Why would nuclear survivors be restricted to just the resources within their own borders? It's not like the oceans would evaporate and make travel impossible.
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The same reason they cannot aquire them via trade. Ports gonna get those nukes for sure, so they have to rebuild those ports to get those resources, but rebuilding the ports needs those resources.
Because communications and information will suck - you won’t know where to go that is safe and where you want to go that might be destroyed already.
Because most ‘other’ places of value for trading high tech resources with will already have been nuked.
Because excessive radiation somewhere is likely to stop the trip if you detect it or kill everyone if you don’t.
Because humans are concentrated along coasts making coasts, ports and communities accessible by sea the ones most likely to be nuked directly.
Travel will still be possible but it will be very difficult, dangerous and expensive. It won’t be practical to trade in bulky things like food or raw materials for quite a while. ‘Trade’ at first will mostly consist of exploring/gathering information, moving key people and books around, and high value items high demand items that either can’t be made any more or which are necessary to keep using existing high tech equipment, are necessary to sustain life, or which can only be made in a few places in the world.
Examples might be tungsten carbide machine tool heads, precision measuring tools, high temperature lubricants, spark plugs and carburator parts, 2 way ‘ham’ radios and seeds.
The Third French Empire would rule an interstellar empire. It's all documented in this book called 2300 AD.
Rebuilding a port would be a relatively trivial task compared to most challenges. The global shipping fleets and their crews would be mostly intact because the middle of the ocean would be the safest place to be. A port can operate with nothing but a natural harbor and a large supply of manpower. Given the reduction in population and the collapse of many service sector jobs, you now have more shipping capacity per capita then before, plenty of labor to apply to the task and a major reduction in the demands on your fleet. Yes oil would be scarce but oceangoing vessels are very fuel efficient compared to cars so any oil producing region should be able to solve that.
The number of oil wells in the world vastly outstrips the number of nuclear weapons. The oil pumping wouldn't be anywhere close to 90% destroyed. It's the oil refining that would be destroyed. However it's very possible to refine oil in a lower tech, less efficient fashion. They did it in the 19th century after all.
The human race has a vast pool of highly educated labor. That, more then any capital investment, is why the standard of living is so much higher then in the past. If even a small fraction of that labor pool survives, they will be able to start rebuilding supply chains. We dont have global supply chains because they are the only way to power civilization, we do because it's the cheapest way to do so.
This is all true - it’s not that we couldn’t or wouldn’t rebuild - it’s the difficulty in the earliest phases. Once the world economies became integrated and globalized suddenly undoing it causes a lot of difficulties. If (for example) steel, transistors and plastics are critical to getting enough food to everyone in your country but your continent only makes one of the 3, then the short term reorganization required to adapt is quite daunting. It’s entirely possible that large regions and whole countries won’t be able to fix critical problems like this fast enough to prevent mass starvation or other forms of social collapse that take place weeks or months after the nuclear war itself is over with.
The thing is that they are integrated until they aren't. During the great recession, trade by the US fell by something like a third. The impact of that felt fairly muted compared to the housing market.
I dont mean to say that a nuclear war isn't going to cause mass loss of human life. It certainly would. However keep in mind that there are automatic stabilizers in the system. People back before canning used to keep their extra food on the hoof and in the bottle. When the lean years come you cull your herds and brew less booze. So even though they lacked the technology to save much food, they did give themselves a cushion. Today, we have far more of that flexibility. Meat consumption is vastly higher, we overeat, we throw away half our calories and we have canned food. So while the suffering would be vast, the amount of "demand smoothing" that is possible should not be underestimated.
Sure rebuilding the port will be trivial, once you got a functional economy. So rebuilding those ports are somewhere down the list, because you just cannot risk your precious stockpiles for a solution that might work.
Put the boat in the harbor. Put a ramp on the boat. Unleash your large pool of labor.
Yes, doing constructions in a radioactive wasteland 5000 km from home is what neutral Outer Loonystan is going to do right after a nuclear exchange.
The threat is about neutrals (indeed insignificant neutrals so no India or Brazil) after a global nuclear war (means important coastal cities are radioactive wastelands... Because they gonna get ground strikes to destroy their infrastructure.. and ground strike means Fallout).
So let's continue from here
I missed the part where they would decide to travel 5000 km and set up a new port instead of going to the nearest natural harbor.
Well they want to import stuff which is not available at their country... So they have to do that. Or just boldly go with the hope that someone ist going to fill their ship at the destination.
Sorry but how did the discussion go from "the regional powers in the third world would surely get targeted by a few nukes as well" to "every coastal city on he planet gets nuked"? This makes no sense. The Soviets may reserve a couple dozen nukes for cities like Sao Paulo, Mexico City or Zürich but they are not going to allocate 100s of weapons to cities like Lima, Daressalam, Dakar, Rangoon, or any of the other 1000s of really not very significant cities in the neutral countries that are really, really far from the USSR.
Remember the whole thing is going to be primarily targeted at destroying America and western Europe, and only once that task is completed, will strategic planners give any thought to wiping out neutral cities to give the post-apocalyptic leftovers of the soviet union a slightly better chance to impose its will on some part of what's left of the world.
And that's not even taking about the weird decisions you would be doing when you allocate a MIRV to a faraway part of the planet. These things spread their warheads of over regions but not over continents. You can't arbitrarily distribute warheads, you need to first plan how to get groups of them to a specific region, and then plan how to spread the group out within that region, because there are limits on how wide a MIRV can spread its warheads.
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Which is why modern pots take many years to build... Oh, wait.
And what percentage of these isn't going to belong or be comandeered by one of the combattants of the war.
Yes, if you plan to recieve ships no larger than medieval cogs.
If you want to to receive, say a Panamax (which are more or less "standard" for long range transport), the list of ports in the 3rd world gets very small very quickly, especially if we consider how not all of these ports were around in the cold war.
"reduction in population" well be accompanied with the collapse of industrial civilisation.
Only mose of this shipping capacity cannot be used, since you cannot repair, maintain or even keep these ships fueled for long
There is a lot more to it than fueling. Do you have a car? You know how can't just fuel it, you need to refill oil, antifreeze, engine coolant, and every year or so you need to take it for regular servicing where worn parts are replaced, from gaskets to rubber seals to various other components?
It's the same for any complex device, the list of things you need to make is just much much longer for ships.
My assumption was and remains (even today well after the cold war) that no major power like the USA would ever willingly allow itself to be obliterated into regional irrelevance. If we were nuked to a husk but neutrals are not, we would sack those neutrals. I firmly believe the USSR would have done the same; if their heartland was glassed, they would roll tanks into someone else's who isn't. Operation Weserubung would pale compared to my expectation of a superpower fighting a nuclear war.
Doom and gloom aside, way too much determinism is being put into the concentration for specialized production. 3rd world economies rely very heavily on comparative advantage. Just because Singapore, Chile, Angola, etc don't make 98% of the tools they use does not mean they could not. It makes no sense to... unless your competition is glowing green. The most specialized and complex might be destroyed, certainly, but getting set back 150 years is way too far the other way. People would either start making what used to be made in the USA etc, or improvise around it with a subpar but working result.
Doom and gloom aside, way too much determinism is being put into the concentration for specialized production. 3rd world economies rely very heavily on comparative advantage. Just because Singapore, Chile, Angola, etc don't make 98% of the tools they use does not mean they could not. It makes no sense to... unless your competition is glowing green. The most specialized and complex might be destroyed, certainly, but getting set back 150 years is way too far the other way. People would either start making what used to be made in the USA etc, or improvise around it with a subpar but working result.
Spoken like someone who has spent an incredibly long time in the oil patch . . . .