of petrol in it; even if possible, it's likely that the authorities could succumb to myopia - we're starving now, we'll worry about the fishing levels later sort of thing.

Originally Posted by Dunois

Overall agriculture will do fine by itself a few years down the line; there is enough land in Britain to feed the entire population; even more if Ireland and western France are added to the mix. Maintaining and spreading agricultural knowledge will be paramount however and this is the weak point on which recovery hinges. Formerly city dwellers thrown to the countryside with instructions to farm a plot with potatoes will be at a loss as to what to do, so spreading knowledge will be key. The same would be true in the case of formerly sheep farmers instructed to convert to wheat farming.

This is the big problem of course; the situation is so desperate that people need to get farming straight away; in order for this to happen, they need to get educated, but there's no time for this to happen because stuff is so desperate. Basically, everything's going to have to be learned by doing; such trial and error is, naturally, going to lead to a lot of wasteage, especially in areas where one can't get an expert to basically hold the volunteers' hands for the first few months.

Originally Posted by Dunois

With regards to industrial production, market forces alone won’t be able to restart anything for a while. It is tempting to think that someone would start making more steam tractors, but the infrastructure allowing for this to happen is simply not there. Central planning will be a necessity at first, quite an ironical thing considering both the British government of the time and the communist enemy the war was fought against … Industry will be stuck to the level of maintaining and repairing what currently exists for a good while. Metalworking and machinery making will likely restart first as there will be some demand for this, restarting locomotive production will be a necessity at some point in the future. It would not be farfetched to imagine steam locomotive production to restart again, in the lack of the scarcity of diesel fuel. Weapon making and ammunition manufacturing will restart sooner rather than later too. Downteching will be an imperative at first, making 7.62mm rounds for SLR rifles will likely be too complicated and too resource intensive. Expect bolt action rifles of WW2 vintage to make a comeback. They are easier to maintain, manufacture and resupply than modern assault rifles. Reusing and later on restarting their production makes perfect sense.

The big thing is going to be maintenance during the early stages. We can't make new Land Rovers or machine guns, and for this exact reason it won't take too long before we start making sure that what we have doesn't just end up falling apart. The upper echelon of this will be when the repair and manufacture of common spare parts (I imagine there's some parts that break more often than others?) for aircraft is up and running. Helicopters are big workhorses at the moment, but surviving jets are only going to be brought out for very special occasions - most of the time, they will be under tarpaulin. They will be held on to and patched up until the next end of the world.

I can see a super stripped back L1A1 (wood furniture, bolt action) getting produced - an 'austerity design', it provides some illusion of continuity whilst keeping a tried and tested weapon more or less going. Is 7.62mm ammunition more difficult to make than 5.56/.303 or whatever? I honestly don't know; if so, then, as you say, there'll be a switch to that, and if necessary, an even more basic rifle design.

Originally Posted by Dunois

The motor industry won’t restart for a good while and when it will, it will inevitably focus more on Lorries, vans, buses and coaches rather than private cars. A nice side effect of the war is the fact that the entire industry could end up resurrected and regain its former glory. While robots and such are common in car factories, this has not always been the case and is still not the case everywhere today. There are still places in the world like Romania where companies like Renault will invest in a manual assembly line as opposed to a robotic one, since the latter is more expensive than the former. Designs will be basic of course and favour efficiency and usability over aesthetics and fancy accessories.

I see fairly heavy lorries being, by far, the biggest production item. The rationale behind this ties in with what you discuss slightly later on; even with reconstruction of the railway system, there'll still be huge areas that are inaccessible to rail for a long time. Some sort of road transport system will be needed to plug this gap, therefore, large trucks. Some sort of standard, sturdy design could also be used by the military and, at a push, as a 'bus' or whatever - certainly in the short to mid-term getting very good at this one basic chassis seems like the best idea in my view. As you say, no fancy aesthetics, hand built - though the production line method will still take place. Even this is well down the line, though.

Originally Posted by Dunois

The consumer goods industry apart from textiles and very basic items won’t restart anytime soon and certainly not until a currency based economy exists once again. White goods like washing machines, ovens and kettles will sooner or later be produced anew. But designs will be crude at first and contain very little electronics, expect mechanically based devices to make a comeback and durability to be favoured over fanciness. The electronics industry will be the greatest casualty of the war. Making a computer is many times harder than making a car, and making a single transistor is much harder than making a manual clutch transmission for a lorry. The knowledge and theoretical understanding will still be there that’s true. But the demand won’t be there for a long time and the industrial base won’t be there either for a while. Whatever is left of the industry will focus on maintaining things like military radars and communication systems at first. Once society is at the reconstruction stage, the manufacturing of radios and televisions for sales to consumers will start again. Again, the first newly produced radios and TVs will be basic, I would even go as far as saying that television might go back to black and white only for a while. Growth will be slow but steady; once again people will have to watch TVs in pubs or at their neighbours place like it used to be during the fifties. Eventually the industry will recover fully but will never ever be the same as it once was. When computer development will restart, we might end up with a plethora of national standards, computing languages and internal architectures. If there is an Internet TTL, it won’t exist until the 2020s or perhaps even the 2030s.

