I heard about this constantly growing up, and it was only until I was 17 that I decided to look it up online thinking 'oh it's only a film i'm proper hard me' – and it pretty much ruined me. It's harrowing, to say the least. On top of showing what would happen, the exploration of life after a widespread nuclear conflict is just as bad, and it's not just the immediate aftermath that's touched upon.
The film ends with a timeskip over a decade later, with the populace reduced to pre-industrial life struggling to survive as they farm off the irradiated land, and those who've grown up in that world speak a very damaged version of English (as if it was hard for everyone to understand Yorkshire accents in the first place!). There's attempts to keep people educated from what they can remember and scavenge, but it doesn't hold a candle to what was once.
It's a very mortifying film that hits you hard, and even skimming over bits of it as I type this, the shot of the mushroom cloud behind Sheffield city centre has made my gut sink – and this is from someone who was born after the Cold War, God knows how distressing it was for those who watched it during the height of it.
As morbid as it sounds I'd hope to be instantly atomized in such a scenario. Imagine trying to deliver YoY growth and market impact using just irradiated soil and GNU/Make.
Oh boy, they snagged on of the least useful repos of mine. So I apologize ahead of time for it being in that arctic vault for any people in the future. I didn't get to pick which one they selected.
Obviously it doesn't actually matter that much but sometimes I do wonder how I'd fare in a nuclear holocaust scenario and it's depressing to think how useless my professional skills would be. Idealistically I'd be grabbing PC components wherever I could find them and frankensteining machines together, making networks to connect bunkers... but in reality we'd probably not even have power. It's so far down the hierarchy of needs.
I'm Gen X, which means that we were, as a group, routinely traumatized as kids with killer bees, acid rain, a frank exchange of nuclear warheads ... suddenly sex was death and we weren't sure of the parameters. But the nukes were always in the background and when you review the media of the period it was like seeing the same guy in the background of different movies, always looking at the camera.
I had read Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank, really the prototype of this kind of thing, about a limited nuclear event and what would happen. There's a great bit:
On the ninth day after The Day, Lavinia McGovern died. This, too, had been inevitable ever since the lights went out and the refrigeration ceased. Since Lavinia McGovern suffered from diabetes, insulin had kept her alive. Without refrigeration, insulin deteriorated rapidly. Not only Lavinia, but all diabetics in Fort Repose, dependent on insulin, died at about the same period as the drug lost its potency.
Now, insulin is much more shelf-stable, but you get the idea. I was struck. So imagine a tween who had drawn up lists of "who had what," where we were going to meet, and general plans for your limited nuclear war. I did have the relatively bright idea of trekking to this particularly cold and hidden spring as a kind of natural refrigerator for wrapped food and batteries and the like. All of that eventually faded after the Berlin Wall came down.
I still think about it, from time to time, as "What would I be good for besides slave labor?" They made us get pretty handy with electronics for my degree and the rest of my sciences were well-rounded with chemistry and some very basic civil engineering. I ran amok in TechShop before they folded, so the shop stuff I can get by with to some degree.
In terms of computing's value, I think the two biggest areas of overlooked utility would be packet radio for a low-bandwidth internet, and having the foresight to have offline copies of Wikipedia, scans of the Gingery books, and so forth, connected up to a PC with line conditioned solar power. With dozens of the same PC or laptop, because those parts wear out. Otherwise, yes, IT probably won't be a big part of your average scavenger horde hellbent on reenacting parts of The Road Warrior.
> Idealistically I'd be grabbing PC components wherever I could find them and frankensteining machines together, making networks to connect bunkers...
You'd be better off reading a book on hydroponics and subsistence farming if you were determined to see it through. And have a way to exit stage left available in case it all doesn't work out.
The only actual skill of value in a post apocalypse scenario is convincing people around you to not murder you for your meager possessions. Humanity without a state has no qualms about murdering a member of an out group, and it can even be a bonding activity for the in group.
Left to our own devices we form tight knit, small scale communities which are very protective of each other but extremely hostile to anything else. There's no "society", no "technology", no "time to build something". Look at the Primitive Technology guy on youtube; Even very basic metal is impossible without industry, so no metal ax, no metal parts for anything. Stone tools are incredibly inferior to even basic modern tools.
The spare people and time required to develop and work an industry to start building ANYTHING more than a weaved basket or stone ax requires the recreation of agriculture, except nearly none of the survivors of any situation will understand anything about growing plants, and we don't have a hundred thousand years of human history practicing while being nomadic hunters.
Your gun won't protect you. Your stores of food will run out. Your knowledge of anything that isn't "how do I sustainably produce one million calories a year with only my bare hands" is useless.
There is a good book called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Abides Earth Abides, the most the lead character manages to pass on of all of our technology is the (fire)bow/arrows. Everything else is lost, even though it takes years for everything to run down.
I'm from Wakefield in West. Yorks. In 1985 there was an issue with the early warning sirens near our school - it was harrowing and took a few hours to fix. Was the first I'd heard of "newkiller bombs" and as a 9 year old couldn't comprehend.
Then the year later at a new school there was the Chernobyl disaster.
I can understand why there was such a reduced want in nuclear energy, 40 years later though I wonder how things would be if we'd gotten rid of coal and gas sooner?!
> Then the year later at a new school there was the Chernobyl disaster.
'86 is the first year I properly remember. Challenger went boom while we were doing a big space project at school, Chernobyl went pop just as I was starting to pay some attention to world news, and Optimus Prime was offed on-screen. More than enough to sear the year into the memory of a young lad!
I happened to see one of the brightest shooting stars of my life shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine last year and it was headed towards the nearest city. I'd be lying if there was a big part of me that thought 'I really hope I don't see a flash in a few seconds'.
I still catch myself looking up at planes a good 4 decades later so I'm totally sympathetic to that. All of this is terribly fragile and single individuals of questionable mental capacity having this much power is the sort of risk that humanity should have never taken.
Ooh Did you see the frightened ones?
Did you hear the falling bombs?
Did you ever wonder why we had to run for shelter when the
promise of a brave new world unfurled beneath a clear blue sky?"
> God knows how distressing it was for those who watched it during the height of it.
We aren't in that different a universe from the Cold War, unless someone's dismantled the thousands of nuclear weapons we point at eachother, and hasn't told me.
The worst thing about the Cold War ending is how everyone talks like the world has changed, yet it really hasn't.
Theres definitely stockpiles of nuclear weapons out there, but they're a fraction of what they were 40 years ago, and really up until the last few years relations between the West and Russia have been less tense - Not to say there hasn't been friction from all the effort put into influencing politics in the West or assassination attempts on Western soil that have definitely soured things.
For reference, the big cultural fear when I was young was terrorism and rogue states, and then around adulthood it was ISIS and the like. These things still exist, but the cultural focus here has shifted for a while.
They are a fraction of what they used to be, because they can be delivered with far more precision, and far less ability for interception than in the Cold War bomber era.
It's no longer the decade of long-distance bombers running interceptor screens and anti-aircraft fire to deliver warheads directly to where they intend to bomb. It'll just be a series of bright re-entry streaks fanning out from an ICBM releasing it's cluster of warheads on your metro area.
It’s kind of impressive that the most awful thing in that film isn’t my hometown getting immolated in nuclear fire, but what happens afterwards.
I was very depressed one weekend and decided to watch threads, when the wind blows and the graveyard of the fireflies back to back. How I didn’t off myself after that unbelievably bleak triple bill I’ll never know.
If anyone would like to make up their own minds about this, it's available on archive.org. I still remember watching it first time round and it was definitely a formative experience for me. I had no idea it was being shown to kids - it was broadcast after the 9pm watershed (when the little dears should have been in bed).
They made us watch 'The Day After' in high school. There is value in imprinting on kids the true horror and the ever present threat nuclear weapons pose. It's not a fantasy, it is real and it is the world they will inherit. It only has to happen once, there are no second chances if we get it wrong.
The Day After famously spooked Ronald Reagan -- a former Hollywood actor who liked to catch movies when he could -- who later screened it for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and asked them if it was really that bad.
Their answer was "nope, it'll be worse, much worse", and that pushed Reagan to reach out to the Soviets and work on de-escalation.
Jesus, someone should have made him some movies years earlier. Why do we keep electing such losers without imagination or simple understanding of reality?
That's representative democracy; out of $population, pick the richest/"most succesful" of the jobless, and let them make choices for the everyone else.
