For fans of Threads, (or for anyone who just doesn't want to sleep tonight), I found a wonderful piece of Nuclear Fiction last week: A fake BBC news report tracking an escalating conflict between NATO and Russian forces.
It's the only piece of fiction that has made me feel deathly ill in quite the same way Threads did.
[EDIT] also, those familiar with The Day After should watch out for a little easter-egg toward the end.
[DOUBLE-EDIT] I'm just re-watching the end now and even with full knowledge that it is fiction, the Attack Warning Red sound is still absolutely horrifying.
Another scary nuclear holocaust movie: Miracle Mile (1988) [1].
Framed as a love story, it's set during a single night in LA as a man accidentally picks up a ringing pay phone and hears what seems to be a soldier who has misdialed his father and calling to warn of an impending missile launch.
It's an incredibly tense film as the man anguishes about whether the phone call was fake or not, and decides to make an attempt to get out of town, but not before getting his girlfriend. It doesn't have the documentary realism of Threads, but the atmosphere of dread is a fantastic, and the structure -- a long "After Hours"-type night of craziness while nuclear holocaust is looming -- is pretty unique.
Fanstastic movie, and very very 80's. Not nearly as terrifying as Threads, which is by far the most terrifying nuclear holocaust themed movie I've ever seen, but still very much worth watching, especially for fans of "what if?" scenarios, and those who enjoy wondering what people would actually do if they thought nuclear war was really going to happen.
I'd add in 1965's "The War Game" by Peter Watkins. it was commissioned by the BBC as an educational film to prepare the populace for a post nuclear attack world, but was pulled at the last minute as "the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting."
Also check out Seven Days in May.[1] It's kind of like a serious version of Dr. Strangelove, being more about the events leading up to nuclear war rather than the war itself. Very well done.
Also Testament (1983), an American movie about a small town far away from major cities to avoid the nuclear war itself, but unlike this typical situation in fiction, they don't live happily after but eventually have to deal with radiation sickness due to fallout and the problem of supplies running out.
That was really unnerving. To me, it reinforced the idea that in a major nuclear conflict, I'm not going to have any idea what's going on. The survivors (assuming there are some) might eventually figure it out but in the short/medium term most are probably going to be left wondering what just happened, who are they at war with, did any side "win"?
If we're trading recommendations of harrowing things to watch, may I nominate Isao Takahata's "Grave of the Fireflies", the story of two children trying to survive in Japan towards the end of the Second World War in the face of a callous, indifferent world.
The only animated feature that is guaranteed to make this grown man weep like there's no tomorrow.
There is also an absolutely harrowing anime Barefoot Gen. I remember when it came out on TV (90s Russia) all the kids who saw it were greatly affected.
I nominate Isao Takahata's "Grave of the Fireflies"
It's a great movie, but if you are going to watch, I highly recommend that you don't watch it alone and that you have something "fun" planned afterwords - maybe a fun dumb movie like The Hangover, play with your dog in the park, etc. Do not watch it by yourself and then go to bed. It is really haunting.
That's not what the end of civilization means at all. It's not like the country had no structure any more. There were still families, bomb shelters and alerts, certainly nothing close to the end of civilization that occurs like in Threads.
Did you watch the movie ? The children deliberately chose to live on their own while they could have returned to their aunt - who, despite treating them unfairly, was still feeding them.
This remark is so brutally inhumane, so utterly disregarding of human behaviour and lacking in any sympathy or feeling for the most vulnerable that I wish Hacker News had a "block user" button.
Productions such as the faux-BBC video and "The Day After" remind me that the word 'obscenity' is utterly wasted on pictures of naked people, when it applies perfectly to high-altitude nuclear mushrooms created by global banking interests.
While I'm all against war I'm not sure how the banks are supposed to set it off. If anything the banks would be screwed. Wars mostly seem to be caused by alpha male leaders sacrificing the people for their greatness and glory. Which is why wars between democracies tend to be pretty half hearted or not happen as the people tend not to be keen on that.
Wow! Just wow! I knew this was fiction the whole time I was watching it and it's still horrifying, right from the outset. They did such a great job, I can't give them enough credit for their realism.