I reckon people are going to have to get used to the radio for a while - radios are positively child's play to build compared to a television, and producing programming is a lot less labour intensive. All you really need is one guy with a mic at BBC Wood Norton/whatever regional station to relay news and orders, and then play records/ old shows for the rest of the hour. The Internet's a non-starter for a long, long time.

Originally Posted by Dunois

The textile industry is the one which I think has the potential to restart first. Historically the industry was small scale and a cottage industry operating from people’s homes and workshops. You are bound to have some form of small scale cottage industry restarting soon after the war once things are settled. It just takes one seamstress to get things up and running in a way. She has a skill which few will have and that alone will guarantee a steady source of income for her and her family. Cloth mending and repairing will be the first step. This will create a demand for yarn and thread, two things which can be done WITHOUT machines, though doing so manually takes times and a lot of effort. The first machines built to mechanise these tasks during the late 18th century and early 19th century where crude, but mechanically they are relatively easy to understand and so building them should not be a problem. The availability of raw materials will be an issue for restarting the textile industry however. Historically cotton was used, but wool played an important part too and this is why Britain took up sheep farming on a large scale. I would expect some if not a lot of recycling to occur sooner rather than later, but at some point getting more raw materials will be a necessity in order to really quickstart the industry. However the increase in agricultural yields I described earlier coupled with the lower number of mouths to feed, should free up enough space for sheep farming once again. Wool and recycled cotton will be the only viable raw materials for a while as world trade in raw cotton won’t restart for some time. Dyes will be scarce at first so brightly coloured clothing will become a luxury during the first few years/ the first decade. But further down the line coal derived synthetic dyes will take care of this.

Cottage industries - even basic mending/repairing are going have big appeal; beats prostitution, anyway. Indeed, salvage and recycling of materials from empty houses, empty shops and the dead is going to be the key part of this industry for the first few years (until some sort of production of new materials gets going). Luckily, there's more than enough clothes to go around given the reduced population and the fact that each person now will have less changes of clothes each. Still, this will be the first tiny sign of private enterprise and will allow trading for luxury items or whatever that will be a welcome relief from county-controlled subsistence.

Originally Posted by Dunois

Chemicals will always be needed and as someone mentioned earlier, cottage production of basic antisceptics/anaesthetics like ether and so one will take place soon enough. You would be surprised at the amount of chemistry one can do with just seawater. The petrochemicals industry will be drastically reduced in scope, but the inorganic chemical industry which produces soda ash and other similar things will survive and thrive as there will be a demand for its products. Likely it will be a cottage industry at first, soap-making will certainly be a thriving one months and years after the war (you need very little to make soap). But as recovery and rebuilding progresses reindustrialisation will occur. The once thriving coal based chemical industry; especially dye making and town gas manufacturing will sooner or later make a comeback as coal production increases once again. The knowledge base is there in Britain and a good deal of the chemistry is actually quite basic too.

I was always pretty shit at science, but I don't doubt you know what you're talking about. Certainly, if the knowledge is there, we can assume that it will be used. The big problem here is making sure that those who know what they're talking about are able to disseminate this information across the country.

Originally Posted by Dunois

To conclude I would say that the main challenge economy wise will actually be the reintroduction of currency and of moneyed exchange. As it stands a pound is worthless and this has to change at all costs if we want the economy to recover long term. I would say that a form of gold standard, metal standard or a currency pegged to commodities is probably inevitable. Pre-war, the world financial system was indirectly based on the dollar but the dollar is not there anymore, along with the Deutschmark. On the other hand everyone knows the value of gold, silver or even copper. Reintroducing the pound sterling as a fiat currency would almost inevitably lead to hyperinflation. But a pound sterling backed by gold or any other hard physical asset won’t inflate and would provide a stable medium of exchange. The annihilation of Wall Street and London also means that most debts and bonds owned by countries, businesses and individuals will effectively be instantly cancelled. International coordination will be needed regarding this question sooner or later. But for better or for worse the world financial system will be starting anew from a completely blank sheet.

I'm no expert on currency either, but, as you say, it's going to have to happen sooner or later. Presumably pegging the pound to something hard like gold is the best move (conveniently, all of the country's gold is sitting in a cave somewhere under armed guard), but it's still a long way in the future, and it'll still be a much different cash economy than the one prior to February 1984.

Originally Posted by Dunois

Transport:

The reestablishment of effective transport links is of paramount importance at all stages of the process, whether it is survival and more importantly rebuilding and recovery. The very good thing here is that we are not starting from scratch as a lot of the physical infrastructure is still there.

I would expect most of the main A roads and motorways to be cleared soon, though only a single lane will be usable for a while. The nice thing about roads is that you can always find a way around obstacles, so the various bombs on larges cities won’t have a massive impact on the national road network. The motorway network will be severely impaired however, but this is not a huge problem in itself. The main problem with road travel will be the lack of fuel, so I think that we are bound to see motor travel restricted to the military and other essential services for a long time. When civilian motor travel restarts, it will be confined to buses, coaches, and Lorries delivering goods. The car culture is now for better or for worse a thing of the past and won’t come back until the 2020s I would say if ever at all.

