Threads, mentioned elsewhere, is a good cure for hoping to survive a major nuclear exchange. The first (IIRC) episode of Burke’s Connections is also pretty goo

Threads, mentioned elsewhere, is a good cure for hoping to survive a major nuclear exchange. The first (IIRC) episode of Burke’s Connections is also pretty good for this. The exploration of how dependent we are on electricity and petroleum fuel, and how fast things would get very, very bad if the power simply went off and didn’t come back on, even for folks we think of as being pretty self-sufficient like farmers (“suppose they do have great-grandfather’s plow buried somewhere in the barn, and escaped a dozen other ways things could already have gone lethally wrong within the first year—do they have oxen? Draft horses? No, almost nobody has those anymore” or words to that effect). A largish nuclear exchange would turn the power off and it’d be off for a while. On top of all the direct damage from the bombs. (The broader point of that episode is that this is basically what we’ve always done: develop new technology, then use it to increase our population such that most of us would die if that tech vanished, starting with the plow, then irrigation, et c; by the mid 20th century we’d reached that point with electricity and petroleum products)