[quote=@Isotope]
Also people here keep saying nukes, but nukes dont carve up continents folks.  Its been a thousand plus years, civilization was totally reset and sent back to the stone age the planet over by god knows what.
[/quote]Yeah, let's stop thinking about this as a twenty minutes in the future kind of apocalypse. Nobody knows what happened here. Hell, it's possible we are all part of a long term experiment by our more advanced peers in order to observe the development of "ancient" civilizations.
Anything is possible. And again, 50s X-punk tech can give you tons of leeway with solutions. Basically any crazy tech people were thinking in the 50s is possible here as well as accomplishing a few modern tech with less advanced basis. Because why the hell not? Steampunk, dieselpunk and so on is all about anachronism.