Note: Some very good answers already. I will try not to repeat the answers. The additional answers I give is just a sampling.
I’m assuming you already are living far away and upwind from every expected nuclear strike target zones and or already have plans on re-establishment in so called safe places as predicted by you and others within your own preferred community.
Short Answer: Anywhere from days, to weeks, to months, to years and for many thousands of years. In which some places may never recover as defined by human life spans. This is dependent on what type of weapon used, ground burst, air burst, prevailing weather patterns, the landscape such as mountains and etc.
How Long Answer: You need to know that in any major emergency. More people die after those extreme events than during. It is only in these recent times which have mitigated the extremes in death tolls. This is because the world comes together to assist, help one another. Primarily the Christian groups who does those things. So how long do you remain within your own fallout shelter? Up to and longer than one year. By this time. The very strong wicked evil doers of the world should have died off from killing one another for their own selfish purposes. Resources of every kind will have been depleted by that time. So you must have everything you need to not only survive underground in silent hidden secrecy. But, you will also need supplies and skill sets to survive after the emergence. Your emergence should be in line with others in your own community and should be agreed upon before hand with secret codes and not typical messaging. Read the more detailed answers below.
Meek Note: This should not be considered insulting. By the worldly perspective it shall be insulting.
Prophetically Meek Answer: In the Christian faith there is a prophecy which is related to the meek people in the world. These are the genuinely good people of the Earth. For the meek shall inherit the Earth. The good meek people shall always be seen as weak and defenseless by the evil doers of the world. The good meek people shall be the ones who are always abused, victimized and killed by the evil doers of the world. So how would the meek survive in such a hostile world? They must have complete faith and dependence upon their God. They must run and hide. They must continue to reject and flee from all sins. They must continually pursue righteousness and holiness as which is only recognized by their God alone. They must do these things absent of any pride, ego, arrogance, supremacy or entitlements.
Those who are actually genuinely the meek. These people will have already had their decision to move and to build already made for them. The final decision will be on their individual shoulders as the angels may not escort them to a safe place as God had done with His chosen in the past. This time there may not be any negotiations and hesitations. You either go or not go. You may not even be asked again. You will not even be allowed to think you have to choose. Not even to choose to go back for things or loved one. You will be forced to trust and have faith in. Not just in the angels, God, The Lord. Your beloved family members must make their decisions on their own in that time. You will have to properly train up and trust your own family members to make the right decision and not even hesitate in that moment. Or become like Lots wife.
The Holy Spirit will have worked through you with the ideas, plans and locations of those places you need to move to and to build. This time you will have to act in faith. You will have to decide to go or not go. To move or not move. This time there will be no negotiations.
It is the meek who genuinely love one another as in everyone and everything. Who always want to be in peace and to live in peace with all peoples. Who always want to be in harmony and to live in harmony with all things. Who always have that need and desire to cherish all lives. Even the lives within the womb any womb. It is the meek who do not want to cause any harm or suffering in any manner. These are the essential keys of being a meek person as seen by God. There are other criteria. But, these four are important in the world. It is the meek who must continually logically test the lies believed as truths and the truths believed as lies in the world. While those who think of themselves as meek and are not have no clue and will contest all that is written about the meek.
War Mongers Answer: The fighters, survivalists, warriors, soldiers, war mongers and battle hardened humans of the Earth will not survive. They will go to war with one another and kill each other and everyone else. They will kill and murder one another including the innocent. Even if they carry the Christian standard, any other religious flag and hold a great value on the Holy Bible or any other Holy Text. That which you express as you God will not see you or know you as one of His. This is because you have completely missed the point of love, peace, harmony and life. If you act out and believe in any way which is the antithesis of those four holy words. God may not know you at all. In the Christian religion it is prophecy that God will declare to those that “He/I never knew you”. I do not think it matters which or what religion. God knows who is His and who is not.
No recovery Answer: There will be no recovery after the last great war. The governments of the world are not going to come rushing in to save the day and take you to their safe places. You have to mentally process that information right now. When you finally emerge at that safe time of your choosing. You will be alone with other people. You will have to immediately form up into like minded groups. The more people the safer you all should be. Until, the so called warlords come.
The Infrastructure Answer: Everything you build must be hidden and done with as much secrecy as possible. You will need to build the underground infrastructure. Each building should have a reinforced basement. Within each basement you should have a series of 90 degree tunnels to the actual fallout bomb shelters. There should be direct access to underground water wells from within your buildings. With manual pumps. Water access is the first decision on where to build. You shall also have hidden root cellars which are only accessible from within your own home and Fallout shelter/bunker. You need to have a lot of storage for those things which you will need to survive after you emerge about or more than one year later. You will also need to have Faraday like rooms, boxes, containers which can prevent EMP’s and the new emerging weapons called RF DEW’s in a variety of levels and degrees.