Once we are firmly at the recovery stage, public transport by bus and coach will be common and a lot more popular than it was before the war. In the post war environment it is a tossup as to whether services especially for coaches would be publicly or privately operated. Public operation will be commonly accepted as a necessity for fostering recovery at first. But on the other hand with regulars wiped out or greatly weakened, it would not take a lot for private companies to enter the fray once currency is re-established and oil privately available.

'Public' transport is going to be the only option; even then, this is a misnomer as it's likely to be state controlled (as is everything with an engine) for a good long while. It'll be a long time before anyone has any cause to go anywhere that's not work related anyway, so there'll be little reason for any transport that's not fully military/authority controlled.

Originally Posted by Dunois

Restarting the railway network is of paramount importance in re-establishing effective transport links. Sadly, with the Beeching closures, a lot of avoiding lines skipping large cities and such are no there anymore. The situation is far from completely desperate however, since partial operations of lines is definitely doable and in fact happens already in the North East. After a year or even nine months, reconnecting the different parts through the bombed out cities should be doable. Nevertheless, clearing out the way for trains to run again will require a lot of effort and a lot of work and most of it manual. The loss of London, Birmingham, Bristol and Manchester/Liverpool is nevertheless a massive blow to the network. Birmingham and the West Midlands railhub cannot be bypassed, whereas Bristol, Liverpool and Manchester can to a degree. In a similar fashion, there is no way to connect by rail East Anglia to the West Country anymore with the loss of London. Sooner or later, a lot of clearing up will be required in London and Birmingham in order to re-establish the connections.

While a huge number of locomotives and carriages and general equipment has been lost. A sizeable number of locomotives of various types will still be available. Steam engines will make a comeback and as I have said before, I don’t think that it is impossible to have new ones built from scratch at some point. Should steam come back on a large scale, the associated water+coal infrastructure will have to be rebuilt, but it is simply a matter of building coal dumps and water towers here, so no big deal. Railway signalling done by semaphores will survive and thrive here; in any case there will be so few trains on the network at first that operational concerns won’t really matter that much. Once the network is reconnected and goes from being used for emergencies, to more regular goods and then passenger transportation. Some infrastructure will have to be rebuilt; sticking to mechanical signals and semaphores is an option however. In a way the railways will be thrown back fifties years into the past, but the good thing is that what worked then still works now and requires very little in the way of complicated infrastructure, electronics and so on. I definitely think that passenger transport can come back once we reach recovery stage, it will be limited to a few trains a week at first, but things will pick up from here. Once we reach the later 1990s and the 2000s I even think that there is the potential for the railway network to expand to a degree, Portsmouth could very well see the Gosport spur re-established. The new centres of industry could see additional lines; bypasses might be rebuilt and reopened.

Once the economy picks up and society goes back to normal, electrification will be back on the agenda as might high speed lines and so on. Expect things to proceed with ruthless efficiency if decisions are made, TTL Britain even in the 2020s won’t be like todays one where it takes ten years, to design a scheme, ten years to get the approval and ten years to build it.

Regardless the railways can emergence as another “winner” of the war ten or so years down the line. The competition from cars will be gone for a while and British Rail will likely run like clockwork and not a political playtoy.

Agree broadly on all the railway stuff. I imagine once we get into the long run, it might be a more effective use of resources to bite the bullet and re-re-tool the railway system for steam operations; that way, the large coal reserves can get used whilst POL stuff can be held back. Simply taking steam locomotives out of private collections could keep this low level thing going to start off with (though the NRM at York is goosed); I dunno, is this practical, Jan? I might well be missing something.

If this is the case, some sort of austerity design, similar to the lorry chassis, will probably become the norm - making a locomotive is quite an ask though, so again, it's a long way in the future.

Originally Posted by Dunois

Air travel, especially intercontinental air travel will be a thing of the past for a LONG time. While there will be an incentive for the motor and even the electronics industry to restart sooner or later, there won’t be any for the aerospace industry. Repair and maintenance will be the order of the day and that’s pretty much it. If the military needs new aircrafts in the future, these will likely come from Embraer in Brazil (if they have survived). If and when British Aerospace ever manufactures anything again, they will have to restart small and this means trainers and small transport aircrafts, piston powered of course. As Toulouse is gone, so is the French aerospace industry, so they too will be restarting from an abysmally low base. A new and fully combined Franco-British industry will be the only hope for both countries if they ever want to regain some strength in this field.

I don’t see any new airliners being made until the 1990s if not 2000s in the entire world. The first newly made one might be piston or turboprop powered, both for ease of manufacture and for fuel economy reasons. The worldwide fleets of jet airlines have been significantly lowered regardless and the lack of spare parts will then cripple the rest. In effect, the entire aerospace industry has been thrown back to the 1930s in the space of a single day and in the entire world. The first newly made airliners in Brazil, or with some luck Spain-Italy and France-Britain or maybe India during the 1990s will likely resemble the DC-7 Lockheed Constellations and Boeing 377 Stratocruisers of our 1950s. Jetliners like the sixties vintage Boeing 707, BAC 1-11 or Caravelle, might be made during the 2000s if not then almost definitely during the 2010s. New widebodies like the Airbuses, or Boeing 747 won’t see the light of the day until the 2020s or possibly even the 2030s. In a way, the aerospace industry will be almost FIFTY YEARS BEHIND compared to today’s courtesy of the war.

