John Christopher

Now, I want to bring in a fantastic juxtaposition I found buried in the comment section regarding this exact theme.

One reader brought up a grim 1956 novel called The Death of Grass by John Christopher.

Oh, this one is terrifying.

In this book, a virus targets and kills all species of grass, which includes wheat, rice, barley, basically the foundation of the global food supply.

yeah and you know they talk about how the survivors of hiroshima you know when they found them when the rescuers got to them or when outside forces kind of met them they were listless and lethargic and they seemed to not care about what happened to them you know because it's so overwhelming so overawing that it just it sort of shorts out your emotional system

there's Another bit of British media, which isn't directly to do with nuclear war, but which I think ties in very nicely with the cynicism and darkness of those two films, one of my favourite books, which is The Death of Grass by John Christopher.

which is about a virus that, as the name of the book implies, infects grass and causes it to die.

But grass as a species includes things like wheat and pretty well every cereal crop that Europe and to a large extent the US rely on for survival.