This is really well done. I think there are some issues with the chronology of how some of it would play out but that's nitpicking. If you enjoy this kind of thing, I very much suggest reading Red Storm Rising. It's somewhat old at this point but presents a very detailed account of this kind of situation.
Thanks, this is very well done. I think in a way it's even scarier than Threads, given it doesn't allow you the detachment of seeing other people. You would _be there_ watching this report and losing it.
I think they've done a few different versions. The differences seem to be mostly in the TV trimmings at the start and end, and a few versions have US or Canadian civil-defence warnings at the end.
Skimming through, the content seems to be largely the same, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were making small changes too.
[EDIT] Actually, you're right, some of the older versions have different (to my ear, worse) voice work. I'm glad the iterated on the idea and polished it up.
That radio broadcast did create a response from a small subset. But that response was from an insignificant, poorly informed, population and was quickly tempered with a minimal amount of effort.
I highly doubt it created a 'mass panic' with serious consequence, as if the average person believed Aliens were attacking earth due to a radio broadcast...
The fact it was false was immediately spreading among the newspapers:
> They immediately left the theatre, and standing on the corner of Broadway and 42nd Street, they read the lighted bulletin that circled the New York Times building: ORSON WELLES CAUSES PANIC.
This type of thinking that we need to protect people has been causing comedians to needlessly apologizing for ultimately harmless art on a weekly basis.
There's a big difference between a piece of humour/fiction crossing the intended audience into people who miss the obvious humour/fiction and take it seriously... and actual malice.
I meant it was exaggerated compared to how many people actually panicked. Playing a fake advent of WWIII in a coffeeshop as if it is real to unsuspecting people might cause a different response though.
> If enough people tweeted about it, Trump might even be stupid enough to "react"
This reminds me of many years as a designer where many people new to design hear the platitude "don't make people think" and assume this is because people don't immediately think so you have to assume they are entirely dumb. But in reality people simply put a very low local amount of energy into day-to-day media/internet consumption. You have to assume they are disinterested, not entirely without common sense.
Interfaces don't have to be idiot-proof, they have to be easy to use (a big difference in practice). Compare the effort required to Tweet something vs a response to a serious incident.
Assuming anyone would buy this for longer than a few minutes is ridiculous, they are merely asking anyone around them or a simple google search away from the answer. To say the President would buy it puts you in a lower intelligence category than the falsely assumed average person is in...
A fake Russia attacking US ships (and escalation by European countries in NATO) BBC news story vs Trump campaign being spied on at the direction of people in the Obama administration is hardly comparable.
At most the serious problem is Trump has his own Android phone allowing him to make emotional tweets on demand without editorialization ala news papers or forcing him to take a timeout to fully consider the consequences. The difference between that and taking serious military action is significant, but sadly this distinction has to be made given the hyperbole spreading about the Trump administration...
Also check out Pandora movie. It is korean but their are good English Subs. It is available on Netflix. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt6302160/ Basically fictional Fukushima in South Korea
I remember a few years ago RTÉ news did a fake news report about Sellafield (nearby English) nuclear reactor going boom. I was there like "okay guys let's keep calm" but the girls all went ape-shit. Running around the house bawling. That was stressful.
Anybody really worried ... should probably know, that russia actually decreased their military budget lately. And that US Military budget alone is allmost 10x higher than russias ...
That's going to make nearly no difference in case of an all-out nuclear war. Russia still has thousands of nukes, as does the US. More than enough to completely destroy both countries many times over and pretty much end civilization as the world knows it.
Well, it makes a difference in the scenario. Because in the scenario of the fiction news, russia planned a attack.
It is quite unlikely, that russia would do anything like that, beeing that underpowered.
Russia wouldn't need to plan an attack and disable NATO early warning systems. If all their nukes were detonated, humanity would be doomed regardless of where they were detonated. The fallout would eventually encompass the entire earth.
Russia decreased their budget ... leaving them fewer options to choose from if things get dicey ... making nukes a choice they would be +x% more likely to make.
Even for tiny values of "x" I still can't call this a decided improvement on the nuclear risk.
Thats true, but they would not attack then in the first place, like they did in the video.
And given that allmost no one from the mainstream media wrote about the budget cut and that they rather make fictive attack dokus, makes me allmost count this piece as propaganda.