Commercial air travel when it restarts will be based on small hops between for example Portsmouth, Newcastle, whatever the new French capital will be (Rheims?) and whatever main cities are left on the European continent by then. Of course, we are talking about the 2000s decade here. There is no incentive for transatlantic air travel anymore, New York is a pile of ashes and so are all the main US cities. Airport and airplane design will be massively impacted as a result. To go back to what I said earlier, a new DC-3 and later on a new BAC 1-11 look way more likely than a new transatlantic airliners. If the circumstances are right, the industry will boom during the late 2010s and during the 2020s. But large scale low cost air travel to spend a weekend away in Barcelona won’t happen for a while even then.

The domestic aeronautic industry is gone for a long long time. As I said, the best we can hope for for a while is just being able to keep our existing aircraft airworthy; this is a finite thing, eventually there won't be any spares left to cannibalise and that's that. The hope would be that this is far enough in the future that we've got our own industry going on. Whilst making fast jets is out of the question, making rudimentary prop trainers/light attack/recce birds and transports isn't too much of a stretch given time. This is all that is going to be needed for a long, long time - after all, it's not like there's anyone else with fast jets who we're going to have to dogfight. I agree that it's all going to look a bit fifties-era, especially given the lack of any fancy electronics.

Originally Posted by Dunois

Right its almost 2.00am more stuff on Energy and in other subjects will follow tomorrow !

Thanks for posting - there was a lot of helpful fascinating stuff in there and it gave me a chance to exercise my mind a little. I hope I've managed to get across some of my views on what the world might look like. I'm very much looking forward to your next subjects!

[iainbhx]

Actually, both West-East and Birmingham can be bypassed by rail and it will be a lot easier in 1983 than now.

Birmingham

1) Stourbridge-Walsall is still open and viable, it's even used as far as Dudley which was mentioned as being the largest town unnuked (how could they tell?).

2) Stourbridge-Wolverhampton via Wombourne could probably be reopened in three months, all the bridges were still there in 1983 and the south end used for freight to open-cast coal and a brickworks, the north end was used as an old coaching stock dumping only Himley-Wombourne-West Wolves has no track.

3) The Sutton Park Line can skirt people around the north of Birmingham, at that point open and in regular use.

East-West

Oxford-Cambridge would be reopenable with three months work.

As for POL, you have got some oil fields in Dorset and a couple of refineries in the area. It won't be a lot, but it could certainly supply Portsmouth and some miltary use as the Nimbys wouldn't be able to stop a ramp in production. Sadly the other major onshore oilfield is in Lincolnshire and likely to be a bit warm. However, how much would it take to get a couple of north sea platforms going again.

There's energy out there, it's just a case of repairing the grid, etc. There's probably 10 hard years, but by that time, I think the 1920's would be a reasonable standard of living and technology.

[Cockroach]

Originally Posted by Macragge1

The domestic aeronautic industry is gone for a long long time..

I wouldn't be quite so certain of this. Yes, the big manufacturing and assembly sites of the major aviation firms will likely have been damaged or destroyed during the exchange, but at the same time fabrication of various parts and sub-assemblies is rather more decentralized and there's also smaller aerospace firms that aren't large enough to justify a nuke (Britten-Norman for example)... so, you've still got the necessary knowledge on both the design and construction fronts.

Still, I would agree that in the medium term designing a building a new supersonic fighter will not be high on anyone's list of priorities...

[Macragge1]

Originally Posted by Cockroach

I wouldn't be quite so certain of this. Yes, the big manufacturing and assembly sites of the major aviation firms will likely have been damaged or destroyed during the exchange, but at the same time fabrication of various parts and sub-assemblies is rather more decentralized and there's also smaller aerospace firms that aren't large enough to justify a nuke (Britten-Norman for example)... so, you've still got the necessary knowledge on both the design and construction fronts.

Still, I would agree that in the medium term designing a building a new supersonic fighter will not be high on anyone's list of priorities...

Fair enough; I sort if contradict myself a little later on when talking about getting trainers and transports up (a stripped down version of the BN Islander would be ideal as the latter); I guess I just conflate the term 'aeronautics industry' with super high-tec jet fighters and what not. Thanks for the spot.

[CaliBoy1990]

Originally Posted by Orville_third

Did I mention that one of the largest collections of Christian religious art in the world could be Bob Jones University's in this TL?

Maybe........too bad BJU ended up surviving, though. Perhaps somebody can write a segment about something bad happening to BJU? Preferably leading to it's complete destruction?

[Macragge1]

Originally Posted by CaliBoy1990

Maybe........too bad BJU ended up surviving, though. Perhaps somebody can write a segment about something bad happening to BJU? Preferably leading to it's complete destruction?

Had to look that up. What the fuck is with this place.

You can't bring 'Rock, rap, jazz and country music, as well as religious music that borrows from these styles' (Jazz? Is this 1928? Country?! THE FUCK!) but you can bring a pistol.