I was raised the same way, and the drawback is that anything nuclear gets tarred with the same brush. We're paying for that in carbon now, as will our grandchildren's grandchildren.
Our current carbon situation has nothing to do with the public's opinion of things, and everything to do with our elected representatives representing monied interests over our own. We understood the dangers scientifically decades ago, and even without that threat, the oil crises should have made clear how important it was to not rely on a desert shipping us black liquid. But we didn't do anything, because that would have hurt the profits of extremely wealthy companies.
Remember, oil companies have been colluding and doing anti-social things for personal gain since at least the 1870s, and they had strong tendrils in government basically ever since. Their breakup was an aberration in american policy, and just like Ma Bell decades later, allowing basically free reign to just buy each other up and re-coallesce into another behemoth means trust busting doesn't fix anything, and in fact just gives a business sector the ability to restructure their businesses in a more profitable and extractive way.
??? We don’t fear nuclear power based on the possibility of a world destroying war. It’s feared based on the consequences of a disaster like Chernobyl or Fukashima.
I'm old enough to remember the arguments against civil nuclear power that were made before Chernobyl, and to have read what were then still recent materials from before Three Mile Island. Proliferation was a big part of the fear initially. But it's fair to note that that more or less disappeared after those two incidents.
It still shocks me how people seem to think that killing all those civilians has any honour at all - the U.S. should have been disbarred from holding nuclear weapons after that.
Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to watching Oppenheimer.
What does it matter whether it's nukes or firebombs that leveled Tokyo and Dresden? It's terrible that a couple hundred thousand people died in the bombs, but frankly, that's a drop in the bucket compared to the 85 MILLION people that died in WWII, and less terrible than the other couple of million that would have died in a conventional invasion.
I always find it interesting how willing everyone is to judge the US for dropping the bombs, and how willing everyone was to completely forget the ~ 30M people japan murdered during their colonial expansion.
> 30M people japan murdered during their colonial expansion.
"Japan" is just a label for an arbitrary grouping of people who live in close geographical proximity. It's incapable of murdering people.
Some in that group murdered. Others did not murder. Were innocent. Do you think a nuclear fireball can discriminate between the two?
> and less terrible than the other couple of million that would have died in a conventional invasion.
I don't think any invasion were necessary. I think they were days or even hours away from unconditional surrender without that. I think that overtures had already been made, but these were willfully ignored.
This is the only argument that supports the assertion that the nukes were war crimes. And if I am wrong in this premise, then I too concede the nukes were justified.
But, if I'm right... it's not difficult to imagine why they were dropped. We'd already seen for ourselves what they could do at Trinity, but the Soviets didn't have a clue. It was a demonstration for their sake.
All these arguments about how it wasn't necessary to drop the bombs seem to conveniently not mention the fanatic Japanese defense of Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
We're specifically talking about the use of nuclear weapons in this instance.
If we're going to start totting up non-nuclear killing of civilians, then the U.S. is looking at the killing of approx 56 million indigenous people for a similar desire to "own" land.
I was specifically talking about deaths during WWII.
The US is partially responsible for the native american genocide, but I'd argue Britain and Spain are much more so (small pox and it's ilk did most of the killing at time of first contact)
Hell if we're talking this sort of original sin, where does it end? Humans have been exterminating each other from the dawn of time.
Could you point me in the direction of writing on this argument?
I'd always heard that there was significant justification for using the atomic bombs on the basis of overall loss-of-life that was expected in an invasion of Japan. I've never read any detailed analysis of this claim and I've mostly taken it at face value.
There is no honest assessment of the pacific conflict that doesn't end with millions of Japanese people dying. The Japanese did pearl harbor KNOWING that there would be no victory against the US if they decided to go to war. They gave themselves a chance of survival of about 2 years if the US committed.
Japan could have taken their ball and gone home at ANY TIME between the bombing of pearl harbor and their eventual capitulation, but they didn't want to because that would be inconvenient for their grand ambitions. The US was not "conquering" Japan, and did not want any land of Japan's.
By the end, Japan's army was acting on it's own, against the orders of the emperor. The reason millions of Japanese citizens died, as well as many American soldiers, is because a few leaders in the Japanese army did not want to give up the power they held. That is it.
The alternatives to dropping the atomic bombs were:
1. Blockade Japan until enough of the country starves to death that they surrender
2. Invade Japan and end up killing Japanese civilians who have all been brainwashed to rush invading troops with grenades and improvised weapons, as happened in Okinawa.
Additionally, both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were military targets. Hiroshima had an army HQ and Nagasaki was a major naval base. Yes, they wanted to select a secondary target that hadn’t been bombed before to demonstrate the power of the bomb to the Japanese, but if terror bombing was the sole intention, they would have hit Kyoto.
In the final analysis, dropping the atomic bombs was the best long term outcome for both Japan and the allied powers. Was it “honorable”? War isn’t about honor; it’s about making the best out of a choice of bad decisions. Maybe the Japanese should have considered that before they invaded China to start the damn war in the first place.
Also,
> the U.S. should have been disbarred from holding nuclear weapons after that
In an alternate timeline, the people of the U.S. could have persuaded politicians that it was in their interest to disallow individual nations from having full control of nuclear weapons. Possibly put them under control of a multi-national organisation?
The problem with "nobody should have nuclear weapons" is that anyone who defects is in such a position of power that you basically cannot protect yourself from them. Unfortunately, the only stable situation in nuclear warfare is MAD and extreme nuclear taboo, which predominantly comes from MAD.
This is why nearly every country with nukes has an openly available and distributed "nuclear strategy" that comes close to saying "we won't use them if you don't", and why even Putin has towed that line so far.
> That it was the threat of Soviet invasion which really tipped the scales.
That's exactly what tipped the scales. The Soviet betrayal of the non-aggression pact, their march through the Inner Mongolia desert (Which Japanese planners considered impossible, given the lack of logistics infrastructure in it), their blitz through Manchuria, the complete collapse of Japan's positions in it, as well as the Soviet naval invasion of the Sakhalin and Kuril islands was what brought the war to a close. Japan could not continue the war without access to Manchuria, and was really, really not interested in getting occupied by the Soviets.
People always claim this, but it doesn't make very much sense to me. The Soviets did invade Manchuria I think the same day as the Nagasaki bombing, but a full invasion even of occupied China, let alone the home islands, would have been logistically challenging for them, and the Japanese would have known this. It would require sending and supplying troops through Siberia, which even today has limited infrastructure. They possibly could have used Western transport ships to stage their forces somewhere in the Pacific, but those transports would have already been full of American and British troops being staged in the theater for the same purpose.
At any rate, Japan prior to the atomic bombings had two reasons to surrender: the blockade and impending starvation of the Japanese people and the risk of an American invasion of the home islands. The Soviet invasion of Manchuria and the atomic bombings represented two more reasons. The entire weight of circumstances forced Japan to surrender when it did; I think it's very hard to deny that the atomic bombs were not a necessary aspect of that.
WW2 was an existential war. The Allied powers had agreed that the only acceptable end to the war was unconditional surrender by the Axis. Combatants mobilized their entire societies to fight -- the US was spending about 40% of GDP on the military in 1945. The nuclear bomb had never been used before, so the nuclear taboo did not exist. Allied air forces had been pounding Axis population centers with conventional bombs for years, killing millions. The American invasion of Okinawa caused the deaths of approx 100,000 Japanese troops, 20,000 Americans, and 150,000 Okinawan civilians. American military planners thought that an invasion of the Japanese home islands would have similar casualty exchange ratios as Okinawa, which would leave hundreds of thousands of American troops dead, millions of Japanese troops dead, and millions of Japanese civilians dead.
There were scant alternatives to the bomb. The war had to end fast, the American people demanded nothing less. Wearing down the Japanese with continued strategic bombing, a naval blockade, and the Soviet invasion of Japanese held areas on the mainland would be slow, uncertain, and cause many more deaths than the atomic bombs did. The Japanese willingness to surrender is hotly debated, so all I'll say is this: the Americans had observed constant Japanese fanaticism over the course of the war. Japanese soldiers would pretend to surrender while they clutched grenades to their chests, the surrender of Japanese units larger than platoons was nearly unheard of, and the Japanese population was basically brainwashed. A common saying on the island was "victory, or a hundred million dead souls".
