So, the Nuclear Apocalypse has come and gone. The year of 1962 wasn’t a good one for humanity, at all, but the United States government, in their eternal infallible wisdom, had a plan to outlive Armageddon.

US Survival Bunker-0X0 was built to house 5,000 of America’s most valuable citizens. Located in the most remote part of Idaho, it was almost unknown to the US population. High Ranking Politicians, Military Brass, and Wealthy Businessman were all housed there, and their official plan was to:

A) Wait in their bunker for a minimum of 50 years, thus skipping the worst parts of the apocalypse.

B) Resurface; make contact with the surviving humans

C) Rebuild the country

But, there is one problem with their plan. After they resurface, they find that City States have been built - City States with superior numbers that wanted to control the Wasteland their own way. So, my question is, How could the Bunker Dwellers rebuild and resettle America according to their plan?

The Bunker Dwellers, compared to the rest of the wastes, are technologically advanced. The built their bunker over a deposit of fossil fuels, so they have access to motor vehicles and air transportation. They also have modern weapons, like machine guns and artillery, while the Wastelanders use 1800s style guns. The Bunker is nuclear powered. The Bunker Dwellers' main problem is that they have a military force of about 2,000, making them incredibly outnumbered.

From the inside, of course.

Think for a minute about the kinds of people you might stick in a vault to represent the hundred most valuable members of your society. From politics, forget the politicians and focus on political scientists: not the people who are elected, but the people who get them elected. From business, a few CEOs might be useful, but you should give more weight to financial, technical, and operations officers - the people who can organize a business and keep it running. In science, perhaps a few of your most innovative scientists, but more importantly, the scientific administrators who can assemble labs and keep them productive.

If these people are smart and shrewd and have done their homework - and they certainly should be and should have - then they are an invaluable resource for anyone who takes them in. Politicians who accept their services are elected more. Businesses, bureaucracies, laboratories that take them on in leadership roles thrive because they're functioning more efficiently, using the knowledge, data, and experience that your leaders have built up over their pre-crisis lives.

You mentioned that the world they emerge into is ruled by independent city-states. That's good for them, because it means that implicit in every single thing they say or do is the threat that if this city-state doesn't listen, they'll go to someone else. Someone who will then have the benefits of their wisdom and expertise.

Once one (or more) of the city-states takes them in, it's a relatively straightforward matter of consolidating their power, ensuring that the people in charge are indebted to them, and putting themselves in a position where they can marginalize or remove any threats or competition. And, of course, actually strengthening their city-state, both to keep up the ruse of cooperation and to minimize the risk of outside conquest.

Assuming they don't want to remain the men behind the man (which is, itself, a perfect position from which to carry out many possible goals) they can work their way into the halls of power. The form this would take depends on the government; they might stand for elections, marry themselves or their children into important families, outright buy positions in some kind of oligarchic state, etc.

If your cabal is really ambitious, they could inveigle themselves in several city-states at once, take control of them in rapid succession, and form a unified alliance out of them. This could give them enough military clout to force the others into line and is a stepping stone to a central government on the scale of pre-crisis nations.

50 years in the hole? 1960s tech?

It would be the grandchildren of the original inhabitants who come out. None of the cabinet members, congressmen, or generals. Perhaps a few young officers of the technical and signals detachments are still around, but they'll be too old for adventures outside. For that matter, how many men and how many women went in?

What they do have are supplies designed for continuity of government and rebuilding.

• Tools to build the tools to build the tools, and blueprints for each step along the way.


• They will have weapons that were stored in preservatives, and a production line for ammo. Some old ammo stocks, too, but they will be iffy. They always planned to produce propellant and primers, and perhaps bullets and casings as well.


• Vehicles would have been built to last, too. No pneumatic tires, few gaskets, probably no electrical systems at all (the insulation of the wires would go brittle). These will be at an advantage over more modern vehicles without perishable supplies -- and at this timescale, gasoline is perishable as well.


• They would be prepared produce electrical power, either through hydropower or perhaps geothermal. Once they uncrate that, they have power tools, electric light, telegraph and radio, etc. Again an advantage over people with broken-down power grids and generators that ran out of fuel decades ago.

They might know the locations of additional, unmanned bunkers with more supplies. Those are easier to build than inhabited bunkers with air, water, and power systems.

They seem to be at a significant disadvantage concerning manpower, so there would be only a few viable strategies.

1. Divide and conquer. Infiltrate the city-states, instigate war. Might get the enemy weak enough to be taken over, or it might spectacularly backfire.




2. Nuke the bastards and start over. Presuming you kept enough nukes in operational condition.




3. Religion. Tactics depend on the situation. Maybe missionaries will be enough. Maybe you will need to nuke one city, then have a divine messiah stop the nuke mid-air in another.




4. If direct confrontation is a must, chemical weapons are a great equalizer and your enemies probably wouldn't have any functional protective equipment left.

Maybe some of the city-states ally with the bunker-dwellers. They either want them to recreate the US, or they want the bunker-dwellers to help them fight rival city-states.

There aren't enough bunker-dwellers to conquer much of anything by themselves, even assuming they're very well-equipped thanks to the bunker's stores. But they may make for amazing allies. If none of these city-states have functional heavy industries, access to the bunker's tools and manufacturing supplies will be an extreme advantage for any city-state that allies with them.

It's kinda like how the Spanish conquistadors conquered the Aztecs. They didn't do it by themselves, they made friends with all the tribes who hated the Aztecs.