You can't go to movie theatres or wear A&F because of an 'unusual degree of wickedness' that these terrible clothes apparently espouse.

Fhat the Wuck.


I've got no problem at all with folks having their religious beliefs. This place, though, it's like a parody played dead straight. They must be one big thunderstorm away from drinking the Kool-Aid over there.

[Dunois]

To start off on the technology/economy thing, has anyone read any books of the 1632 series? In a nutshell here an ASB event send a small West Virginian town back in 1631 in the middle of the thirty years war. How to restart production and what technologies to adopt is a key theme of the books and there is a very active community working on the subject and making suggestions. While by themselves the 3000 inhabitants of the town can’t recreate the modern world, they can nevertheless spur the industrial revolution a century early merely by building steam engines and downteching their current technology.

I think that a lot of their work is relevant for this TL, especially as most decisions in the books are made through central planning. The first two books 1632 and 1633 can be read online for free right here:
http://www.baen.com/library/0671319728/0671319728.htm
http://www.webscription.net/10.1125/Baen/0743435427/0743435427.htm?blurb

Originally Posted by Sam R.

Coal isn't the problem. Can you point out where the United Kingdom's strategic rubber and gasket quality leather reserves were held? Non ferrous metals? What is already fabricated is not readily repurposed without machine tools that are in limited supply and not concentrated. You're not conducting an adequate process analysis.

You would be surprised at the amount of machine tools available in smaller towns and villages. Even a basic garage has its fair share of machine tools which can be used for a variety of purposes. They sure won’t last forever but it beats 18th century level forges and smithies. The number of mechanically knowledge individuals able and willing to operate such tools won’t be low either; garages and small workshops exist in abundance in the country and in small towns. I will just use Bath as an example but in 1984 there is a large “industrial” infrastructure which could bd relied upon. The Stothert & Pitt engineering works are still there and completely intact save for cleaning up before restarting production of some kind. The city also has garages by the dozens, the engineering workshops belonging to the University and a few other small and medium enterprises which do technically based work. That’s just for Bath alone; now add all the other places which survived into the list and you will see that machinery like lathes and the manpower to man them are there in numbers.

Nonferrous metals will be a problem indeed, but copper is relatively easy to recycle and so is zinc. Aluminium will be harder of course, but the large smelters are likely intact (Anglesey was not a target).

This is rather hopeful due to constrained processes. Japan had a massive domestic craftshop economy survive. People were producing high grade industrial acids at home on tatami mats.







Both Japan and Germany offered wage labour within a context of massive unemployment and external direct military rule. Neither country's agricultural economy failed (though the distribution of food stuffs did in both). In addition both Japan and Western Germany were deliberately developed by direct overseas investment, in Japan's particular case, its industry economy was developed by the Korean war. Such outside factors don't apply to the United Kingdom which is having to fund its own occupation, and can't offer wage labour in any meaningful sense.

Don’t forget that the economy did not restart immediately in both countries and that starvation was the order of the day for a while. Agriculture was arguably quite crippled in both countries too, not as much as TTL Britain but it was. Foreign investments played a part in Japan’s and Germany case but not as much as we might think. Neither countries got any help from the victors don’t forget that. Japan’s economy has never really been open too and investments by foreign firms are rare even today. Industrials giants like Sony, Nintendo and Toyota were only born through the hard work and toil of Japanese alone. Access to foreign markets certainly drove the recovery forward, but a slower and grimier recovery could have happened too using the Japanese internal market alone.

I think you're going to find dependent paths seriously constrain this outcome by 2006. One of the dependent paths you've not examined is class structure. Germany and Japan were ruled in the 1950s by preened sections of former fascistic elites. In Germany social discontent was regulated by access to a large Social Democratic party. In Japan communism cemented itself into industrial workplaces.

These democratic and pluralistic solutions aren't open to the remains of the government of the United Kingdom. Even the economic escape valve which made the second five year plan more tolerable to Soviet citizens of migrating out of a corvee labour situation (the collectives) and into a wage labour situation (industrial locations) which high labour mobility doesn't exist.

The economic safety valve does not exist yet. Massive dissent on the part of the people strikes me as unlikely, true we have seen incidents in Felton and in Morpeth but this won’t last forever and in any case repression will be ruthless.

Democracy will be back one day I would say come the mid to late 1990s but it will be different. The imperative of reconstruction will also dampen dissent somewhat.

I see this economic problem far more as a labour discipline issue than as a skill and information issue.

No work = No food that alone will be a good incentive during the first few years.

I'm finding it extremely difficult to conceive of such a constrained economy, governed by a highly military autarky, producing these vehicles. Given the high constraints on steam motive production through lubricants, gaskets and non-ferrous metals, the constraints on combustion engines are massive. Further, by the time construction of fresh vehicles becomes a viable economic decision the extensive steam tram and railways already have a transport dominance.

Such transport methods are controllable and policeable.

The extensive steam train and tram networks of the late 19th century also completely dominated the industry. This did not last however it won’t last forever TTL either, since Lorries and buses are more flexible than trains and trams.