So given all that context -- existential war, lack of a nuclear taboo, normalization of strategic bombing, lack of belief in the Japanese will to surrender, and political pressure to end the war quickly -- dropping the bomb was inevitable. It was horrible, unfathomably cruel, and ended the innocent lives of blameless men, women, and children. It wasn't nice, fair, or honorable. But there was no better option, so we did it.
> So given all that context -- existential war, lack of a nuclear taboo, normalization of strategic bombing, lack of belief in the Japanese will to surrender, and political pressure to end the war quickly -- dropping the bomb was inevitable. It was horrible, unfathomably cruel, and ended the innocent lives of blameless men, women, and children. It wasn't nice, fair, or honorable. But there was no better option, so we did it.
The USA was pushing to an unconditional surrender of Japan, well aware that it was one of the few things the Japanese would deny for a surrender. Surrender was already in negotiations, it was just the unconditional part the Japanese were against to save some face with their population.
The USA wanted to drop the bomb, not negotiate, there was this new weapon that could show which nation has the biggest dick around and there was a willingness to use it as a showcase to the Soviets, to the world. And so the USA dropped the bomb.
There were other avenues to explore, Japan was already aware it was going to lose, continuing the blockade of Japan would obliterate their industrial production capacity as Japan doesn't have much natural resources, they wouldn't be able to leave the island under siege, it would've taken longer but an amphibious assault wouldn't necessarily be needed to force them into a negotiated surrender. The USA pushed the unconditional surrender as the only option exactly to have casus belli to drop the atomic bomb.
It's pretty naïve as well to believe the narrative that was pushed forward to justify dropping the bomb, it's part of American propaganda and something I wish Americans would learn from their past, the same as Japan does not educate their citizenry on the abominations they did during WW2, the USA does not educate its people on the absurdity of dropping atomic bombs and instantly vaporise hundreds of thousands of people just to show the world it had a new big dick.
> The USA was pushing to an unconditional surrender of Japan, well aware that it was one of the few things the Japanese would deny for a surrender. Surrender was already in negotiations, it was just the unconditional part the Japanese were against to save some face with their population.
Japan at the time occupied a large swath of East/Southeast Asian countries, causing unfathomable hardship to the civilians. Two million of Vietnamese died from famine in 1945. People died on the streets while rice were stocked in Japan Army's warehouses, no doubt in preparation for potentially fierce battle with the US. The quicker Japan surrendered the less suffering would be for civilians. Japan's surrender gave rise to many independence countries -- China, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia.
If you don't want to be slaughtered by the millions, do not engage in Total War with anyone. Japan was not going to stop shooting the allies with whatever they could unless the allies killed every last one of them or invaded the homelands and attempted to put down the resultant insurgency.
The idea that there's some form of "Honorable" war is disgusting propaganda from people who wish to control others through violence.
> It still shocks me how people seem to think that killing all those civilians has any honour at all - the U.S. should have been disbarred from holding nuclear weapons after that.
The firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945 killed approximately as many civilians, and left a million homeless. Also considered a war crime by many.
And yet Imperial Japan did not surrender after that. The IJA and IJN were mostly finished by then. They were unable to hold their conquered territory, and were being pushed back and defeated at sea. What was it going to take for the war council to agree to surrender?
> And yet Imperial Japan did not surrender after that. The IJA and IJN were mostly finished by then. They were unable to hold their conquered territory, and were being pushed back and defeated at sea. What was it going to take for the war council to agree to surrender?
Destruction of their capability to wage war and/or the removal of the people refusing to surrender. A nuclear weapon was one answer to that question, but I suspect that there were other motives in play e.g. testing the destructiveness of the bombs and to send a message to other nations.
There is a strong argument to be made that Truman should have been tried for war crimes for dropping the second bomb. You can justify the first bomb as shortening the war, bringing Japan to surrender. The second bomb was about getting an unconditional surrender with terms dictated by the USA.
The Nagasaki bomb may not have been necessary. As well a simple attack on Japan, the Nagasaki atomic bombing was also a cold-blooded test of the implosion bomb technology, and a demonstration for the rest of the world, particularly for the Soviet Union.
But between 100,000 to 250,000 died, Japanese and American, in the battle of Okinawa in 1945, the 3 month US invasion of Okinawa, before the atomic bombs were used. That was the first and only US attempt to invade the main Japanese islands, and it was a tragic and unnecessary loss of life.
About 80,000 died in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.
But Japan should have surrendered long before any of the atom bombs fell. They had obviously lost. If Japan's leadership could not take that obvious step, then there was no easy solution.
Especially with how little change the unconditional surrender had on Japanese life in the long run. Yes, the emperor came out and told the people he was not divine and has taken on a ceremonial role since then but the emperor was not forced to resign, members of the imperial family were immune from prosecution for war crimes (so the person at the top responsible for the atrocities in Nanking was never held to account for them), several politicians who were class A war criminals rose to the top of the Japanese political leadership after the war, and Japan has never officially apologized for their atrocities.
unconditional surrender meant that all of this was at the pleasure of the occupiers, who were currently operating concentration camps for japanese-americans; other possibilities included turning japan into a second nanjing or pine ridge, where to this day occasional rapes by whites continue with impunity
things have in fact worked out fairly well for japan, much better than it worked out for the people of jiangsu, but you can hardly blame the japanese leadership for expecting otherwise
Calling the US internment camps "concentration camps" is both disingenuous and a neo-Nazi talking point.
The internment camps were a disgrace, were wrong, and the US government was right to issue both an apology and compensation to people who were interred there.
The government of Japan has never done the same to Nanking. I don't believe they ever will.
> where to this day occasional rapes by whites continue with impunity
This is yet another disingenuous point - rapes by soldiers in Japan occur, they're bad, and the military both investigates and prosecutes those who take part, unlike Japan and Nanking.
you are the sort of person who compares people who disagree with them to neo-nazis; that is not the sort of person who is in a position to question my integrity in any way, much less viciously attack it as you have
(you can probably find neo-nazis saying the sky is blue as well)
i didn't mention the actually occurring rapes by soldiers in japan, which i agree in the actual world we live in are appropriately investigated and prosecuted; as demonstrated by my link, i was talking about rapes by whites in pine ridge and other so-called indian reservations, which to a large extent are neither investigated nor prosecuted
> you are the sort of person who compares people who disagree with them to neo-nazis
I'm really not - calling the internment camps "concentration camps" is literally a neo-Nazi talking point and meant specifically to draw moral equivalence between the Japanese interment camps and the death camps in Germany during World War 2. I'm sorry if that offends your delicate sensibilities, but it's true. Look over my comments on this account if you don't believe me here - I have not and do not call people neo-Nazis for disagreeing with me (and I'm not calling you a neo-Nazi, I'm saying that it's a neo-Nazi talking point).
I think there's no other fruitful discourse we can have here.
From my hazy recollection, Japanese leadership didn't believe the US had been responsible for Nagasaki. The second bomb settled that matter. All of these could be true though, they aren't mutually exclusive.
> the U.S. should have been disbarred from holding nuclear weapons after that
By who, and how? They had and have literally nukes and the largest and most powerful army in the world. It would only be possible if they volunteered, but they wouldn't because not long after, other countries developed nukes. Nobody wants to give up nukes if others have them too.
I remember seeing "when the wind blows" (UK cartoon about an old couple slowly dying from radiation sickness after a nuclear war) when I was kid and that really scared me:
I read the graphic novel version of "When the Wind Blows" as a child about 40 years ago.
I don't remember being scared but to this day I still think about how I would improvise a fall-out proof shelter in my own house.
are you going to live in that shelter for the rest of your life? lots of people tend to think of these shelters as a temporary space during the explosions, sort of like a tornado shelter. you seek shelter, and then come back out after the event has passed. only, that fallout isn't going any where any time soon. maybe it'll wash away after a couple of rain storms, but it's also going to soak into the ground. so, that shelter better be prepped for a really long stay.
>that fallout isn't going any where any time soon.
It becomes exponentially less radioactive due to decay. The long-lived isotopes that persist might eventually give you cancer or cataracts, but the short-lived isotopes present in the immediate aftermath of a blast will kill you. The dose makes the poison and fallout shelters vastly reduce the absorbed dose of radioactivity.
This movie and "Grave of the fireflies" are the two movies which shook me the most emotionally. Masterpieces in their own right. Both put the horrors of war into proper perspective.
