A full-scale nuclear exchange between major powers could kill billions of people — most of them not from the blasts, but from the global famine that follows as nuclear winter collapses agriculture worldwide. However horrible, a catastrophe on this scale cannot be ruled out — and nuclear war is not the only scenario. Engineered pandemics, cascading infrastructure failures, and other large-scale disruptions could sever the global supply chains that every modern nation depends on. The outcome of any such event is not fixed: published research suggests that serious preparation — food resilience, knowledge preservation, pre-positioned recovery capability — could dramatically change how many people survive and whether the foundations of civilization are preserved or permanently lost. Today, that preparation lags far behind — but rapid advances in AI have changed what is possible.
To show how AI tools can help, this project tackles a specific scenario: New Zealand after a full-scale nuclear exchange — physically unscathed, renewably powered, institutionally stable, but dependent on imports for nearly everything it cannot grow. The grid works. The roads are fine. The government is functional. But fuel, medicines, tires, electronics, spare parts, chemicals, and clothing will never be resupplied. If the transition to self-sufficiency is managed well, NZ preserves the foundations of a modern society. If it isn’t, each failing system drags others down with it — and the human cost compounds with every step backward.
This Recovery Library is a proof of concept for AI-assisted catastrophe preparation. Recovery planning at this breadth — 171 documents across 15 categories, from pastoral agriculture to pharmaceutical rationing to transistor fabrication — would normally require large teams of domain specialists and years of effort. One individual, directing AI tools over one week of focused work, produced the entire set. To be clear: these documents contain errors and have not been peer-reviewed — they demonstrate the capability, not a finished product. Our working paper argues that going further — including a pre-positioned AI inference facility that could generate and adapt this kind of guidance in real time, tailored to local conditions and distributed to affected regions worldwide — could fundamentally change recovery outcomes.
Selected Documents
Here is what some of the 171 documents look like.
Public Communication: The Case for Emergency Measures How do you tell a nation that the world has ended — honestly, without triggering panic, while maintaining the institutional trust you’ll need for years? The messaging framework for explaining rationing, requisition, and collective sacrifice to 5.2 million people who have just watched civilisation collapse on the other side of the world.
Food Rationing and Distribution Supermarket staples deplete within 48 hours of a panic-buying event. NZ can feed itself under nuclear winter — but only if distribution is managed from Day 1. Caloric math, ration design, and the logistics of feeding 5.2 million people through existing retail infrastructure.
Mental Health: National Grief and Social Purpose What does grief look like when the loss isn’t a person but an entire world? Ambiguous grief, the solidarity-to-despair trajectory, and why meaningful work may be the most important mental health intervention available.
Fuel Allocation and Drawdown Model NZ’s only oil refinery closed in 2022. There is no crude stockpile, no refining equipment, no pathway to resume domestic refining. What NZ holds at the point of supply severance is finished product — and that is all there will ever be. One of the most time-critical economic decisions the government faces.
Pharmaceutical Rationing and Shelf-Life Extension NZ imports virtually all of its medicines. Total in-country stock represents months of consumption, not years — and domestic production is years away. Without rationing, an estimated 30,000–50,000 die from pharmaceutical exhaustion in the first year, including every child with Type 1 diabetes. With aggressive rationing, the total toll is similar but who dies changes: age-weighted allocation of insulin and antibiotics can save most of those children, at the cost of accelerating mortality among older patients. The hardest decisions in this library.
Pastoral Farming Under Nuclear Winter NZ produces “food for 40 million” under normal conditions. Under 5°C cooling and reduced sunlight, that number drops dramatically. The honest caloric math — what NZ can actually produce, what the diet looks like, and how the livestock system adapts.
Sailing Vessel Design from New Zealand Materials Cargo and passage vessels for Tasman and Pacific trade, built from radiata pine, NZ steel, and harakeke fiber. Junk-rigged for ease of handling, Thames barge-inspired for shallow-draft coastal work. NZ’s path back to the world.
Economic Transition: From Market Economy to Managed Recovery What happens to money when imports stop permanently? The NZ dollar can survive — but only with immediate, deliberate intervention. Price controls, requisition compensation, the ration coupon system, and the decades-long transition back to functioning markets.
Tires: Depletion, Conservation, and Local Production NZ has roughly 20 million tires in service. It manufactures zero. When they’re gone, vehicles stop — and with them, food distribution, emergency services, and agricultural operations. The anatomy of a consumable depletion spiral, and the multi-year path from retreading to eventual domestic production.
Machine Shop Operations and Training The meta-capability. Dozens of technical documents in this library assume the ability to machine replacement parts — which conceals an enormous amount of implicit capability. This document exists to make sure that capability is actually there.
Computer Construction: From Raw Materials to Stored-Program Computer The library’s most ambitious technical document. A practical guide for building a germanium-transistor computer from NZ-available materials — from extracting germanium from coal ash to designing logic gates to writing a BASIC interpreter.
The complete library contains 171 documents across 15 categories. See the Full Catalog for the complete document list with descriptions, feasibility ratings, and links.
How this was built
One individual, working on behalf of Recoverable Foundation, directed AI tools (Claude, Anthropic) to produce this library: structured, footnoted, internally consistent guidance covering everything from crisis communication to transistor fabrication. A comparable project using a conventional team of writers with domain expertise would take years and a substantial budget. The content is a proof of concept. The capability is the point.
These documents are unreliable. They have not been peer-reviewed. They contain errors of fact, judgment, and emphasis. A domain expert will find things to correct in every document. What is worth engaging with is the demonstration of capability and the editorial methodology. See About This Project for scenario assumptions, methodology, what this gets right, and what it gets wrong.
But a static library is only the beginning of what AI capability means for catastrophe recovery. A functioning AI inference facility operating post-event would be vastly more useful: answering specific questions in real time, adapting guidance to conditions as they develop, translating specialist knowledge into locally actionable instructions. The knowledge gap — the difference between what a recovering society needs to know and what its available specialists can provide — is one of the largest practical challenges in any recovery scenario. AI tools are already capable of narrowing that gap substantially.
Reference
- About This Project — scenario, recovery phases, methodology, limitations
- Full Catalog — complete document list with feasibility ratings
- Style Guide — editorial standards
- Working Paper — Recoverable: What Civilizational Recovery from Nuclear War Might Actually Look Like