What type of SHTF are you expecting?, page 2

Having watched events unfold over the last decade, I'm becoming more and more certain we are teetering on the edge of an abyss, and its only going to take a little push to start a chain of events that will be self reinforcing and without some sort of extreme luck will probably put an end to life as most know it today. Here's what i see happening in the near future:

1. a black swan event like an unanticipated war with north korea or Iran where either the Chinese or Russians, or both support them vs the west, or perhaps a major catastrophe such as a solar flare disrupting communications and the power grid, a pandemic such as mutated or weaponized bird flu.

2. anything like the above will almost certainly be the tipping point in which the western economies collapse, and this collapse will dwarf the great depression in both scope and scale.

3. the economic collapse will be rapidly followed by a total breakdown in supply chains of fuel, which in turn will destroy the ability to both transport and produce food and maintain critical infrastructure. the USA will be especially hard hit due to our abandonment of the railways in favor of refrigerated 18 wheeler transport. any food that makes it to market will not be enough, and so overpriced that no one can afford it anyways.

and that is the point when events turn into something out of a nightmare, massive riots, police and military unable to keep order and abandoning the major cities as they are burned to the ground, followed by a mass exodus of starving hordes numbering in the millions that will loot,rape, murder their way through the suburbs and finally into the rural areas, rumors of cannibalism will spread like wildfire as food stocks vanish and a shoot first, ask questions later mentality becomes the new law of the land.

and the final nail in the coffin will be a total meltdown of hundreds of nuclear plants in the northern hemisphere as the workers fail to show because they have either fled or attempted to defend their homes and families from the starving mobs, even those survivalists who hid out in the far reaches of the countryside and prepped with their stash of food, weapons, gold etc will find out none of that matters as radiation poisons the entire ecosystem. the horrors that will take place will make the worst of the dark ages seem trivial by comparison, the whole of western civilization will vanish in the space of a year.

the human race will survive all of this, in very small groups in places like south America, New Zealand, certain parts of Africa, but what emerges from that, and on what sort of timeline is anybodies guess.