Interesting how as a teenager I would spend hours playing Mortal Combat, ripping peoples spines out, or Carmageddon and splattering peoples intestines all over the windshield. None of this prepared me for these two movies. I guess even at a younger age we're just good at separating fact from fiction.
An extraordinary film that I recently found and watched on YouTube after years of being aware of it and its nightmarish reputation, and not looking too hard to find it in case I had no excuse not to watch it.
Yeah but at the same time, PTSD from for example Mortal Kombat or Carmageddon can develop later in life / over a long period in time. One example, there's a pretty harrowing scene in Shaun of the Dead where one of the characters gets disemboweled. We have a 15 year old that watched that at a much younger age, didn't hit him, but when he saw it again it affected him a lot more.
I think being able to correlate and understand what's happening is a big factor in how things affect you. Films like Grave of the Fireflies apparently (I haven't watched it) hit much harder if you have kids for example.
This is the first thing I think about when I see any mention of that infernal social media app.
And the only thing I remember about the film is the scene where a woman is looking on in horror, and there's a closeup of her urinating in her polyester trousers.
In contrast, the big TV film in the States was The Day After. I believe that I was in sixth grade at the time, and I sincerely appreciated the efforts of our Catholic school administration and faculty to get in front of the messaging and buzz, and prepare us kids psychologically and spiritually for the experience.
>And the only thing I remember about the film is the scene where a woman is looking on in horror, and there's a closeup of her urinating in her polyester trousers.
The entire film is harrowing, but that scene of the nuke hitting Sheffield has to be the most gut-wrenching thing I've watched in my life.
But mentioning her in particular, if you need a quick laugh to jut your head out of the depressive slump this film puts you in, her iMDb page is an oddly funny read - https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1856457/
I think the woman urinating (she was on The Moor I think) was when RAF Finningley was nuked first, but I don’t remember for sure. It is one of the abiding memories from it. I was only about nine when it was shown and only got to watch half of it. It was so bleak, and worse for living in Sheffield. I watched it all about ten years ago and it is still absolutely horrifying.
I was shown this at school aged 9 in 1984. I remembered it being grim.
I decided to rewatch it last year and it's the bleakest thing I've ever seen in my entire life (and I've seen Salo) and in no way suitable to be shown to nine year olds. It gradually increases the bleakness to be so bleak that by the end of it your first thought is "If there's a nuclear strike I'm standing up somewhere high to be vaporised" as the alternative that's suggested in Threads is a living hell.
What I also realised is that just how many of my teachers must have been members of CND and activist teachers who were wanting to scare us into becoming like them.
I don't think the UK government has ever wanted to terrify the population about the real effects of a nuclear war - quite the opposite. Protect and Survive was supposed to be a practical guide - the fact that it was actually quite terrifying was unintended.
AIUI the Protect and Survive films were only ever meant to be broadcast if a nuclear attack was imminent. They were classified but leaked to the BBC. It's not like anyone was showing them alongside the Green Cross Code man, "old fridges can kill", or Charly telling you to keep away from strangers and chip pan fires (separately...).
(I'm reasonably sure the pamphlet didn't get published for the general public either, but again its existence was reported by the media)
EDITED TO ADD: aha, Wikipedia says that the pamphlet did get published, basically because of the reportage generating so much public interest.
The pamphlet was published in 1980. I remember my parents had a copy, but not where they got it from. I was in my very early teens then, and I remember it being a frightening time.
The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service got slated for having a series of ads run in the early 2000s telling people to just get a takeaway on their way home from the pub instead of trying to cook when they got in. The big complaint was that it was encouraging people to eat unhealthily, when presumably a drunk person getting in would be whipping up a nice wee quinoa, avocado and pak choi salad or something.
It cut fire deaths from chip pan fires to basically fuck all, within a month.
The UK government routinely terrified the population about a number of different dangers via their public safety films, many of which were made by aspiring horror filmmakers: https://youtu.be/lUgTH9Lnvv0
I have vivid memories of watching Apache and The Finishing Line when I was in primary school (under 12 years old) over 40 years ago. I'm still terrified of farm machinery and railway lines.
After the end of the The Finishing Line, where the bodies of dead children are carried out of a railway tunnel I remember the railway safety officer who had presented the film telling us that the ending wasn't realistic - usually bodies hit by trains are carried out in pieces in bags because the damage is too bad.
> the fact that it was actually quite terrifying was unintended.
LOL Do you understand psychology, in particular reverse psychology?
I spent some time in Germany as a kid when the IRA were bombing things and leaving car bombs for people to find, so you had to look under your car before getting into it whatever the weather and you had to have british number plates on your car to match the steering wheel on the right hand side. One Xmas New Year period we got cleared out of the accommodation block which was just a block of flats in a town or city in Germany, and this bomb disposal squad got called with a mini tank with an arm on its top to investigate this plastic bag. Thing is the plastic bag was tied to a street light beyond the reach of the mini tank contraption arm so someone had to go and untie it and place it on the ground for the tank to inspect. The person untying it wasnt allowed to look in the plastic bag in case it was booby trapped! Turned out it was just a bag of rubbish, a take away box in a plastic bag because someone couldnt find a bin!
What a frigging waste of time that was! And I dont think the German police were called either, it was entirely handled by the british army, which made me wonder if it was an exercise!
Course the IRA bombing also meant many bins were removed from the streets in the UK as these were handy place to hide a bomb in plain site apparently, much like many ponds and lakes were filled in during WW2 because the Luftwaffe could navigate at night using the moon reflecting off these bodies of water, and many of them haven't been reinstated either to this day.
Still I learnt about OMO washing powder on display in a window, Old Man Out, and got to watch the stag patrols, slipping into the apartments for 10-20mins and saw how married women dressed, in order to entice the stag patrols into their humble abodes. I think that was more shocking for me, seeing what such good liars women are.
If you want to become a swinger join the military!
At about age 6 I saw something even worse [0] - and because it was so disturbing that it was never shown again, I spent decades thinking I'd dreamt or imagined the whole thing, regularly asking new people I met if they remembered it. Threads and Salo have nothing on The Finishing Line.
Oh, that's interesting. I recall seeing Robbie at school (at least once, possibly all three version) but hadn't heard of The Finishing Line. You can stream it online for free from the BFI now, I'll be giving this a watch: https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-the-finishing-line...
Eh, it was the 80s; they showed all sorts of things to kids in the 80s. Mid-80s was more or less Peak Horrible Death-Based Public Safety Ad, wasn't it?
> Mid-80s was more or less Peak Horrible Death-Based Public Safety Ad, wasn't it?
And also the 1970's. I remember we were treated to a steak and mince horror safety show designed to discourage us tearaways from playing on the new bypass being built around our village circa 1977. It was a proper video nasty, especially for 10-11 year olds.
"Scarred for Life" is a great book exploring these themes, many of which continued into the early 80's:
It was shown after the watershed in the UK and that's commonly understood to be "not suitable for children after this time" and it's a 15 certificate on DVD.
Teachers aren't the people to decide to show that kind of content to 9-yeard olds without parental warning/approval.
If you don't scare kids about nuclear war, you're going to get a nuclear war. Kids after 1989 didn't get any warnings, and now we're moronically running headlong into direct conflict with a nuclear power..
I can't speak for what the OP intended, but I would consider that having aging nuclear weapons in a country with a possibly unhinged dictator who has an expansionist agenda is the result of not taking nuclear armageddon seriously.
What the fuck was the rest of the world supposed to do, invade Russia? How is swiftly and expressly causing nuclear war the correct way to prevent nuclear war?
A country going through turmoil is less likely to assign a high priority in keeping weapons safely maintained and under control.
If we took nuclear armageddon seriously as an existential threat to humanity, then this issue would have been dealt with much earlier - most likely when the wall came down.
A lot of diplomatic efforts were made at the time. Ukraine was convinced to hand over their nukes, in exchange for security guarantees (that went well...) And in reality, the amount of US/Russian nuclear weapons was reduced during that period (mostly tactical)
But imagine us 20 years into the future. 6% inflation for two decades has made the US deficit unwieldable. The dollar is no longer the international reserve money. The US has tripled its debt since 2023, and has defaulted.
China is very anxious and demand the US abandon nuclear weapons in return for financial aid and debt-forgiving. What do you think is going to happen?
You're never going to get someone suffering from acute loss-of-empire to give up all of their nukes.