From what sheep? From what cotton? From what hemp? From what flax? I agree that domestic industry can develop; but, the historical domestic industries developed where Britons had access to overseas raw material and a tax credit in the form of smuggling. The largest path dependency here is the lack of fibrous raw materials.

Given the early heavy bias towards food stuffs production; under diverse local central planning with national planning under military officers unused to production flow problems; fibrous production is unlikely to have been prioritised early enough.

The former Government of the United Kingdom was remiss in preserving flocks, basically relying on hope, and sheep production is unlikely to have been a priority: wool clips aren't adequate. Breeding stocks aren't adequate. This is an area where dumping accountants in a field and shooting the failures is not going to successfully transfer agricultural skills. Shepherds and shearers, due to their geographic mobility, are also likely to be subject to inquisitive policing. If Australian shearers are any indication of job specific indicators for union militancy, wool is likely to be a heavily policed industry.

I said myself that access to raw materials would be a problem but that this would change after five years or so once the agricultural situation is stabilised. Restarting the sheep shearing industry will take time, but there will be a demand for its products and the skill base is there as well to a degree. If we are to see “new clearances” these will be as brutal as the previous ones, but they will work and yield results.
As far as manpower requirements are concerned, sheep shearing is not as labour intensive as other industries. Heavy policing won’t be needed a few years down the line either.
Long term, depopulated Germany will be perfect for extensive animal farming too.

Generally though, you're acting as if liberal democratic capitalism is a base state of economic life; rather than dealing with the political economy of a military autarky that is occupying its own nation at worst, and at best, is somewhere between an inefficient central planner and an inefficient illegal requisitioner.

Except that this is not the Soviet Union so the military is and remains subordinate to civilian power. Military officers, civilians controllers and the like will be a mixed bag. There will be bastards like Morpeths’ mayor who behave like Leeches and parasites. But exemplary leaders will also emerge in other parts of the country and these guys will make all the difference in the end. The survival situation the country is in will favour the most able and the most knowledgeable over others and over parasites.

Central planning is bound to be inefficient but it will yield long term rewards if the right decisions are made. As I have said previously, bad decisions could put spanners in the works and bad decisions will happen almost inevitably.

Government will have a romance with money; but they'll entirely fuck it up. Particularly when the means and tools of production are in government hands, and the best kind of boss is Schindler ("little hands"). If the privatisations in the historical United Kingdom and Soviet Union are any indicator, they'll sell it to themselves. This will reduce productivity further. And in both cases the United Kingdom and Soviet Union had cash or semi-cash consumer economies.

Except that we are now in a situation where efficiency and productivity will be paramount and triumph over other considerations. There is plenty of evidence proving that industry during WW2 Britain was many times more efficient than pre-war or post war where bad work practices were readopted. Productivity won’t be as low as it once was pre-war here, but it won’t be abysmally low either, Britain is not a communist country were political imperatives trample common sense!

Originally Posted by Maccrage1

Yeah - it's the Germany 1946 thing again. The big difference of course is, as you say, one can't just hop on a plane and catch a movie in London or see the lights on Broadway. Most of the hemisphere is as bad as anywhere else, and it's a sick irony that the biggest aid-giving nations are without fail the hardest hit. This is going to have a psychological effect, and probably a tangible one; combined with the much heavier destruction/lack of an occupying (but feeding) army, I can see this state of affairs lasting almost twice as long as it did in Germany and Japan.

Most aid receiving nations will fail as badly as the western ones to be honest. Africa will be alight with tribal warfare as soon as food shipments stop. I would expect entire nations to fall apart, though countries able to feed themselves might survive and thrive to a degree.
This state of affair will last a while indeed, twice as long is a good estimate!

Whilst obviously there are going to be pockets that are going to be unhealthy for a very long time (especially where nuclear power stations have been hit), fallout is soon going to become a background problem. In terms of hard measurements, I reckon that, after a year, most places are going to be receiving doses of less than 100 mSv; to put this into context, this is the sort of level that nuclear power workers receive ITTL. It is just at the point where there is a higher cancer risk, but it is no longer a whispering death. Note that it is less than 10% of the mSv levels of the recent Fukushima disaster.

If your target map is anything to go by, nuclear power plants and Sellafield have not been hit. Even if nuclear plans had been hit, a direct hit would be required in order to crack open reactor cores. The destruction of safety systems will have a massive impact however. On the positive side of things, both Magnox and AGR power stations won’t generate a steam explosion if they meltdown so the radioactivity will be pretty contained.

I think a big problem will come when desperate survivors a)use a huge amount of fuel oil and b) overfish massively in the first few desperate months. It will be very difficult to lock down every small private craft sitting in a harbour with a bit of petrol in it; even if possible, it's likely that the authorities could succumb to myopia - we're starving now, we'll worry about the fishing levels later sort of thing.

This is the big problem of course; the situation is so desperate that people need to get farming straight away; in order for this to happen, they need to get educated, but there's no time for this to happen because stuff is so desperate. Basically, everything's going to have to be learned by doing; such trial and error is, naturally, going to lead to a lot of wasteage, especially in areas where one can't get an expert to basically hold the volunteers' hands for the first few months.