The expressions that you used ("deathly ill", no sleep tonight) make me think that you may be lacking some perspective and/or are identifying too closely with your body.
Sometimes, it pays to take a step back and contemplate on the fact that you will eventually die. If you vividly visualize that projected moment of your death and make it real in your mind, you will realize that possible problems you may be having in your everyday, mundane life now appear insignificant. You may also be filled with anxiety and dread. Alternatively, you may dissociate.
It is that dissociation that will allow you to identify with something other than your body (nothingness) and thus be free of such (unexamined) reactions.
When I was a younger man I lived as if my life was separated from death by a single sheet of paper. At any time I was ready to die, it made me free and fearless. Then I held my first child, and I understood what folly I had fallen to.
It also pays to realize that when people say something makes them feel "deathly ill", they're probably using it as an expression to signify how shaken they are by something.
People don't seem to understand how close to the edge of disaster we still are. The message in movies like Threads and The Day After are quite relevant today, despite how impossible they may seem. While an intentional war may be less likely today, the danger of an accidental one is just as real.
Just this week, one nuclear state is threatening another nuclear state that happens to border with two other nuclear states. Meanwhile, the nukes are on hair trigger everywhere. What can possibly go wrong?
The really scary part, however, is that, obviously, nobody cares. There are no angry tweets, demonstrations, whatever. Politicians must feel like they can do whatever they want without anyone even noticing.
On the positive note, there are UN negotiations of nuclear weapon ban going on. In theory, the ban could be approved as soon as this summer.
Ah, global zero idea, right? Which is cool, if you believe world leaders can be trusted ... and, even if they can, that they'll trust each other.
It doesn't help that the Saudis are just one large money-transfer away from having their own nukes (the check is probably already written, just waiting to be cashed, so to speak). The Iranians are closer, and Pakistan's been there for some time. So even if the "grown ups" (USA, Russia, China, India, UK, France, Israel) can be counted on to behave themselves, the upstarts less so.
It's also an open question how well the new members of the club would be able to keep their own arsenal under lock and key. If the Middle East gets into a nuclear arms race, to protect themselves from each other, that's all the more opportunities for some enterprising jihadis.
In one sense, the presence of nukes has made large-scale war more unlikely, and taking them off the table might have the opposite effect.
It was done with other types of WMD, so why not nukes? Such bans come with extensive monitoring programs.
Also, it's better to have couple countries hiding few nukes so that they are not found by inspectors than thousands of nukes on hair trigger as we have today. An accident in the first case may wipe out one city or one country. An accident in the latter case will wipe out humanity as a whole.
Also kudos to South Africa who have destroyed their nuke cache long time ago!
This is the original context for "trust, but verify."[1]
There is already a lot of infrastructure for monitoring the development and production of new nuclear weapons. As you suggest, tracking existing weapons is much harder and depends mostly on the cooperation of the club members.
The scale of potential disaster is much lower now than then. We have many times fewer nukes, and counterforce is supposed to work a lot better for the attacking side leaving even less to be thrown on cities.
It will only kill high tens of millions of people now, instead of hundreds!
It's an improvement, but not much of one.
Also, consider the aftermath of nuclear war. Consider how many people live in cities. Consider that cities are not at all equipped to survive without massive, and consistent shipments of food, water, and electricity.
We'd be lucky if billions, not millions, of people didn't die in an all-out nuclear war between the US and Russia. It's still debatable whether any humans anywhere in the world would survive.
Long term, yeah. The ensuing nuclear winter would effect the entire planet much more than was thought in the early Cold War [1], which would absolutely affect food production. Add in the fallout, and your long-term forecast looks pretty bad.
Right now yes, nuke forces are crippled and no longer sufficient to do their job in many cases. Essentially they are sufficient in just one case: Russia finds itself in unmanageable situation and attacks countervalue first, in a deliberate suicide to take everyone else with it. To me it seems highly unlikely. In all other situations, nukes will simply play too little role with every possible conflict fought and won without or with very minimal use of nukes.
They didn't update for 30 years after all, and conventional smart weapons evolved a great lot in the same period. Nukes are almost not needed for counterforce (almost, because area targets such as sub bases and mobile ICBM garrisons are still better attacked with airburst nukes, but these are so low number it will be inconsequental from humanitarian or environmental standpoint).
