A new study out of Penn State University has reached a shocking conclusion about potential nuclear apocalypse: corn would get really f**ked up.
On the surface, it sounds like whatever happens to corn in a nuclear winter is the least of our worries. Still, you should consider bumping it up several spots on your list of post-nuclear worries for one simple reason: what you think you’re going to be eating in the post-apocalypse, should you survive?
Don’t let the Fallout video game universe fool you. Those cans of spam you scrounge up from the carcass of a grocery store will only last so long. If anybody is going to survive longer than a couple of years in a post-nuclear winter wasteland, they’re going to have to farm… and one of the most versatile crops around today, corn, would likely not survive a nuclear winter.
How to Survive a Nuclear War Fallout
Using an agroecosystem model called Cycles, the team at Penn State simulated six nuclear scenarios, ranging from relatively small, as far as nuclear scenarios go, to full-on nuclear Armageddon, with anywhere between 5 million and 165 million tons of soot injected into the atmosphere.
They found that even a small nuclear war would reduce global corn yields by 7 percent. On the extreme end, comparable to a full-blown nuclear war, corn production could collapse by 80 percent. Add the extra UV-B radiation from ozone-layer annihilation, and we’re staring down the barrel of an 87 percent loss. That’s a biblical famine.
Millions would die and even the most low-key nuclear war, and millions, perhaps billions more would die in the ensuing famines, and it’s mostly the loss of corn we would miss the most. Corn is everywhere, and it’s in everything. It’s in your food, your fuel, your livestock feed, your soda. If it disappears, so does everything else.
So, what’s the plan? The researchers propose “agricultural resilience kits,” essentially survival seed vaults, customized by region and ready to plant faster-growing, cold-hardy crops in a world where winter is prolonged and sunlight is scarce.
World leaders who threaten their enemies with nuclear war every other week failed to consider that one little nuclear temper tantrum could have devastating consequences for the entire human race, including themselves.
Any nation hoping to survive such a self-imposed apocalypse is going to need to start prepping its agricultural resilience kits now because, as Penn State’s Armen Kemanian puts it, “Resilience is of the essence.”
You can stock your useless nuclear bunker with as many canned beans as you want. What you’re really going to want to stock are seeds. Or, we could not nuke each other into oblivion. There’s always that option.
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