This is such an insanely retrospective analysis that you either alienate or lose anyone who would want to agree to your message. Yeah, 30 years later we can see the effect of a slightly "lax" global nuclear policy after isolating a single point in time that catalyzed several historical invasions from then to present day, but "just taking it seriously" isnt a discussion. Any pathway we could have taken from that moment could have easily escalated any numerous amount of tensions, plenty of which have completely lost any hint of understanding their contexts. Pretending that taking the path you can justify as the solution to our problems NOW is a few steps away from prompting others to write historical fanfiction, but I'd probably rather you spent time with chatgpt amusing those curiosities.
Speaking of 1980s nuclear war movies, I'd recommend the US movie Testament. (1983) Everyone who was around remembers the grand spectacle that was The Day After (depicting the aftermath of a nuclear attack on a city), but Testament was, like Threads, a small scale story about a family. The movie is set in a small town too far away from cities to actually be damaged in the initial attack, but as the weeks go on the town begins to run out of supplies (because there is no longer a supply chain), and fallout begins to arrive in the rain, leading to radiation poisoning.
There was a mini-series called Jericho, which was about a coup in the USA. It began with a series of nuclear attacks on cities, and portrayed the resulting descent into inter-communal violence, gangsterism, shortages and hardship.
It wasn't anything like as scouring as Threads was. If anything it was more like a soap; they made rather light of nuclear winter and fallout.
I liked it, except the weak ending of the truncated second series.
Yes, Testament had a similar setting to Jericho but it was a lot grimmer, implying that at best the folks in the small towns would only live a few weeks/months longer than the people killed in the cities.
It amazes me the sheer quantity and variety of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic film and other material. Jericho is generously a prime time drama with a backdrop of nuclear attack.
There’s a sort of seriousness/grimness continuum from Threads and other films on one end to the cartoonish Sam Hell Comes to Frog Town on the other end.
Watched Jericho recently with my partner after telling her about it, as I'd never completed it back when it came out. Genuinely hilariously over-dramaticised, the typical American show where the directors constantly shove music and reactions in viewers' faces because they don't trust them to be smart enough to follow the narrative, but we still enjoyed it for what it was. 7/7 with rice. :)
There was a 1970s British show "Survivors" that had similar social concepts but after a pandemic instead of war. I think of this as the tail end of the era where science fiction still tried to be conceptual, instead of just using it as an aesthetic.
Imagine something like "The Walking Dead" series, but without the unscientific zombie horror and constant cheap gore.
It's a hilarious bit not at all realistic. 'You're telling me that the entire population of Great Britain has elected a complete moron to the highest office in the country... again???'
Threads is a great movie in many ways. One of them is its accurate, well-researched depiction of the state of nuclear war planning in the UK at the time. The Sheffield city emergency operations center is depicted much as they were in most UK cities, with some discussion of the more protected Regional Seat of Government. There is a quite accurate depiction of the HANDEL telephone early warning network, and the greasepen board which would be used to enter detonation reports reported from UKWMO.
It seems primitive from the modern perspective, and it is, but the design of some of these systems was cutting edge within the cost constraints of the time---HANDEL, for example, using the distribution network of leased lines that had been established to distribute the "speaking clock" audio to telephone exchanges. The hierarchical reporting systems designed for nuclear attacks, with information moving up a hierarchy and reports moving back down, were originally developed (principally in the UK) for air defense but advanced significantly during the Cold War and created the basic architecture for many of the first networked computer systems, which were essentially automation of the established systems.
The aftermath depicted in the film is largely drawn from (and accurate to) reports prepared by both UK and US civil defense organizations, but tends to take the more pessimistic route---not at all an unreasonable choice, as these agencies had a tendency to be rather rosy in their forward-looking work. This seems to have been more a political attitude than a result of the actual analysis of the time, as reports alluded to the worst outcomes being likely and some programs were secretly initiated under the assumption that survival of population centers was infeasible (e.g. the famously secretive US mass relocation program). But planners also felt that, from a practical perspective, it was important for the public to be optimistic. "Expect the best, prepare for the worst" is a positive take on the era, although for political reasons the "expect" often got a lot more resources than the "prepare."
Ironicaly, it's easier to picture the world ending, than to picture someone pitching the concept of a realistic "end of the world from the laymen perspective" movie.
That being said, I think climate activists need to have their "The Day After" moment, but the problem is that they have to distort science just enough to have a movie where they show _westerners_ taking the blunt of the damage.
Don't get me wrong, adaptating the first chapter of "The Ministry for the Future" would make for an harrowing look, too (*) - but watching 20 million people from India die in heat bulb, is, sadly, simply never going to have the same impact as seeing the house next door explode.
(Also, for those who've read the book: I want to watch the Davos scene on a big screen.)
The immediacy of war is never going to be matched by a slowly evolving disaster such as climate change and that is exactly why we're not doing anything that will move the needle. It is just over the horizon, very comfortable and plenty of people strongly believe that since they are not personally going to be affected that it doesn't concern them.
But if a country is invaded that is something that you can actually do something about, on the spot and see the result.
> The immediacy of war is never going to be matched by a slowly evolving disaster such as climate change and that is exactly why we're not doing anything that will move the needle.
True. So the best medium might not be a single movie, but a long-period-spanning series where you would follow "regular" people (possibly from around the world) while they age and come with a changing climate. Sort of "Years and years"[1] but on an even bigger timescale.
Or maybe non-interactive fiction is not the right medium, and we need an mmorpg where every day/week of game play is a year in game-world time, and effects of climate are baked-in ?
And you get to repeat the experience of "from now until 2050" every few weeks ?
> That being said, I think climate activists need to have their "The Day After" moment, but the problem is that they have to distort science just enough to have a movie where they show _westerners_ taking the blunt of the damage.
We've had so many already. Day after tomorrow, snow piercer, don't look up, etc and that's not including all the 'documentaries'.
Isn't it amazing how mankind is always forced into a state of existential angst by the people in power. Nuclear winter to globalcooling to ozone to hiv to global terrorism to global warming. Will an asteroid end life on earth? Who cares? Life goes on.
Well, 'Day after tomorrow' and 'Snow Priecers' are perhaps distorting science a bit too much ;).
'Don't look up' is a bit more on topic, but it's a comedy about our handling of a prediction of a catastrophe, not our handling of the catastrophe itself.
> Isn't it amazing how mankind is always forced into a state of existential angst by the people in power. Nuclear winter to globalcooling to ozone to hiv to global terrorism to global warming.
Well, it depends on "which people" in power of "what".
The exact opposite arguments pops up regularly, where some indefinite "They" is accused of "hidding" a very dangerous thing that is going to destroy us all.
We have almost as much evidence of governements, corporations, interest groups downplaying risks (nuclear winter, global warming, AI, etc..), than of governments, news outlets, activits overblowing risks (global cooling, terrorism, etc...)
It's usually just fun when the risks are completely imaginary, but in practice someone _is_ affected.
In the end, we have survivor bias for "mostly past" risks (nuclear war, covid, ozone layer, terrorism, hiv, etc... are not things of the past per se, they're just less acutely present), and Cassandra syndrom for the future ones - with the benefit of our capacity for fiction.
At some point, the proverbial shit hits the proverbial fan, and we do our best, and we 've historically survived as a species - but I'd rather not be too close to the feces, and I wish more people would "see the movie" before it happens.
They will try to go into island mode. This is effectively already happening. Not that it will make one bit of a difference but they will definitely try.
We have no way to know if this is going to end with massive shootouts at borders. The political costs of "just build makeshift camps, keep them fed and out of sights, eventually send them to another country, and let most people ignore them" is still lower than "handle a viral video of your army massively shooting migrants".
That being said, I think climate activists need to have their "The Day After" moment
Mentioned in other comments The Road is a possible contemporary parallel, but the time has probably past for experiences as communally shared as watching Threads due to the very fragmented media landscape, especially compared to the very limited UK TV choice of the 80s.
I've only seen the movie, but If I remember correctly, the Road never really explains the catastrophe, nor does it link it to climate change, does it ?
Also, a cataclysm that kills bugs but spares Charlize Theron ? Come ooooon..
Huh, just a week ago, I was searching the seas for a copy of Q.E.D. A Guide to Armageddon which was Mick Jackson's earlier directorial attempt to capture the sheer insanity and horror of nuclear war.
