Nuclear famine

While belief in the "nuclear winter" hypothesis is both popular and heavily debated, the issue of potential food supply disruption from blast and fallout effects following a nuclear war is less controversial. Several books have been written on the food supply issue, including 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 and 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,^[1] the continuity of government plans for preventing a famine in On Reorganizing After Nuclear Attack,^[2] and Survival of the Relocated Population of the U.S. After a Nuclear Attack by Nobel Prize winner Eugene Wigner,^[3] while those focused solely on radioecology and agriculture include Effects of Fallout Radiation on Crop Production,^[4][5] Behavior of Radioactive Fallout in Soils and Plants,^[6] and practical countermeasures that were intended to be taken on the individual level in Defense Against Radioactive Fallout on the Farm.^[7]

Early work[edit]

One of the first works to discuss the problem of fallout, farming, food and supply was Herman Kahn's 1960 publication On Thermonuclear War. Kahn argued that while total war would indeed be an "unprecedented catastrophe", food which is slightly-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, which is supported by the research of Project 4.1. 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 younger generations.

Overview[edit]

From 1983-1985, in a time period during which the "nuclear winter" hypothesis was notably still in its early "apocalyptic" 1-D computer model phase, more than 300 physical, atmospheric, agricultural and ecological scientists from over 30 countries around the world came together to participate in the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment-Environmental Effects of Nuclear War (SCOPE-ENUWAR) project. This project assessed the global consequences of nuclear war, resulting in a two-volume publication titled Environmental Consequences of Nuclear War, detailing the physical, atmospheric, ecological and agricultural effects of a major nuclear war.^[8][9] In the publication, it is predicted that billions of survivors in the aftermath of nuclear war, even in non-combatant countries, may experience a dwindling food supply (if the continuity of government countermeasures were not fielded) which plunges survivors into "massive levels of malnutrition and starvation," and in dire situations, "only a small fraction of the current world population could expect to survive a few years".^[10]


Many processes can be involved leading up to a massive food shortage on a global scale. To begin, crops, stored food and agricultural supplies such as fertilizers and pesticides can be instantly destroyed in nuclear blasts; nuclear contamination of soil, air and water can render food unsafe to eat, and crops unable to grow properly; and uncontrollable fires can impede normal agricultural or food gathering activities. Experts predicted that in the first few years that follow a nuclear war, more complex processes, such as the crippling of the international economy and trade systems, collapse of global food transportation and distribution networks, loss of exportation incentives and importation, drastic climatic stress on the agroecosystems, and associated chaos and disruption in society can spawn to escalate the problem of food shortage.^[10][11]


Following the publication of Environmental Consequences of Nuclear War, more studies have emerged based on modeling and analysis of hypothetical nuclear exchanges between nuclear-armed nations. The conclusions of these studies illustrate that a nuclear war is a self-destructive road to mass starvation, and echoed the statement made in The Medical Implications of Nuclear War, a publication by the National Academy of Sciences, that "the primary mechanism for human fatalities would likely not be from blast effects, not from thermal radiation burns, and not from ionizing radiation, but, rather, from mass starvation".^[12]


While the total number of global nuclear weapons had declined by two thirds following the U.S.-Soviet Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) compared to the early 80s, some experts feel that the risk of nuclear conflict has not decreased, but has instead risen.^[13] This is due to nuclear proliferation as more countries such as India, Pakistan, and North Korea now have nuclear arsenals, increasing the risk of regional nuclear conflicts. Growing military tensions, accidents, sabotages and cyber-attacks are all potential trigger points of massive nuclear disruption and regional, if not global famine.