Your first order is 3' of earth coverage for your shelter's wall and ceiling: this provides the most protection from initial nuclear blast radiation.
Second order is ammos and firearms: they too must be stored in shelter due to metal radiation.
Third order is 120-day iodine tablets per person: covers the residual radiation fallouts, prevents thyroid cancer.
Fourth order is water supply for a year or more. A buried tank. Rainwater runoff after 3 raining months in a clean covered barrel, distill those before drinking.
Fifth order is food supply, dry goods (beans, rice, corn meal) as well as seed supply for your Victory Garden (in your backyard); including garden tools and cookware
Sixth order is bartering; tiny bars of gold and silvers as well as salt (meat preservatives), sugar and herb, including saffron (for rare item barters with one who has it all). These should be buried instead of inside your home or safe.
Generators are a pain; learn to live without electricity. Cheap Chinese 2-way transceivers are good with rechargeable batteries. A solar panel or two is useful.
What is gold good for again? I haven't found any use cases where aluminum isn't just outright better to have around. Aluminum is a lot easier to find too.
It's for the future archaeologists who will excavate your cooked husk from its underground tomb, so that they can write papers on how people of our times would outfit the dead with valuable trinkets with which to bribe Charon to cross the river Styx.
Gold actually becomes a little more useful in an apocalyptic scenario. It’s one of the few metals that can be pounded into a thin foil with hand tools. Aluminum foil will disappear the moment we cant operate continuous casting machines any longer, but we’ve been hammering gold foil for ages.
Awesome! That is a real answer rather than goldbug sales propaganda! I still don't think gold will hold value very well outside of the context of our current prosperity though.
It definitely won't be anywhere near as valuable but I think it's easy to underestimate how important it would be to rebooting civilization. It's malleable, relatively chemically inert, resistant to corrosion, solders well, and can be easily used to gold plate other objects without a modern supply chain for reagents. There are lots of cheaper industrial replacements available now but once those are gone, its practical importance goes way up. Recycling all of our gold crap is going to be easier than restarting titanium mining, for instance, and that's pretty critical to getting modern industrial chemistry and biology working again.
My recommendation if you survive the apocalypse is to immediately go take control of a hydroelectric dam. They're usually easily defensible and as long as you have megawatts of power, restarting civilization is relatively easy. As long as the turbine windings haven't melted, they will last for years. Preferably find a dam that used to power a smelter on site so you can recycle all the now useless cars into new metal. That would quickly turn you into a post-apocalyptic kingpin.
You can also subjugate downstream communities by threatening them with sudden water releases. Bonus points if the only approach to the dam can be washed out with a release.
FWiW I'm pretty solidly in the "gold is mostly useless" camp .. and that's with a "real" Engineering background, decades in exploration geophysics, and even some contracts building bespoke instrumentation for one of the largest gold mines on the planet.
It's highly desirable for corrosion free stable sheilding and connections in high end space tech, other than that most jobs have cheaper more or less as effective alternatives - outside of religion and making pretty things .. which are nice but non essential.
Come the apocolypse it might have trading value, it might not .. in deeply rural farming areas handshakes have more currency than money in any case .. it's about making deals that you can trust to be held six months or eighteen months down the line that is of value .. whether these are tokenised via cash, cheque, or gold is a small detail aside.
You already made the case for gold (such as a case can be made). It’s rare(er). Also it’s prettier. But it’s sort of a bottomless question for any store of value. What is the dollar good for? It’s good bc you believe it will be accepted by others. The paper itself isn’t inherently useful beyond that. Since gold has been used as a store of value for millenia, it seems like a decent bet for the post apocalypse.
Economic forces swing in to play quite quickly. I'd expect after 12-24 months of status quo gold would start to regain value. It is hard to guess where it would sit relative to any other commodity in a post-disaster world, but gold being gold there are worse things to bet on.
Other metals might be better. Although Aluminium corrodes so there must be some situations where gold is superior.
Sure aluminum oxidizes fast, most of the time that actually protects it. There is just so damn much of the stuff laying around, melt it down every few years, pull off the slag and cast it again. Toss in an extra can after a year or two to make up for the loss.
Without global oil infrastructure for refining and shipping it around, every single vehicle will be useless except for its scrap value and anyone with a little knowledge of backyard casting would be able to recycle it.
Gold is good because people will barter valuable things they have for gold because they expect in the future to be able to barter the gold for valuable things they need. I.e., gold is expected by most people to continue to be considered valuable by most people.