While our (and presumably Russia's) counterforce capability has improved, a lot of likely counterforce targets are still near major population centers. An all out counterforce exchange would result in tens of millions of civilian casualties. Such an event would probably end our way of life (speaking as an American).
I think that the 1960's plans called for Moscow to be struck by about 400 warheads. Perhaps the modern ones call for less than 10, no one who knows will be able to comment I guess. In any case, not a great day to be in Moscow, London, Los Angeles, Paris... Perhaps casualties will be lower than the second world war, but I doubt it, and my guess is that they will be much higher for civilians, and that the injury count would be perhaps ten times higher due to flash burns. In any case my guess is that everyone who reads this would know people who will die in such a conflict. Not an exciting or positive thought.
Unrivaled global superpowers go out with a whimper, not a bang. If war comes to the U.S. in the near future, I fully believe that it will be due to internal issues.
There's a reason the last official declaration of war by the us was ww2- and why the great powers never make hard and fast alliances with smaller states, or aid them too openly. And the reason is to avoid world war 3. Relations between countries are always in a big muddy middle ground between peace and war because they have to be.
> the great powers never make hard and fast alliances with smaller states, or aid them too openly.
Really? US-Israel? US-Saudi? Russia-Syria? All examples of basically untouchable alliances with smaller states and blatant, public military aid. If I were better educated/informed I'm sure I could come up with more.
Not to mention that the US is fond of breaking treaties left and right, though with the current administration it would surprise me if they didn't jump at the chance to attack anyone anywhere for the least provocation.
This is a good point, and I have an idea I want to toss out here- maybe what's really dangerous is to have a mutual defense treaty between a lot of states but still allow them to have separate diplomatic relationships.. so that a snafu involving one member state can blow up and involve a bunch of countries who didn't need to be involved. If there was a central agency speaking for all those states then there would be fewer ways for a disagreement to occur. So what I'm saying is that 20 small countries will a mutual defense treaty are much more likely to be involved in a war than one big country over the same area. I don't know if that's true or not- you'd have to do the number crunching to find out..
It's the reason we have not yet had WW3. The jury is out on whether that is a good thing.
Perhaps we'll find one day that several smaller conflicts (as horrifying as a WW without nukes would be) would have been preferable to one larger civilization-ending one.
Several smaller conflicts ... yep, sounds like the last 70 years of history since WWII. In a sense, we're in the middle of finding out. I agree the jury's out, but it's probably preferable to WWIII, or even a limited nuclear exchange.
The desire for positive relations with Russia is one of the reasons that Trump was elected. I'm not sure I'd characterize our government's behavior as "teasing Russia". The media is a different story.
It's the opposite: they have shown an incredible amount of restraint in the face of overwhelming opposition and crippling sanctions from Europe and USA.
What? Well, they sure have earned those sanctions haven't they? Aggressive expansionism and annexation of foreign territories, tampering with elections in the USA, not to mention atrocious domestic policies in an effective dictatorship. They have earned those sanctions and more, indeed I think we will find in the future that dealing so softly with Russia was a mistake.
Have you seen the movie this topic is about? If not I highly encourage you to watch it. Blind nationalist attitudes like yours are what will cause the disaster it depicts.
It might surprise, and horrify you to know that a large number of high-ranking US staff think that nuclear war is winnable [1]. It makes my blood boil.
> a large number of high-ranking US staff think that nuclear war is winnable
The article [1] cites two retired generals as its examples of "senior military officers" who "might be eager to get things started in the belief that a war with Russia could actually be winnable".
The official story, of course, is that it is intended to protect against Iran. From my limited understanding of geography, Poland does not lie between Iran and the United States.
Most people don't even realize that just about the same conditions led Japan to attack during WWII. There comes a time when you keep pushing a guy, and he says, enough! No mas!
Japan invaded China in 1931, Thailand in 1941 and had attacked Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia. It was kind of on a roll attacking stuff before it hit the US in a way that is rather different from modern Russia.
Russia was the first country in Europe to invade and annex a part of a neighboring country since, what, WW2? If that's restraint, I hesitate to ask what the lack of it would look like.
