Forget the Fallout, What About Our Tea?

Good thing Britain hasn't been nuked, so this crisis never came to pass.

Never mind the radiation: British contingency planners worried there would be a dramatic shortage of tea in the aftermath of a nuclear attack, recently declassified documents show.

The shortfall of the staple British beverage would be "very serious" if the country were to come under attack with atomic and hydrogen bombs, said according to a memo drafted between 1954 and 1956.

"The tea position would be very serious with a loss of 75 per cent of stocks and substantial delays in imports and with no system of rationing it would be wrong to consider that even one ounce (28g) per head per week could be ensured," it said.

"No satisfactory solution has yet been found."

Another memo, written in April 1955, warned: "The advent of thermo-nuclear weapons ... has presented us with a new and much more difficult set of food defence problems."

Let's hope they've stockpiled enough in the past 50 years so in the event of any future attack such a dilemma will be averted.