Imagine there is a nuclear war and the only people, who survive it without getting sick (without breaking their DNA and suffering from radiation-induced diseases) is the military personnel (couple of hundreds - max. 1000 people) inside the NORAD bunker.
For how many years/decades/centuries could these people maintain a civilized way of life?
By "civilized" I mean access to
- modern sanitary systems (hot water, sewage),
- electricity,
- good-enough transportation (at least cars, ideally - airplanes as well),
- telecommunication (at least stationary phones, ideally - mobile phones) and
- computers.
I thought, how these people could get access to such goods after a nuclear war. One possibility: Allegedly, there are large warehouses in Russia, where various goods (from napkins to trucks) are stored for two purposes:
- Supply of the troops in case of war (allegedly, those warehouses contain spare parts for weapons as well).
- Support of people after natural disasters (when e. g. an earthquake happens somewhere and the Russian Emergency Control Ministry sends food and medical equipment into that region, those goods come from these storages).
Let's assume that such facilities exist in the US as well. Then, after a nuclear war the NORAD survivors need to find the nearest warehouse of that sort and part of their needs will be covered (provided that those storage facilities were not destroyed during nuclear attack).
If the storage facility contains gasoline, they could use it for cars and generate electricity from it.
The question is - could they have mobile phones and Internet with most of the people, who maintained these systems, killed? Could they maintain a modern level of medical support without access to medical schools?
Another question: If there are up 1000 survivors, for how long could they live off these emergency supplies (before they run out and the survivors learn to produce these goods themselves) ?