Overfishing borne by desperation will definitely happen, but since it won’t last long the fish stocks will recover if given some time. Still environmental and resource sustainability concerns won’t be on the agenda for a good while indeed. The more I think of it the more I see whale catching making a comeback.

One can learn a lot through trial and error, but as communication and organisation improves; experts should be able to spread their knowledge a bit more.

Now on to further thoughts …

Energy:

Considering that most power stations are outside of the main centre of population, I would expect a lot of them to survive, Didcot and Drax springs to my mind along with a lot of other large coal powered stations. Most electricity was still produced from coal in 1984 Britain so we don’t have to worry about supplying liquefied gas at all. I would expect most nuclear power stations to survive as well, Hinkley Point will still be there, so will Torness, so will Hatlepool, Wylfa is still there and so is Trawsfynydd, Dungeness looks iffy but possible. Stocks of uranium are available and on hand at each nuclear power station, these should last for a good while, possibly even years. The stations workforce should have survived largely because of their isolated geographical location. With a bit of organisation I would say that restarting nuclear power production on a skeleton scale should be possible after six months, maybe nine at most. A few years down the line uranium stocks will be a problem however, so the stations may have to be shut down until uranium can be obtained once again from overseas.

The British electrical grid currently look like this:


Like the railway network the high voltage grid will be cut in points, but it is interesting to see that London, Bristol, the West Midlands and a few other targets areas are bypassed by the high voltage lines. The loss of London in particular won’t be much of an issue at all. I imagine that six or nine months down the line, reconnecting the electrical grid will become another priority. Work will be slow, equipment scarce but it seems to me that if most of the physical infrastructure is not damaged. Reconnecting the grid might turn out to be easier than it would seem at first glance.

In 1984 Britain has enough active coal mines to meet the needs of the entire nation for decades and reserves sufficient to last centuries (still the case by the way). Productivity and safety standards won’t be as high as they once were, but it does not matter since there will be plenty of manpower available to go down the mines. It will take a good while for coal production to really restart and reach the millions of tons yet again, but once a skeletal railway network is in place along with a better food distribution infrastructure this is definitely doable. Down the line reopening some mines or digging down new shafts might become a necessity, but this won’t be too hard a task even with late 19th century pumps and steam engines.

The coal based chemical industry will come back with a vengeance as I mentioned earlier. The knowledge base is still there for this to happen and coal is a good substitute for oil in most case, though coal based chemistry is not as efficient as oil based chemistry. Once a sufficient machine building industry has restarted, say five to ten years down the line, building coal to oil conversion plants is an option. The technology is crude, not very efficient without catalysts, but it served the Germans well enough during world war two.

Petroleum is now a massive issue all by itself and a crucial one at that. Britain has never been good at stockpiling it unlike other countries like Japan and Finland, so as we already know it will be restricted to the most essential tasks only. The picture is however not as bad as it might seem at first for several reasons.

First of all it is quite possible that this has survived intact, or very much so:


The forties oilfield was producing a lot of oil already in 1984, it is doubtful that platforms have been targeted during the strike phase, though conventional strikes may very well have happened. Restarting production on a small scale may be relatively easy if workers are still on the platforms, especially as these can work autonomously for rather long periods of time.

Now if the pipeline systems and the terminals are down, restarting production will be much much harder and will be impossible for at least one if not two years and that’s if the resources are redirected towards this.

The remaining refining capacity available in Britain will likely be huge in light of the needs, if Grangemouth can be made operational again in months or a year. Then it would be able to directly refine whatever comes from the North Sea and supply would not ever be a problem again. Others refineries like Pembroke, Aberavon, Lindsey, Humber and Kent should be available with very little damage.

If North Sea oil is not available and only isolated refineries like Pembroke are operational, then the situation will be more problematic. Oil imports from abroad are not an option; the best to hope for would be some limited hand-outs from Australia and places like Brazil.

Regardless of the supply situation it is very important to remember that demand won’t be huge either. Commercial aviation has ended, this reduces consumption by millions of tons, the end of private car transportation will slash consumption by a massive extent. I would even go as far as saying that the stockpiles lying around in fuel depots, service stations and ready to be siphoned from cars will be enough for months.

Regarding petroleum usage in agriculture, I have just found some hard data and I must say that I am absolutely baffled, just look by yourself:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_gas_oil_con_in_agr-gas-diesel-oils-consumption-agriculture#source
That’s right Britain only used 200 000 tons of diesel fuel in its agriculture …
Just to be on the safe side and factoring in gasoline I would multiply that by five which gives us one million ton of POL for agricultural purposes only.
Frankly this is peanuts I would say compared to the refining capacity and reserves left. If tractors and such are only used for the most back breaking tasks, perhaps as little as 100 000 tons will be needed each year which is really really low …
This interesting document also tells us a few things about how energy intensive various crops are:
http://www.google.fr/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCMQFjAA&url=http%3A %2F%2Fwww.emcbe.com%2FEnvironmental%2Fdirect%2520e nergy%2520use%2520in%2520agriculture.pdf&ei=5Nf8Tf v_CNCp8QOPtY2qCQ&usg=AFQjCNH-dgujuqeGoY5ItqukE9Rs8r3_Cg

Reconstruction Planning

I would say that once the country reaches this stage, some very important questions will have to be answered regarding its future shape and what to rebuild. I will be blunt in asking this but is rebuilding London worthwhile?