It seems to me that modern television is very watered down compared to what was shown in the 1970s/80s.
Edit: After some random clicking around on IMDB, I've just found out that Mick Jackson also directed the amazing Connections series (starring James Burke).
I love Connections! Still I sometimes wonder if this particular shot isn't hyped a bit too much, with people actually wondering in the comments whether it's fake... why should it be?
It's a fairly trivial feat for any good presenter (and of course Burke was very good) to get the timing of a single sentence right; /that's part of their job/. He does one or two practice runs and then knows the duration. In the event, the countdown was public, so he got the GO at T-15, stepped into the frame and delivered the line.
Don't get me wrong, the effect /is/ spectacular, but in practice, it wouldn't have been too difficult to pull it off with a bit of preparation. Still I bet the production crew had a round of applause when they had the take.
Of course they got only one chance for this particular shot, so I imagine they had filmed it at least once before just in case, and would then just have cut to the take-off. Wouldn't have been "The Greatest Shot in TV", but still good enough.
That's an audacious bit of TV. Watching it now, it seems as though James Burke slowed down his delivery to match the timing - I bet he must have practised it a lot beforehand.
My favourite aspect to the Connections series is the dry wit of James Burke. We could do with a modern version, but I'd be afraid that it would be dumbed down too much. Maybe get Hannah Fry to present it.
Sorry, I haven't watched the film, but it's interesting to see how much of an impact it had on people in the uk. Looking at it from a geopolitical point of view at the time USSR was (economically) at the brink. They were failing in Afghanistan _hard_. Countries like Poland were harder and harder to control. The only option for USSR to survive was to convince the West they _will_ nuke everyone if they go down. In this context I'm very interested if we ever find out exact circumstances that led to the decision to air this film at 9.30pm on Sunday and not in a late night slot mid-week it would seem more appropriate for. Also, how did the BBC choose to make this particular production etc. Call me paranoid, but I don't think it's a far off stretch of imagination to assume it didn't "happen by itself". I wonder, had a majority of Americans watch films like that before they voted Ronald Regan in for a second term, would they vote for him?
> had a majority of Americans watch films like that before they voted Ronald Regan in for a second term, would they vote for him?
Well they watched "The Day After", 39 million households, during his first term. One of the people watching was an ex-actor who said it was "very effective and left me greatly depressed", who then used his position as commander in chief of the US armed forces to make the Joint Chiefs of Staff watch it, and then that president turned around and managed to get the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty agreed.
One wonders what would have happened had Walter Mondale won in 1984. Would he have been as affected as Reagan? Would he have managed to persuade a traditionally hawkish conservative chiefs of staff? Would he have been able to persuade the Russian leadership?
For anyone interested in this subject / genre I recommend "The War Game" by Peter Watkins [1]
Also by Peter Watkins, "The Journey" (aka "Resan") [2]. Quite long, that one.
Threads is one of relatively few films I have ever been inclined to re-watch. In fact, I watched it soon after the first covid lockdown started, followed by bingeing on "I Shouldn't be Alive". Quite curious about the psychology behind those viewing choices!!
I found the original Fallout games 15 years ago or so, and got interested in post-apocalyptic worlds and wanted to watch a movie about one. Threads was the first movie I saw, and after watching it I didn't want to watch another one.
Nuclear weapons are humanities biggest extensional threat, moreso than climate change, but it rarely seems to be discussed in public forums. Films like Threads and Day After Tomorrow should be a requirement in civics classes for states that possess nuclear weapons.
I’m not sure what case can be made for mutually assured destruction bringing peace to the world. Is it causal to how there are relatively fewer people who die in wars during our modern times? Is it correlated with the global improvement in standard or living? or is it merely a statistical blip that will be “evened out” when a nuclear war takes place?
I do think it’s a pipe dream to eliminate nukes; however I do wish there was some way to increase the amount of time required between intending to use them and actually using them. The 1979 incident at NORAD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls#9_...) is a great example of why the latency shouldn’t be minutes between intent and implementation. Increasing this latency to days, then weeks, in a verifiable manner could give time for cooler heads to prevail.
The depressing thing is that so long as these weapons exist, it’s not a matter of “if” they will be used, it’s a matter or “when”.
I watched it with the expectation that it was shocking, but it was mostly what I expected, didn't really affect me. It was filmed in a way that made it feel like a fever dream, but the actual content wasn't too bad.
I felt much worse after Requiem for a Dream and immediately regretted watching it. But I was younger at that time.
> It was filmed in a way that made it feel like a fever dream,
I'm curious if you are from the US? It's filmed as if it was a UK TV soap opera, which to people in the UK would definitely not feel like a fever dream.
OMG I watched Requiem, and then Dancer in the Dark - and didn’t go back to the movies for 6 months! Since then I basically nope out of anything more stressful than Amélie.
So the depiction of the ever present threat of nuclear war and the aftermath is not scary and rather predictable? A fever dream of 'good content'. Watching the collapse of civilisation is nothing compared to Jared Leto.
There’s an episode of some sci-fi anthology show[0] where this woman is struggling with the chaos in her life, loses it in a supermarket and starts yelling, “Shut up!” She quickly learns she can pause time by doing so and start it again by saying, “Start talking.” She used it in predictable ways. The episode ends with an impending nuclear attack and she screams, “Shut up!” at the news cast and the sirens and her crying family. The world stops, she steps outside, and looks up at an ICBM frozen above the city.
I saw this when I was somewhere around the age of 10. I didn’t see The Day After or any of the real serious nuclear stuff. But there’s a piece of my mind that still exists in that episode of that show. Stuff hits you weird when you’re a kid in ways I don’t think most adults remember. And I only say weird because hard isn’t the right word and I don’t think how it hits is always predictable.
[0]I thought it was the second version of The Twilight Zone which aired about the right time, but I can’t find such an episode.
Children today are apparently having nightmares about climate change, and depicting apocalypse scenarios when asked to visualise the future.
Stories are given to children all the time and it effects them.
I still remember nightmares about nuclear apocalypses. Threads contributed. Children today will remember the nightmares we give them today and then go on to give their own children new nightmares in responses to their parents emergency.
Can it be ever moral? Is it only sometimes necessary? How can trauma be prevented? Can information be given effectively?
I happened to watch this recently one night when I couldn't sleep; I figured it was just some old 70s low budget movie that'd put me to sleep.
Holy hell, this turned out to be one of the scariest movies I have ever watched in my life, and I don't scare easily from movies. Needless to say I don't recommend watching as a sleep aid. Or maybe for any aid. Ever.
There are, in my opinion, two types of people. Those who have never seen Threads, and those who have seen Threads at least one time too many. You probably should have stayed in the former category :)
Part of the subtle brilliance of Threads is how it deliberately withholds information from you. You do NOT learn the fate of many of the characters. Including---spoiler alert---the character you initially THINK is the main protagonist, until halfway through the film when he disappears with never another trace. You do NOT learn the fate of the rest of the world besides the UK. All of this is brilliant because the characters themselves would also never learn those things.
I watched Threads five or so years ago, but it was meh, maybe it hit harder if you watched it decades ago. This, on the other hand . . . gave me pause, as a grownass man: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cAZZR_Jki0
Yes, that was pretty heavy as well. And it is much more likely now than when it was first distributed. What they really got right there is the degree of uncertainty that accompanies almost every statement. You never really know what is going on other than that things are escalating, quickly. And that leaves you wondering all the time what the real situation is, and then the next update makes you realize it was worse. This feeling never really leaves you.
It actually seems less likely now. Russia didn't have the military strength to invade the other European countries but we didn't know until they bashed themselves against Ukraine. Back when the current war started analysts seemed to be predicting it would be over in days or weeks.
The nuclear side is still scary but the idea that Russia would even try to engage NATO forces and then have a showdown seems ludicrous.
Kinda like 9/11, when no one fully knew what the hell was going on in real time other than it was very, very bad, except substitute the less than a handful of planes being hijacked with civilization-ending nukes flying all over the place.
I remember Threads clearly, that along with "When The Wind Blows" are etched into my memory. I grew up near Sheffield, and it all just seemed so real to me. It was incredibly harrowing to watch.
This is the first thing I thought of when Meta released Threads. I winced when hearing the name. This film is burned into my memory after renting it from a cult video shop way back in the day.