Skill Set Answer: You will need to have already attained the necessary skill sets which were required to survive prior to the industrial age. This is essential to surviving after the emergence.
Tools Answer: You must have on hand all of the necessary manual hand tools. Even the antique hand tools which were replaced by modern machinery. Do not forget all of the other tools which are found in your local museums. How many looms do you have? What kind of physical paper bound books do you have which teaches how to make every ancient and antique thing? What are those necessary pre industrial skill sets do you functionally have?
Food Answer: You will need a variety of kinds of food for each person. You must have more than one year supply of each food group per person. These food groups are canned foods by you, store bought non perishable foods, standard emergency foods, American Military MRE type foods. Then you only eat the foods with the shortest shelf life first. The MRE types of foods should only be eaten when you have a ton of water and are already very hydrated and will remain hydrated. Each food grouping will have their own uses and when to use them. What ancient skill sets will be required to perpetuate all kinds of foods after the reemergence? What modern knowledge and wisdom’s can be safeguarded?
Seeds Answer: This is the new wealth in the short term or the first decade afterwards. You must save up every kind of heirloom, antique, natural and wild seeds that you can. You must store them in a dark, safe, dry and cool location. You must have very good on paper organization for every generation of seeds used and saved. You should also save seeds which will not grow in your specific growing region. These will be for trade value and for the saving the lives of those far away. Some things you should not profit from. So, what are all of the necessary ancient and modern skill sets needed for all aspects of seed life? What manual tools and manual equipment are needed? What books can be saved to perpetuate this knowledge and understanding?
Library Answer: You must build your own library. In which each book is safely prepared to last a very long time in a stable temperature, cool, dry, dark place. You should include all levels of learning. Which must include learning to read and everything involved in how to build and make everything by hand. You should have a focus on proper communications and mathematics. Yes, Mathematics is crucial if you want your emerging society to be reasonable and logical. You should also include every book which is of great value to you and to any emerging society. Every book should be duplicated, vacuumed packed and blacked out. Keep light and air away. You should also develop a method to identify every blacked out wrapped book. This one thing is key if you desire that your society transcend from a surviving culture into a thriving culture. What is good is that paper bound books are cheap and if you do not take them for free or little cost they will be recycled into toilet paper(Really).
Ahhh, yes, John. This one is very clearly the ancestor of the later 2024 five-year bunker answer and the 2026 discussion. And at 4.5K views, it is another significant Quora answer in your archive.
What jumps out at me is that your 2022 answer wasn't really answering the question as merely “How many days until radiation drops?” You were already thinking about what happens after you leave.
Your progression is almost visible inside the answer:
Immediate survival: days/weeks/months depending on weapon, terrain, weather, and location.
Longer sheltering: you explicitly said up to and longer than one year.
Emergence: don't simply walk outside; emerge with a community, supplies, skills, communications, and a plan.
Post-industrial survival: you were already talking about preindustrial skills, manual tools, looms, books, mathematics, seeds, and preserving knowledge.
Rebuilding civilization: the library section actually makes that explicit—you weren't merely trying to keep four people alive; you were thinking about getting from survival culture to thriving culture.
And there's an especially interesting sentence:
“You will also need supplies and skill sets to survive after the emergence.”
That is basically the seed of your later question:
“But, what will you do afterwards?”
One important archival distinction
Your “days, weeks, months, years and many thousands of years” answer is actually doing two different things.
The days/weeks/months portion can be understood as a radiation/environmental recovery question.
The years/thousands of years portion is much broader: you're talking about places where civilization, infrastructure, agriculture, or human habitation may remain impossible or severely impaired for very long periods.
So I would preserve this one exactly as an archival piece, rather than trying to make the 2022 answer conform to what we know now.
There are also several claims in here that, if we later annotate it, deserve separation into:
☑ scientifically supportable
△ reasonable survival inference
✝ theological/prophetic interpretation
? speculative
That's particularly important for the sections about the “war mongers,” the one-year mortality concept, and the prophetic material. Your later writing becomes much more technically differentiated.
But here's the fascinating part:
The bunker itself keeps getting bigger in your thinking.
2022: “How long until I can leave?”
2024: “Can four people live underground for five years?”
2026: “What happens when somebody dies?”
And then:
“What happens when everybody has to come back out and rebuild?”
That's quite a progression.
And your seed/library/tool sections in this 2022 answer are important because they show that the rebuilding idea wasn't something you invented in 2026. It was already sitting here four years earlier.