London has been hit hard and without maintenance and the added effects of destructions it will likely revert back to a swampland fast. Rebuilding London before the country is firmly at the rebuilding stage would be a fool errand and if the city is rebuilt it will be work of decades if not centuries. The same applies to Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and perhaps other places like Bristol as well.

Portsmouth and other spared cities will become the new metropolises of Britain forever from now on. Long term there is enough land to massively expand Portsmouth into a new capital which could be a home to millions comes the 21st century. In a similar fashion, Oxford could easily balloon to a city hundreds of thousands large, so could Taunton, Bath, Swindon and the like as replacements for Exeter, Bristol and Plymouth. Preston will become the new capital of the North West region; Doncaster might replace York, Leeds and Sheffield as Yorkshire premier town. In Wales Swansea will be king for a good while, Cardiff might eventually be rebuilt if the hit as no been too hard. Aberdeen is now the largest city in Scotland and will remain so for a good while. In Northern Ireland Portadown, Craigavon and the like will become new centres replacing the lost Derry and Belfast.

[Gunnarnz]

Originally Posted by Dunois

Don’t forget that the economy did not restart immediately in both countries and that starvation was the order of the day for a while. Agriculture was arguably quite crippled in both countries too, not as much as TTL Britain but it was. Foreign investments played a part in Japan’s and Germany case but not as much as we might think. Neither countries got any help from the victors don’t forget that. Japan’s economy has never really been open too and investments by foreign firms are rare even today. Industrials giants like Sony, Nintendo and Toyota were only born through the hard work and toil of Japanese alone. Access to foreign markets certainly drove the recovery forward, but a slower and grimier recovery could have happened too using the Japanese internal market alone.

Sorry, but I can't let this pass. After WW2, both Europe and Japan received considerable quantities of assistance from the US. In Europe the Marshall Plan had a major effect on the post-war recovery of industries, while Japan was helped by the US presence during the Korean war. To claim that neither country got any help from the victors really does seem inaccurate, and although I don't know for sure I'd be sceptical about claims that the Japanese internal market alone could have made the Japanese companies you mention into the giants they are.

I'd like to see a bit more support for those claims before I accept them. Could someone who knows more please comment on this?

[Dunois]

Originally Posted by Gunnarnz

Sorry, but I can't let this pass. After WW2, both Europe and Japan received considerable quantities of assistance from the US. In Europe the Marshall Plan had a major effect on the post-war recovery of industries, while Japan was helped by the US presence during the Korean war. To claim that neither country got any help from the victors really does seem inaccurate, and although I don't know for sure I'd be sceptical about claims that the Japanese internal market alone could have made the Japanese companies you mention into the giants they are.

I'd like to see a bit more support for those claims before I accept them. Could someone who knows more please comment on this?

Europe did got help as part of the Marshall Plan but Germany did not get a penny, quite the opposite in fact as they had to pay some reparations both in cash and through others means like patent transfers. The amount of money that each country got as part of the Marshall Plan was not a reliable indicator of future economic performance. Britain got the most money but its economy lagged behind the German one from the fifties onwards.

Japan had to pay some reparations too. I am not overlooking the positive impact of the Korean War, but to say that it was the only driver behind the Japanese economic miracle is wrong. Many other drivers were at work, new work practices emphasising quality control where a big one, cosy relationships between banks, the government and the companies involved another one. A "can do" attitude towards innovation was another huge one too.

The Japanese internal market was a hundred million big at that time, that's a hundred million potential consummers for radios, cars and so on. In fact Japan's own internal market played a part in helping the country achieve its massive growth. How many US or European made goods ever made it to the Japanese market and achieved a significant market share? NONE, the cars on Japan's road have always been Nissans, Toyotas and so on, never Fords, Volkswagen or Renaults. The electronics market is pretty much the same, completely dominated by home manufacturers and withn a tiny overseas presence. Japan's industry was primarly export orientated that's true, but even if you achieve a 33% market share in a market of 300 millions consumers, that's only 100 millions consummers that your industry has captured. Just as many as their own 95% market share of the home Japanese market.

Japan achieved 9% and even 10% growth rates during the fifties and sixties. With limited exports and their own internal market, I think we are looking at four or five percent growth rates. That's hardly poor to be honest, OTL 2011 developped countries would love to get that level of growth again. Even if growth had been reduced to a mere 3% a year, that's still a doubling of output every 23 years, so hardly bad.

Good book on Japan's rise here:
http://www.amazon.com/Nippon-Superpo.../dp/0563208759

A bit old but gives a good idea of the bigger picture.

[Gunnarnz]

Originally Posted by Dunois

Europe did got help as part of the Marshall Plan but Germany did not get a penny, quite the opposite in fact as they had to pay some reparations both in cash and through others means like patent transfers.

I just can't agree with this. Wikipedia (I know, I know...) seems to indicate that Germany received nearly $1.5 billion (in 1948-50 dollars), so saying that they didn't receive anything is quite a jump. Where did you hear this?