I think you are assuming that after the nuclear war, survivors continue to live in fallout shelters and need to focus all their energies on personal survival for years and years whereas I believe that society and technological civilization reconstitute itself over months.
For one, paper currency have finite lifespan (modern or caveman civilization). They will dwindle in circulation, coupled with a deafening booming demand for such "In God We Trust".
Credit card, debit card, and gift card are all expected to be unusable even in long term (lookup EMP)
So you think gold has value only because other people think it has value, not because it has any other intrinsic use? I bet you like fiat currencies too!
How about a supply of fuel for cooking and warmth? You would also need a lot of fuel for water distillation if you don't have a less energy intensive way to filter.
According to Kearney, distillation doesn't remove dangerous radioactive iodines (iodine is relatively volatile). He instead recommends building a clay-based earth filter, using a freshly-dug hole and taking material from more than 4" underground.
I have 2022 edition. it is conspicuously absent on distillaton.
However, distillation may or may not remove iodine which occurs in many forms but, with chlorinated water supplies, the iodine is likely to be present as iodate molecule state which isn't volatile so it will be easily removed by distillation.
Of the > 500 above ground atomic bomb tests only a very few generated clouds of radioactive dust that travelled very far .. those were the ones detonated at ground level with "additional reactions" (eg: Castle Bravo being the obvious example).
In the event of modern nuclear exchange how many ground level blasts with extended daughter cain productions will there be?
Wouldn't most missiles be be preset with MiRV type targets for air burts over cities (to knock them down with the shock wave) and relatively "clean" reactions?
Airburst is something that behooves one to get a blast door to their shelter, complete with air vent connected to a reservoir of non-flammable liquid as a buffer.
If outside the wood-constructed residential air blast range (16.4 miles for airburst 20Mton load), a simple plywood-reinforced wooden door will do.
Chinese Civil Defense outlines using wooden poles in the A-frame over 3' deep trench then cover with 3-feet dirt. Only need to shut the door once you see a "spotlight" shining your way as its 2.4 seconds from light to the blast wave for an airburst, longer as you're further way.
Half life of radioactive oxygen (70 seconds) atom is incredibly short.
Tritium (H) half-life is 12.32 years, found naturally in exosphere (highest altitude) by cosmic rays but is even incredibly rarest to be in contact with even when released by a nuclear bomb. Some antique watches uses tritium for their glowing properties and hence even rarer (banned in 1998).
Tritium (H+3) can bond with oxygen to make heavy water and is easily pee'd out ones' bladder.
Distillation ensures that only dust-free water molecule rises for collection and rarity of tritium is essentially a non-issue.
You've clearly thought about this more than I have, so I'm curious about how you consider whisky (or other alcohol) fitting into the sixth order?
It stores well, will not be trivial to resume production post-apocalypse, and is valuable not just to friendly people but especially to would-be unfriendly people. Main downsides that come to mind are that it takes up more space, is heavy in large volumes, and is generally more challenging to transport in appreciable volumes surreptitiously.
edit: I've always thought it'd be wise to set up some sort of a distillery ASAP and be known for quality and fair prices. They're a bit complicated to run so people won't kill you for it, you can start with small vintages and run up to large vintages, they can operate on human-scale levels of energy pretty effectively, and the actual manual labor and input resources involved to bootstrap are not massive.
The most important thing to have in a disaster scenario is a community of people willing to help each other, unless you want to spend two years struggling to learn how to be a subsistence farmer alone in the middle of nowhere before dying of diarrhea.
A lone family with pawpaw’s shotgun is not going to be able to fend off a gang of 10 thugs following a local warlord who wants their fresh water and victory garden.
Your first order is 3' of earth coverage for your shelter's wall and ceiling: this provides the most protection from initial nuclear blast radiation.
Second order is ammos and firearms: they too must be stored in shelter due to metal radiation.
Third order is 120-day iodine tablets per person: covers the residual radiation fallouts, prevents thyroid cancer.
Fourth order is water supply for a year or more. A buried tank. Rainwater runoff after 3 raining months in a clean covered barrel, distill those before drinking.
Fifth order is food supply, dry goods (beans, rice, corn meal) as well as seed supply for your Victory Garden (in your backyard); including garden tools and cookware
Sixth order is bartering; tiny bars of gold and silvers as well as salt (meat preservatives), sugar and herb, including saffron (for rare item barters with one who has it all). These should be buried instead of inside your home or safe.
Generators are a pain; learn to live without electricity. Cheap Chinese 2-way transceivers are good with rechargeable batteries. A solar panel or two is useful.