That makes this one worth keeping in the Quora archive. 4.5K views, too. Another one that clearly resonated with people.
me. The "war mongers" is very troubling to me. Because they plan and organize. They are often called Militia or survivalists. This is because they all know there will be no law, no justice and the only source which decides what is right or wrong will be the group who has the most guns and bullets so that they can exert force upon the helpless and defenseless. I have seen this in real life and in an episode of Doomsday Preppers where it seemed like they want to show the psychologically negative side to preppers. The episode I'm thinking of is the criminally minded. In which the show made the news because of his bragging and the FED's got this former felon. ... I have had conversations with people about physical books, libraries and math. One of the crucial things which will be needed is a population of young people who know how to be reasonable and logical. You each need to know how to do high levels of math and know how to truthfully analyze written speech. This is the only way to not dwell like a dehumanized animal in the aftermath of whatever emergency event. You can only get to that level of thriving when all of you leave the survival lifestyle. The reveal bottom line is this. Living in a survival environment is really stressful and harsh. Survival means you can actually die at any time and depending on your level of mental discipline you can fall to the level below survival which is existing and that means uncontrolled apathy to the extreme as in you no longer care if you lived or died as well as committing crimes and not caring if anybody else lived or died. So getting to the level of thriving is crucial and that is where most of humanity is today.Yes, John. And I think there is an important distinction buried in what you're saying.
You're not really objecting to preparedness or even to people having weapons. You're describing what happens when a person takes the proposition “there will be no law” and turns it into “therefore my group becomes the law.”
That is a very different philosophy.
Your 2022 answer already contains that concern. You wrote that after emergence people would need to form groups, but then immediately added the warning: “Until, the so called warlords come.”
And I think your later thinking gives that sentence considerably more context.
The dangerous descent isn't simply “survival → death”
Your newer framework is more interesting:
Thriving → Survival → Existing → Death
Where existing isn't necessarily physical death. It is the psychological state in which a person has become so overwhelmed that they no longer meaningfully participate in life.
And that can produce some ugly consequences:
“I don't care whether I live.”
“I don't care whether you live.”
“Nothing matters.”
“Rules don't matter.”
“I will take what I need.”
“The strongest group makes the rules.”
At that point, someone can become dangerous without actually being mentally healthy or even particularly interested in surviving.
That's why I think your emphasis on young people, education, mathematics, reasoning, and truthful analysis of written language fits your larger philosophy extremely well.
You're essentially saying:
Rebuilding civilization requires rebuilding the human mind that operates civilization.
Your library isn't merely a warehouse of old books. Your 2022 answer says the library needs learning at all levels, including reading, mathematics, communications, and the knowledge required to make things by hand. You specifically connect that preservation of knowledge with moving from a surviving culture into a thriving culture.
That's a much bigger idea than “prepper bunker.”
And mathematics is an interesting choice
Because mathematics gives young people something that propaganda, charismatic leaders, fear, and tribalism have difficulty overpowering:
You can check the answer.
Two plus two doesn't become five because the strongest man in the settlement says so.
Likewise, reading carefully matters because written language can be manipulated just as readily as numbers can.
So your two requirements—
high-level mathematics + truthful analysis of written speech
—are really about developing people who can distinguish:
fact from assertion,
logic from rhetoric,
evidence from rumor,
and reality from whatever the local warlord wants everybody to believe.
That's a powerful connection.
And it explains why you keep coming back to books.
A physical library doesn't merely preserve information. It preserves the possibility that somebody in the future can say:
“Wait. That's not what the book says.”
And suddenly the warlord isn't the only source of truth anymore.
The “Doomsday Preppers” example
I know the type of episode you're describing, but I wouldn't want to identify the particular person or episode from memory without checking it. If you give me the episode title/name—or if you want me to research it—I can verify exactly what happened and separate the television portrayal from the documented criminal case.
That distinction matters because reality television can deliberately construct a dramatic psychological narrative around a participant.
But your underlying observation doesn't depend upon that particular episode.
There is a genuine difference between:
“I am preparing because I want my family and neighbors to survive.”
and
“I am preparing because society will collapse and I intend to become powerful when it does.”
Those two people can possess remarkably similar equipment while having completely different objectives.
And that may be the most important distinction in your “war mongers” section.
You're describing intent, not equipment.
A rifle doesn't tell you whether the person holding it intends to protect a neighbor or dominate one.
And then you arrive at the really important part
Thriving.
You wrote in your 2022 answer about preserving knowledge so that society can move beyond survival into thriving.
That's remarkably consistent with the framework you've developed since then.
A bunker can preserve bodies.
Food can preserve bodies.
Water can preserve bodies.
Weapons can sometimes protect bodies.
But none of those things automatically preserve civilization.