Turkey didn't annex Northern Cyprus. Nor did Albania annex Kosovo, nor Russia itself annexed South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Transnistria before.
It's the combination of invasion and annexation - effectively, waging war for a formally acknowledged territorial gain - that makes the situation in Crimea unique post WW2.
People who understand how close to the edge of disaster we are don't seem to understand how far past the edge others already are, and have been for generations.
Nuclear strike is only a relevant fear for people who live cushy lives exploiting those who already live in post-apocalyptic landscapes, often just down the street from them. Those who can afford to worry about imaginary disasters are clearly desensitized to current ones.
Those who truly care about holocausts are already busy putting out fires. Those who only care about themselves are worrying about nuclear weapons.
The possibility of preemptive nuclear strike is still looms. There is also the possibility that the person with their finger on the metaphorical button is not all there, and maybe shouldn't have that power. There is a movement to remove the ability for the president to call preemptive strikes. There is also a movement to remove ICBMs from the Triad. If enemies launch toward the US, an ICBM counter attack launch only allows a 6 minute window. (Assuming they targeted our ICBMs.) A side note: Military doesn't man the ICBMs. They are controlled by civilians. This is by design because the past administrations didn't trust the military to control ICBMs. The fear that they would use them without hesitation was too great.
Nuclear attack subs would pick up the slack and don't require the 6 minute response window. This would greatly reduce the currently great risk of thermonuclear war we live under.
> A side note: Military doesn't man the ICBMs. They are controlled by civilians. This is by design because the past administrations didn't trust the military to control ICBMs. The fear that they would use them without hesitation was too great.
One of the issues is that destroying a nuclear submarine is an ambiguous operation with respect to nuclear war. Are you really going to launch nuclear missiles in response to a sub sinking? With land based ICBMs, it is unambiguously a nuclear attack and you would respond appropriately.
> There is also a movement to remove ICBMs from the Triad. If enemies launch toward the US, an ICBM counter attack launch only allows a 6 minute window.
The existence of ICBMs has been increasingly questioned in most of the countries that have them, with France leading the pack having phased them out of service. You've described one of the reasons, but the more important one is that their future ability to deliver warheads is now suspect. The SDI project was largely a comedy, but one of it's sub-projects, Brilliant Pebbles [1] was quite successful. While the work on the project as whole was ended, it's subcomponents lived on, most importantly the Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle [2], the interceptor of the Ground-Based Interceptor [3], which was developed from the KE interceptor of Brilliant Pebbles. During the 00's, advancements in computers and especially digital cameras have made what were previously the hardest parts of Brilliant Pebbles have become not only realistic to implement but also quite cheap. At this point, it is widely believed that if anyone were to manufacture the ~5000 required interceptors and loft them into low earth orbit, this would provide nearly 100% effective missile shield against any exoatmospheric ballistic missiles.
The reason this was not previously considered debilitating to ICBMs was because of the limitations in available rocket launches, boosting all those interceptor satellites into orbit would have taken a very long time, during which you could either seek diplomatic solutions blocking their deployment, start deploying your own ASAT assets, or seek other solutions.
Enter SpaceX. Not only will ITS be the largest rocket ever developed, but they are intended to be very rapidly reusable, and SpaceX intends to build multiple of them operating from different pads. If they work as advertised, when they become operational the prompt space launch capability will go up by a factor of 100. This is necessary if we intend to make humanity a multi-planetary species. It will, however, also mean that the Chinese Premier can go to sleep one night in a world where ballistic missiles still work, and wake up into one where one power has deployed a functional ABM shield.
And if the other space launch operators intend to be able to compete with SpaceX in the market, they will have to build competing systems. This means that even the US is now looking into other ways to deliver warheads.
Pray tell what was objectionable about this comment that it got voted into invisibility?
@ritzw: "The possibility of preemptive nuclear strike is still looms. There is also the possibility that the person with their finger on the metaphorical button is not all there, and maybe shouldn't have that power. There is a movement to remove the ability for the president to call preemptive strikes. There is also a movement to remove ICBMs from the Triad. If enemies launch toward the US, an ICBM counter attack launch only allows a 6 minute window. (Assuming they targeted our ICBMs.) A side note: Military doesn't man the ICBMs. They are controlled by civilians. This is by design because the past administrations didn't trust the military to control ICBMs. The fear that they would use them without hesitation was too great.
