Nuclear famine

Nuclear famine is a hypothesized famine considered a potential threat following global or regional nuclear exchange. It is thought that even subtle cooling effects resulting from a regional nuclear exchange could have a substantial impact on agriculture production, triggering a food crisis amongst the world's survivors.

While belief in the "nuclear winter" hypothesis is popular, despite issues such as the defection of a major previous supporter and active climate modeler of it, revealing that it was "politically motivated from the beginning". The uncontroversial issue of potential food supply distruption from blast and fallout effects following a nuclear war has together resulted in the following books being penned, beginning approximately with, Fallout Protection, Nuclear War Survival Skills, Would the Insects Inherit the Earth and Other Subjects of Concern to Those Who Worry About Nuclear War and most recently the extreme "nuclear winter/comet impact" countermeasuring Feeding Everyone No Matter What.

Together with these largely introductory texts, more official tomes with a focus on organization, agriculture and radioecology include Nutrition in the postattack environment by the RAND Corporation, the continuity of government plans for preventing a famine in, On Reorganizing After Nuclear Attack, and Survival of the relocated population of the U.S. after a nuclear attack by Nobel Prize winner, Eugene Wigner. While those focused soley on radioecology and agriculture include, Effects of fallout radiation on crop production,Behavior of Radioactive Fallout in Soils and Plants, and practical countermeasures that were intended to be taken on the individual level in Defense against radioactive fallout on the farm.

One of the first works to discuss the problem of fallout, farming, food and supply was the 1960s, On Thermonuclear War. In which, amongst other things, author Herman Kahn suggests that while Total War would indeed be an "unprecedented catastrophe", food which is slight-to-moderately contaminated need not be wasted. As the ingestion of such food by the elderly would not result in any observable increase in cancer in this cohort. This is due to the fact that, like other common carcinogens such as cigarette smoke, cancers do not immediately emerge after exposure to radiation or specifically from, nuclear fallout, instead cancer has a minimum latency period of some 5+ years, with those of Project 4.1 serving as supporting evidence to this fact. It is for this reason that the elderly could eat slight-to-moderately contaminated food without much, if any, ill effect, allowing for the most uncontaminated food to be saved for infants etc.

...
Wikipedia