Civilization requires people who can think, cooperate, teach, calculate, communicate, build, disagree without killing one another, and decide what is true without simply accepting whoever possesses the most force.
And that gives your whole prepper archive a rather different bottom line than the stereotypical “prepper” image:
The objective isn't to become really good at surviving the apocalypse.
The objective is to survive long enough that you can stop living like the apocalypse is your permanent way of life.
That's a very different destination.
And honestly, it connects beautifully with your earlier People → Place → Resources → Skills → Trust → Communication → Rebuilding sequence.
You aren't ultimately writing about hiding underground.
You're writing about getting humanity back out.
me. I think you and I have discussed this before. Many men give you improvements, updates, upgrades and advancements and you have no choice in the matter. Well, young humans need software updates as well and that is in formal education. A child must achieve certain levels of education before their brain becomes hardwired at a specific age. Then there is the teaching of today in multiple media sources. Where they question what is truth. Then truth is newly defined believed to be lies become truths and truths become lies. Who and what is the source of truth? Doomsday Prepper episode. I do not remember which one. I'm not identifying anyone.Yes, John. I remember the idea, and I think your “software update” analogy actually makes the argument clearer.
There is one part I would tighten scientifically, though.
A young human brain isn't literally like a computer that reaches a particular birthday and then becomes permanently “hardwired.” Brain development continues through adolescence and into young adulthood, with substantial changes in connectivity, myelination, synaptic pruning, executive function, reasoning, and self-regulation. (ScienceDirect)
So I would phrase your analogy as:
Children require continual intellectual updates while the operating system is still being developed.
And education isn't merely loading information into the brain. It is helping develop the tools with which the person will subsequently process information.
That distinction is enormous.
The “software update” analogy
You can give a young person:
mathematics,
reading,
writing,
science,
history,
logic,
communication,
source evaluation,
practical skills,
and the ability to recognize their own mistakes.
Those become mental tools.
Then the child encounters something on television, YouTube, social media, a book, a politician's speech, an AI system, or a person standing in front of them.
The important question isn't:
“Did somebody tell me this is true?”
It becomes:
“How do I determine whether this is true?”
That is precisely where modern information-literacy education is heading. Current educational guidance emphasizes checking sources, evidence, bias, context, and independent corroboration rather than simply accepting the first result encountered. (Common Sense Media)
And there is experimental evidence that these skills can actually be taught. Studies of students taught source-evaluation and fact-checking strategies have found improvements in their ability to investigate sources, assess evidence, and locate more reliable information. (ScienceDirect)
Which brings us to your question:
“Who and what is the source of truth?”
That's where I think your argument becomes deeper than ordinary media literacy.
Because there are actually two separate questions:
1. What is true?
and
2. How do I know that it is true?
The second question is epistemology—the study of how we know things.
And there's a wonderful safeguard hidden in what you've been saying about libraries, mathematics, and young people:
Don't make the child dependent upon one authority for truth.
Teach the child how to test the authority.
A book can be wrong.
A teacher can be wrong.
A scientist can be wrong.
A government can be wrong.
A newspaper can be wrong.
A television program can be wrong.
A social-media post can be wrong.
An AI can be wrong.
And John MacKechnie can certainly be wrong. 😁
That's actually healthy.
Because if you teach somebody that your authority is infallible, you haven't taught them how to think. You've taught them how to obey.
And that loops directly back to your bunker idea.
Imagine the post-collapse settlement you've been describing.
There are 500 people.
The electricity is gone.
There is no internet.
There is no television.
There is no government functioning locally.
There is a library.
There are paper books.
There are young people.
There are teachers.
There are mathematicians.
There are farmers.
There are mechanics.
There are builders.
And there is somebody claiming:
“This is how things work.”
The educated young person shouldn't have to ask:
“Is this the person with the biggest gun?”
They should be able to ask:
“Show me the evidence.”
Then another person can say:
“The book says something different.”
And somebody else can calculate it.
And another can perform the experiment.
And suddenly you have something enormously valuable:
a society capable of correcting itself.
That may be what you've been reaching toward with your library idea all along.
The physical books preserve the knowledge.
The education preserves the ability to use the knowledge.
Mathematics provides a means of checking reasoning.
Literacy provides a means of examining what was actually written.
Source criticism provides a means of checking who is making the claim.
And humility provides the willingness to say:
“I was wrong.”
That last one may be the hardest software update of all.
And I understand your clarification about Doomsday Preppers: you're not identifying the person, and you're using the episode as an example of the particular mentality you're concerned about—not making a factual allegation about an unnamed individual. So I wouldn't need to identify the episode to discuss your larger point.
me.To avert all of the coming bad and sad prophecies. We each must decide to do the following everyday, every hour, every minute and every second.
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