Nuclear attack subs would pick up the slack and don't require the 6 minute response window. This would greatly reduce the currently great risk of thermonuclear war we live under."
I was born in 1970. I grew up (~12 to 17-19) expecting to not live into adulthood. It wasn't always on my mind, but I thought there was pretty high likelihood of nuclear war. It was pervasive meme in the art(movies/books/etc) and news of the time. And nobody expected to survive, era of "duck and cover" were long over.
I'm the same age as you, and I grew up in Southern California.
Most of my peers didn't expect to survive to be adults, as you said.
We weren't generally freaked out about it. We laughed grimly when we had earthquake and nuclear drills in school, both of which consisted of the same thing: getting under our wooden desks. We were completely surrounded by primary nuclear targets. A major oil refinery was a couple of miles away.
I believe it's safe to argue that the most dangerous time in the cold war was in the first half of the 1980s. The Cuban Missile crisis in 1962 was a very close call, but we were really on and off the edge for most of 10 years in the late 70s and early 80s.
Yet most everyone feels far less safe today than we felt then.
How we feel about safety is rarely connected to how safe we actually are.
I believe that unlimited information and communications is making us insane. How many tens of thousands were killed by gas attacks in the late 70s and early 80s in the middle east? We knew it was happening, but we didn't see it, as we do today.
I won't go into this theory more now, I've posted it a number of times in greater length, so it's available in my post history.
I'm the same age, and from Northern California, and I read and watched plenty of Post Nuclear War Fiction. We knew how to use a Geiger counter, survivalism was definitely A Thing, and I'm pretty sure I was exposed to at least as much Third World War Angst as your average kid.
Nobody I knew, and nobody I had ever heard of, expressed any doubt whatsoever that we would all live into adulthood.
People planned for college, or for jobs; people fell in love, people daydreamed about what the future might hold. The background threat didn't spoil anyone's day, and in the case of the survivalists it probably gave them a much-needed sense of purpose.
Based on my own experience of those same years, I'd say you were in particularly bleak company.
I feel like there always a background acceptance of this which younger people will never understand. I've had this conversation and they always say "yeah, it's like the threat of terrorism" and I try to make the point that global destruction was something a bit different.
Much like terrorism though you didn't live in constant fear, but there was a certain gallows acceptance
I've read enough about Threads to know that I absolutely do not want to see it. Just reading the story in the article makes me queasy. The article calls The Day After "reassuring and sanitized," but from what I remember, that was something of a nightmare.
The movie Testament also came out around this time and it's often brought up in the same context as The Day After and Threads. Watching Testament felt like a gut punch.
I wouldn't tell anyone else not to watch Threads. (How could I? I've never seen it.) But if you are going to watch it, you should brace yourself emotionally. If your idea of a post nuclear apocalypse is driving around in cool cars like Mad Max in the Road Warrior, you probably should watch Threads.
As a kid Threads terrified me in a way which still resonates. I never understood what the big deal about Te Day After. When I watch it now I actually find it somewhat amusing. Threads, not so much
Considering the relative difference in our reaction to TDA I'd concur you shouldn't watch Threads. It's that much more intense.
Oh man... I still get the ideas of "The Road" out of my head, and I saw that like 5 years ago. The only positive thing in that movie was that maybe at the end, there are some good people left.
I think what gives Threads extra psychological heft is the fact that it opens with a very long sequence of everyday life pre-bomb, which grounds the film in reality. Because the cause of the disaster is unknown, it is easier to shrug off "The Road" as an alternate universe. The events in "The Road" are more awful, but less immediate. Now that I think about it, that grounding also enhances the "Wizard of Oz", in a different way.
I think the factor that made Threads so powerful, particularly if you saw it in the early 1980s, was that appreciating how close we were to that scenario actually happening.
The Road is, I would agree, rather more bleak but as the threat is rather ill-defined it doesn't quite have the same sense of dread, at least to me.
However, I was 18 when I saw Threads for the first time and it did rather leave a a mark, as did the related "QED: A Guide to Armageddon" which is a chilling look at the effects of a nuclear weapon on a large city.