I know this is a bit adjacent, but I always come across this sort of movie when I encounter another small genre of films, which is the documentary-style sci-fi. Following in the vein of Orson Wells’ War of the Worlds’ “News report” these are sci-fi presented as non-fiction. The one I witnessed in real-time was Without Warning but have since discovered Alternative 3 and Special Bulletin
It’s a fascinating genre as television used to be much more trusted, like radio before it, and the internet has I think gone through the same transformation. And it’s fascinating that each of these productions thought “No way people will think it’s real…”
I usually see “Threads” (1984) paired with “When the Wind Blows” (1986), which is a British animated film with similar themes. It’s really good if people are looking for something to watch.
We were shown When the Wind Blows at school when I was about 13 and it absolutely traumatised me. To this day just thinking about it makes my stomach drop and I still occasionally daydream about how I'd create a makeshift fallout shelter in my childhood home.
For the curious, here is the most recent press release by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists explaining in detail why they have set the Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds from midnight:
The furthest it went was "17 minutes to midnight" in 1991. What state would the world need to be in to get to "1 hour to midnight"?
During the Cuban Missile Crisis it was set at 7 minutes to midnight. What happened in 2007 and the last 16 years to make the world closer to doom than it was during those 13 days?
It's such a meaningless scale I've never paid attention.
I mean, it's condensing the unknowable event horizon of entire world of geopolitics into one number, so some loss of nuance is to be expected. It's a narrative device, not a scientific instrument.
Re:1991, the fact that nuclear weapons were safely handled during dissolution of the Soviet Union was a huge deal. To get more than 7 minutes of benefit though, those weapons would have to have gone away rather than just be relabeled as Russian. The current state of Ukraine is proof of why it was correct to view this event as cold comfort - simply buying time. 7 minutes worth.
In 2007 climate change was added as a factor to the clock's position. At that time North Korea was actively testing nuclear missiles and Iran's program was gearing up.
Between then and now, nothing substantial has been done on climate change, and nothing substantial has been done to stop North Korea or Iran's nuclear ambitions. The US and Russia have stepped away from open skies treaty and others. Many other geopolitical issues have boiled over.
It's subjective of course but IMO to be an hour from doomsday - we'd need to reverse (not just stop) human accelerated climate change, have much more aggressive nuclear treaties, no large violent geopolitical conflicts, no pending Taiwan invasion, etc.
Even Star Trek's future society is an hour from doomsday, or there'd be nothing for the TV shows.
To read into the justifications for why the clock has been where it is, the Wikipedia article is quite detailed (particularly the 'timeline' section) and has citations to the Bulletin's various communications on the topic, which are nothing if not verbose:
Threads is one of the most memorable things I have watched. It is incredibly dark and unremittingly bleak.
Books that informed my understanding of nuclear war and that I recommend are: Hiroshima by John Hersey, Command and Control by Eric Schlosser, The Doomsday Machine by (recently deceased) Daniel Ellsberg.
And later generations as well. It's a movie that you probably shouldn't watch unless you are very sure that you are properly equipped to deal with it, and even then you should prepare to be overwhelmed.
There’s some doubt which Thatcher government initiative this programme was in support of: “protect and survive” or “long term economic plan for the North of England”
Either way it certainly hastened the move to plastic milk cartons.
Power and Chaos! Yeah, I remember watching The Tribe every Saturday morning. Turns out loads of people here in the UK watched it as kids too but they don't remember the name, so you have to say "it's the show where all the adults died and kids run around a city with their faces painted trying to avoid a villain called Zoot and his gang whose motto is Power and Chaos" which usually works.
Back then, there was all sorts of ideas and drills in the event of a nuclear war. There was "Protect and Survive" [0] from the UK Government and plenty of parodies along the lines of "In the event of nuclear war, take cover under the nearest table, cover your head with your hands and kiss your ass goodbye".
I should be a required viewing for all enthusiasts of escalation of conflict with Russia. When the shit hits a proverbial fan, it will be too late to start thinking...
> I should be a required viewing for all enthusiasts of escalation of conflict with Russia
Yes because Russia would rather end the world and itself then lose, that's a position the people all the way up the command chain to launch the nukes will totally have too.
Not sure if your post is sarcastic, but:
1. Russia is highly unlikely to lose.
2. Ukraine was planning and implementing escalatory moves to keep the West engaged.
3. The end of the world is not in strategic plans of either side, but it may happen as a sequence of tit-for-tat moves with a little help of an accident or two.
It doesn't look like they are going to occupy all of Ukraine any time soon, which we know was their primary goal based on the accidentally posted victory article on TAS.
> 2. Ukraine was planning and implementing escalatory moves to keep the West engaged.
Theres literally no proof of this, but even if there was, id ask what escalatory measures exist when you're in a state of total war, having an existential risk to the literal existence of your state?.
> 3. The end of the world is not in strategic plans of either side, but it may happen as a sequence of tit-for-tat moves with a little help of an accident or two.
The end of the world also requires every single person who is actively involved in launching nukes to actually do it.
Would you press that button knowing you'd kill everyone you know and end life as you know it?.
1. They likely won't occupy all of Ukraine, but I doubt it was their initial goal.
They may still occupy all of the eastern part. In any case, it's pretty unlikely they will just pack and go home.
3. Not every person, there is some redundancy in the chain exactly to make sure it will work even in case of a few people who wouldn't press the button.
>> Russia is restoring its unity - the tragedy of 1991, this terrible catastrophe of our history, its unnatural dislocation, have been overcome. Yes, at a high price, yes, through the tragic events of the virtual civil war, because now brothers separated by belonging to the Russian and Ukrainian armies are still shooting at each other - but Ukraine will no longer be anti-Russia. Russia is restoring its historical fullness by gathering the Russian world, the Russian people together - in its entirety of Great Russians, Belarusians and Little Russians. If we had abandoned this, allowed temporary division to gain a foothold for centuries, we would not only betray the memory of our ancestors, but would also be cursed by our descendants - for allowing the collapse of the Russian land.
For reference 1991 is when Ukraine gained its independence.
Many of us have PTSD from this movie and the Cold War!
I watched it aged 12 with my cousins whilst staying at a relatives house. The adults were out.
X-Gen 80s kids have legitimately recognised PTSD from the Cold War.
The fear pressed into us by the media was horrific. It was everywhere. Discussion of the horrors of nuclear war were unavoidable and terrifying. Impossible for children’s brains to understand.
Every time I heard a jet go overhead I thought it was a nuclear bomb.
If disturbingly realistic nuclear war movies are your jam, check out an older UK production from the 50s called The War Game. Threads actually lifts a number of images from it and it was equally terrifying in its time.
The same director did another interesting one called Culloden, in which a 60s BBC documentary crew visits the historic battle as it happens. Hybrid fiction/history experiment.
You see? The "Adult Version" is that after a nuclear war everybody dies. But in fact, that had been the received wisdom for many years. These 1980s movies were actually trying to impress upon people that after such a war, there would be survivors who would keeping suffering for a long time.
"Threads" however annoyed me in that everyone seem to regress to a pre-civilization mental state, even losing their grammar. In reality, much of the world (including most of the southern hemisphere) would be untouched and would be sufficient to get the supply chains sort-of working again (at least in a few decades).
really neither. Hollywood likes to portray these dog-eat-dog lone ranger scenarios, but the reality is people band together.
A good many major cities would be decimated, but even just an hours drive away you'd be mostly fine, at least after a week or two when the fallout has fallen out.
I don't mean to downplay an all-out nuclear exchange as no big deal, obviously it would be an even worse disaster than ww2 etc, but it wouldn't end civilization let alone all life.
And if you look at how many nukes there are, and factor by how many would actually work (maybe not that meny of russia's for example), it would be very far from global annihilation.
Sure, the whole global economic system we have now would be totally disrupted, and we'd spend a few decades rebuilding certain areas, or cordoning off others, but life would go on.
This is almost comically incorrect. A few decades rebuilding? We'd be lucky to come through that with even a semblance of our institutions and capabilities in one piece. Never mind the population...
There are simply not enough nukes to destroy even every large city or even a majority of them, and then there are all the military targets that would be a priority anyway.
Just 10s of miles away, you'd be mostly fine anyway, after the fallout has fallen.
Nuclear winter is not a real thing, or at least, it's on a similar scale to a large volcanic eruption. ie at least a "year without a summer", and maybe a decade of cooler weather, but not the years of total darkness we're led to imagine.
