Recovery

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This is the page that I am currently trying hardest to interest people in. It has to do with individual recovery after a nuclear war and deals primarily with the subject of agriculture. For those who have prepared for nuclear survival this is the next level of thought.

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Purpose of These Pages

Purpose Of These 'Recovery' Pages

Our goal is to make available, to everyone, essential information for reconstruction, recovery and renewal - after a catastrophe such as nuclear war. On this website [and on the CD] there are hundreds of webpages and, if one were to print them all out, thousands of printed pages of information. It is not anticipated that anyone would read them all, or even be interested in them, until they needed the information. That is why we expect people to view this as a reference source and why we like them to have it on the CD of which we have distributed over a thousand free copies, some in every one of the 50 US states, and many others throughout the world.

While we do not know what form a catastrophe may take, still with the number of nuclear weapons that there are in the world, there is the very great possibility that it may be nuclear. We also realise that in the immensity and intensity of Divine Retribution the very equilibrium of the planet itself may be disturbed.

The purpose of the 'Recovery' pages is to gather in one place the technological information for dealing with radiation in agriculture after a nuclear holocaust. Nowhere else, available to the public, through the Internet or otherwise, has all this information been gathered together. Here will be found both simple explanations for the layman and the highly technical information needed by professionals. Much of the information is in original university theses publications, presented here with their authors' permission, but not printed elsewhere. I am a Radiological Scientific Officer and I can assure you that this is the necessary and correct information.

Also, in this 'Recovery' section are hundreds of pieces of information, oftentimes found in whole books, on the subject of re-establishing 'primitive' agriculture and means for developing local sources of energy. A great many of our resources deal with old Pioneering skills. We cannot just go back to the old ways. We have lost many of the skills. No one had them all then and you would be hard put today to find a wheelwright, a miller, a tanner, a barrel maker. All those trades, like farming, have advanced into modern technology and the present experts seldom have used the old ways. Many of the old implements are no longer around and we certainly don't have the horses. Modern horses are neither bred nor conditioned to pull the plow. Still, in the skills of the past we may find solutions to the problems of the moment.

Our Library

Our personal library is very extensive. At one time I counted 13 sets of encyclopedias. These are mostly specialized - like a 14 volume set on gardening and another 16 volume set on do-it-yourself repairs. There are others on health and medicine and a variety of other subjects.

We have also acquired CDs with hundreds of books and one summer put a crew to work microfilming thousands of documents which we have on microfiche. These, plus many many books, are in just our own home but our Ark Two Community librarian is the real gatherer of information - he has many thousands of books, mostly on technology for recovery.

In the future, when people want it, we hope to be able to disseminate all this information widely. There are many blind spots in our library. We have little information on modern technology and almost no information on leading edge technology. Members of our Ark Two community are of far more than average knowledge about nuclear and computers but there are many, many fields such as in modern metallurgy, petroleum refining, hundreds of specialties in chemistry, medicine, and untold numbers of other areas that the expertise to re-establish them will have to survive with the experts - if they are going to be recovered in the immediate decades following.

One major focus of our library has been maps, in order to determine where that expertise may reside. We have thousands of maps. Local road maps. Topographical maps. More and more maps on an expanding scale. We have every map ever published by the National Geographic. We have CDs with map search programs. North American and World Atlases. The list goes on. One map set which we were very desirous of obtaining cost thousands of dollars (far beyond our budget) from the US government. It comes with a subscription program for real-time updating and the printed book is reprinted annually. A marvelous tool for demographers tracking changing patterns - but one used copy would serve our purposes. Miraculously, on the Internet we found a library discard copy - at a fraction of the cost.

Other associates of ours are providing us with gigabytes of survival information on CDs. Our problem has not been so much one of obtaining information but determining on which to concentrate our limited resources for storing and cataloging. Tons of information is of no use, if you have no way of finding what you want in it. In early years we were given literally tons of new books by libraries and publishers. Expensive new technical volumes that often cost over a hundred dollars each - but we finally had to abandon that effort simply because of lack of storage space and manpower to handle it. Tons had to be destroyed simply because we could not, even with weeks of searching, find a way to transport them to Third World countries who were desirous of having them.

The problem of the moment has not been getting information but one of determining which information is going to be most useful to survivors. What we offer in these pages, measuring radiation contamination in food, producing food without the modern technology and its skills, finding alternate sources of energy, recovering and repairing remaining machinery, creating the nucleus of an economic system and restoring the basis of functioning society - information on how to do these things - are what we feel will be most needed at the outset. It is our sincerest hope that we will be able to get it to the people who need it and that they will find it useful.