_Threads_ changed my perception of what to hope for in the event of nuclear war. After watching _The Day after Tomorrow_ as a kid, I'd think of survival strategies about where to go to wait out the destruction. _Threads_ makes the point, all too clear, that there is no society left after WWIII, and what's left of our race will be horribly mutated and deformed. I'm almost happier now with the feeling that I might be caught in the initial blast due to my proximity working near a military base. If we are stupid enough to use these weapons at scale, it would be game over for humanity at this point.
I've read an article that argued Threads was actually a very optimistic view of what would have happened to the UK in case of a nuclear war. They said after the Cold War, the former head of the Soviet nuclear strike force who was in charge of attacking the UK assured his British counterpart that the entire UK was a complete overkill zone. There would have been no survivors.
I've thought about this. In the event of nuclear war, I desperately hope that I'm killed in the initial blast. I don't want to die in agony of radiation poisoning or fight for survival in an apocalyptic hellscape.
Threads over sold and under sold the threats. A lot more people would have dropped dead from radiation and the blasts within the first month.
But I think it's fairly unrealistic that if millions of British survived they'd go back to tilling land. Sure a lot of tools depend on long global supply chains, but trade would resume as soon as radiation threats died down (a couple weeks).
We'd only go pre industrial if nearly the entire population was wiped out. Even then civilization would still thrive in areas not directly effected-like South America.
The approach of the UK government has been to provide aid and safety to the refugees near to their country of origin. The main justification is that by allowing the people to find temporary safety and assistance there, they will hopefully soon be able to return and help rebuild their country. Many of those fleeing to Western Europe will not return to contribute to the their country which will desperately need skills.
This approach, which was widely and heavily chastised by the other dominant European countries, is now being adopted by its primary critics, Germany and Sweden. They have quietly changed their mind and decided it is a better approach in the long term, especially considering some of the problems they have been facing.
The United Kingdom is also the second most generous donor of foreign aid behind the US.
The UK's refugee approach is one of the few policies I think they've got right recently (notwithstanding the government's shameless treatment of child refugees already in Europe, which is/was indefensible). Another idea behind it is it limits the horrendous impact people smugglers have on refugees trying to cross over to Europe.
Indeed you're correct [0][1] with regards to foreign aid.
Personally I disagree with that viewpoint though. One is sending money and trying to stay as little as involved as possible and the other is dealing personally on your doorstep with an immediate crisis.
Which may be the best in the long-run I doubt is conclusive either way.
Supposedly the similar "The Day After" convinced the previously hawkish Reagan to advance arms control talks with the USSR, so that isn't the worst idea.
Though Reagan loved movies, while I haven't heard that Trump is a movie buff, so we'll need something equivalent with more appeal to its target. Has anyone tried filming a post-nuclear holocaust reality show?
> President Ronald Reagan watched the film several days before its screening, on November 5, 1983. He wrote in his diary that the film was "very effective and left me greatly depressed," and that it changed his mind on the prevailing policy on a "nuclear war". The film was also screened for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A government advisor who attended the screening, a friend of [the film's director Nicholas] Meyer's, told him "If you wanted to draw blood, you did it. Those guys sat there like they were turned to stone." Four years later, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was signed and in Reagan's memoirs he drew a direct line from the film to the signing. Reagan supposedly later sent Meyer a telegram after the summit, saying, "Don't think your movie didn't have any part of this, because it did." [0]
Oh it is, and the tension built up through the whole first half is exquisite. I'd certainly recommend everyone watch through from the beginning for the full, sickening experience.
Hi all - I'm the author (backed by a very capable team) of the YouTube nuclear attack video. I appreciate the commentary and the dialogue about Threads, The Day After, The war Game, Fail Safe and other such movies, all of which inspired us in making our own modest production. Ben Marking.
I wonder if societal expectations of the end of the world will affect how it does play out, should the unthinkable happen. Threads is a horrific, profound work- but it's also very rooted in the anxieties of densely urban England. In the U.S. there's much more open land, unclaimed wilderness, and so the concept of post-apocalyptic plenty abounds, whether in survivalists building compounds in forests and fields, or the looting of abandoned malls in zombie films. The prepper subculture has been around long before current geopolitical realities. In the face of nuclear apocalypse, those who can't flee to New Zealand will just preemptively take to those compounds[0].
