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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 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]