Of course, with completely destroyed supply chains, bad crop yields etc, and then inevitable fighting over resources, the aftermath would see many millions of further deaths.
But look at somewhere like Shenzhen. A small fishing village just 40-50 years ago. Or Berlin after WW2.
Sure, we'll rebuild in a few decades. Perhaps not to the same levels of grotesque consumerism and waste we have now maybe.
I mean, this is obviously not something we want to happen, at almost any cost (for example, russia winning in ukraine would be infinitely preferable, even for most ukrainians), but it would not be the end of even civilization, let alone humanity, or all life.
Zero. In the first few years, they would likely trade grain and oil for hard money (gold, silver). Once that played out, much of the effected world would likely have economies similar to the late 19th century--materials extraction, textiles, agriculture. The result would be a generation or two of poverty, but not a total collapse.
Also, the "nuclear wasteland" business is pure sci fi.
What a terribly written article. Wasted so much time reading this trying to get to the point but the author just rambles on about how traumatic it was without explaining how specifically. You'd think the author was trying to fill up sone word quota, just get to the damn point.
As someone else posted about humans and their ability to survive.
> "A species with human-level technology could survive even the Chicxulub asteroid that killed off non-avian dinosaurs, given the huge population and vast range that industrial civilization enables that species to attain, as well as the diverse array of energy sources, and robust habitats that become accessible to such a species."
What's interesting is that Threads and Day After had such impact (I saw The Day After as an 80s kid) but the things that affect me more are: forest fires hundreds of miles away, global epidemics, and water security. How banal.
It was posted on hn just a couple of months ago. I watched it then on YouTube. It was pretty harrowing, to a person who grew up in the UK it felt very easily real and not dramatised.
The BBC also made the excellent "The War Game" in the 1960s - which was withdrawn from being broadcast as "the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting. It will, however, be shown to invited audiences...".
Some countries literally have no plans for warning the public. Like Australia…
We have emergency warning systems that can do all the modern stuff like cell/tower area broadcast/push, websites, data feeds, and radio/tv station protocols for major enough events… which are all nationally coordinated, but actually activating them is delegated to state level control, so a national emergency is passed down to the state emergency management organisations… but while Australia would absolutely know we’ve got nukes incoming (5 Eyes intel, and our own massive over the horizon radar systems) and probably have some idea where they are headed… that’s a military matter with no publicly documented process.
We have a publicly documented process to handle a biological incident (weapon or accident doesn’t change how you deal with this much once it’s happened) and we’ve got a publicly document procedure for re-entering space debris (which we’ve actually used recently due to some random spaceX debris in a farmer’s paddock) …
But we have no plan for if we’re going to get nuked… which is only partly understandable.
We’re not exactly spread out enough that a dedicated nuclear attack couldn’t exterminate >90% of the entire population of Australia. Depending on the missile and it’s MIRV/Decoy ratio and the yield of the weapons, you could probably get above 90% with 3 or 4 ICBMs. There’s no infrastructure for sheltering, and we’re completely unprepared for the aftermath, having a plan that details how fucked the survivors might be is … not something I think a lot of government ministers want to sign their names to… bad optics…
However the counter argument is we’re a major US ally providing material support to US overseas military power projection by way of naval ports (which we just made more important as part of our sub deal making those ports more useful for US nuclear submarines) our significant regional radar coverage (JORN is quite the beast of a radar) and us hosting secure downlinks for the US orbital assets covering this hemisphere and us hosting a major communications facility which would likely play a role in ensuring the final communication of orders to submerged nuclear ballistic missile submarines in the event that a nuclear war actually happens. I find it hard to imagine Australia won’t have at least a couple of nukes headed out way somewhere early on the list of targets even if it’s not so much about Australia as it is about destroying and degrading the ability of the US armed forces to operate in the indo-pacific region.
So on the one hand… probably going to happen in the event the shit hits the fan so hard nuclear war starts… on the other hand there’s not a lot we can do to prepare or defend right now against the sudden outbreak of nuclear war. So why worry anyone with detailed plans for horrific doom. Sure if tensions rise we might get some US missile defence systems that could help make it less doomsday, but that kind of military planning is probably a classified bullet point on some future planning list based on one or more of the treaties Australia has with America already.
Oh and there’s the classic “On the Beach” if anyone is looking for more of this kind of horrible disaster scenario stuff.
One of my early bits of library research involved archive dives for a book by (now) Emeritus Professor David Blair, pioneer in gravitational wave research in Australia [1].
The book was
First and Final War: A Basic Information Manual on the Effects of Nuclear War Applied to Australia (1986) [2]
and featured reasoning as to why Australia would be high on a first strike list, primary as a MIRV target covering radar and signaling installations.
Also some early work on blast radius and fallout spread.
It bears repeating that the submarine communications station (in Australia, there are others) responsible for sending fire commands is the Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt [3]
To be fair, the bits of Australia where the significant military and intelligence installations are located are literally thousands of kilometres away from Australia’s larger population centres.
Nuking Australia’s cities would do precisely nothing for Russia or China’s strategic position in the event of a nuclear conflict - and the threat to do so doesn’t deter us from launching nukes at either because we don’t have any to launch regardless.
Mostly correct but with an important exception. Our two primary naval bases Fleet Base West and Fleet Base East, are located in proximity to populated areas. Fleet Base East is basically in Sydney and Fleet Base West is approximately 35km from Perth, somewhat offshore and to the south, but not that it’s the most accurate predictor but NukeMaps estimates for blast and fallout have moderate to significant effects on the city of Perth depending on the size of the nuke used, which depends a lot on how much an adversary wants to ensure that they destroy infrastructure the Australian and US navies can use to support, resupply, and maintain nuclear submarines in the Antarctic and Indian Oceans, the AUKUS treaty which will give Australia its first nuclear submarines also includes provisions for greater cooperation and interoperability with UK and US submarines, and will involve US nuclear submarines getting supply and basic maintenance at Fleet Base West even before we have our own nuclear attack submarines as part of the overall plan to train and upskill the Australian navy to support the new submarines.
So while a strike against communications infrastructure only would indeed be aimed at facilities in remote enough locations that the general population need not worry too much about the nuclear part of the war that just happened… if they expand the target list to include the Australian navy’s facilities, then Perth and Sydney are in for a pretty bad time.
Can ICBMs even target Australia? I always figured that if anyone cared to screw with them, it'd be the SLBMs. It's not as if they need more than a (in this case, literal) boatload to turn it into the Mad Max wasteland. And with Tina Turner gone, who'd even run Bartertown?
Moscow to Perth, Western Australia (overflying the US Naval Communication Station) is 12,000 km.
The Chinese DF-5 has that range, the Russian RS-28 Sarmat has a range of 18,000 km.
The assumption in the mid 1980s was that any 'first strike' against the US by Russia would first target global radar and submarine commnications with other hard targets stacked up immediately behind .. in order to sow confusion and minimise chances of counter strike orders.
A sense of Duty to your people? I think people deserve the 8 minute warning to the end if it's possible. It's not right for the government to decide that "there's nothing to do about it", as the second a nuke launches, any ideas of "right" or "wrong" is moot and pointless, and all of philosophy goes down the drain. You have several minutes to have the last thoughts and sentences you will ever see. Say and do the things that matter to you in those moments.
So what if people panic and murder or attack each other or loot or anything else? In a nuclear exchange, I'd argue pure and unadulterated anarchy is the only morally correct option, as the concept of "state" and "society" just failed catastrophically.
>However the counter argument is we’re a major US ally providing material support to US overseas military power projection
This seems like an enormous risk factor more than anything else. Australia and the EU are essentially vassals of the USA, but Australia seems wayyyy more vulnerable to armageddon. Since everyone's packed into such a tight space.
The film ends with a timeskip over a decade later, with the populace reduced to pre-industrial life struggling to survive as they farm off the irradiated land, and those who've grown up in that world speak a very damaged version of English (as if it was hard for everyone to understand Yorkshire accents in the first place!). There's attempts to keep people educated from what they can remember and scavenge, but it doesn't hold a candle to what was once.
It's a very mortifying film that hits you hard, and even skimming over bits of it as I type this, the shot of the mushroom cloud behind Sheffield city centre has made my gut sink – and this is from someone who was born after the Cold War, God knows how distressing it was for those who watched it during the height of it.