It'd be interesting to see a work of art that includes our culture's awareness of prior works of art.
If you want a sour vision of post-apocalyptic America that puts the lie to the prepper dream, I recommend the 1984 novel Warday (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warday).
Warday is set five years after a "limited" nuclear war between the US and USSR, in which only one salvo of nukes was fired by each side before their governments collapsed. In the US only two cities (Washington and San Antonio) are hit directly, with one more (NYC) taking a "near miss" when its missiles go off course and explode offshore. Beyond those urban areas, only the sparsely populated areas around the US' western missile silos are hit. So in that respect, it's very much an optimistic scenario, much more so than the one laid out in Threads.
But the book's argument is that even an optimistic scenario like that would be devastating in real life. Warday's America has been thoroughly hobbled, not so much by the bombs themselves as by knock-on effects the bombs caused. Fallout from the strikes on the missile fields has irradiated the nation's farm fields, leading to persistent famine and turning the Midwest into a radioactive Dust Bowl. Malnutrition means reduced resistance to disease, leading to a range of exciting new ways to die that include a horrific strain of flu that kills three times as many people as the bombs did. Even five years after the war medical care is still being triaged, the price of food is subject to wild fluctuations, and with the federal government mostly dissolved the states are starting to pull apart into their own regional fiefdoms; Texas is gearing up to go to war with Mexico, and relatively unscathed California is gradually descending into a police state in order to keep from having to share what they still have with refugees from the rest of America.
It's a great, grim story, one that's stuck with me decades now after I first read it as a kid in Cold War America.
Haven't read it, but I have read Alas, Babylon. Sounds similar but definitely worth checking out.
One book I was thinking of in my post is The Postman by David Brin. In it, the post-apocalypse was triggered by a cascading series of disasters, including (non-nuclear) warfare and disease... but the final societal collapse was caused by domestic militants following a hyper-survivalist, regressive philosophy. In other words, the preppers themselves were behind the fall of America.
I've read Alas, Babylon and The Postman too, and IMHO Warday is far superior to them both. If you found those books interesting, you will eat it up with a spoon.
I don't think the prepper mentality would go that way. I think preppers would be a lot closer to isolationists with the true horror of lack of social connection to other survivors. I can see the roving marauders since that's par for the course when society breaks down. I expect emptied prisons to do the trick.
True, in The Postman the Holnists weren't just hyper-preppers, but followers of an extreme ideology that sought to reestablish a Social Darwinian, Luddite, feudal world and who actively fought the forces of order following the Doomwar. That's a different strain of thought in the real world but hey maybe some among that number might become preppers.
Never forgot the first time i watched Threads. I was a teenager up late and flicking through TV, probably hasn't had a nightmare since i was 4 years old but I dam well did that night. Brilliant piece of work by the BBC.
There was this great surge of nuclear scare in the early eighties. Threads, The Day After, and on lighter note WarGames are among the movies which came out of that scare.
I lived through those years. I was scared. I went and saw The Day After on what I believe was its first European showing, in Copenhagen a few days after the American TV airing had made a big splash in the news. It didn't tell me anything I didn't know, but I was seriously shaky all the same, going home that night. I'm still sort of incredulous to find us all alive in the 21st century. And at times I wonder - were we all just in silly hysterics back then? But then I read up a bit on things like Operation Able Archer, autumn 1983, and realize how clear and present the danger really was.
Let's hope it remains a vision and not reality. The way Trump and Kim are rattling sabers does nothing to make me sleep better. Neither of them appears particularly stable to me and both could do with a bit of a diversion from their other foreign and domestic issues.
A lot of superlatives about this. Just in the comments here for example. Whats interesting is that this is achieved through realism. Its a pretty well researched show, they tried to depict the facts as clearly as possible.
One of the reasons Threads worked because it felt like a documentary about ordinary people. That bloody voiceover with its calm measured tones describing the absolute horror that was unfolding...brrr.
It was narrated by Paul Vaughan who used to also narrate the Horizon BBC science documentaries (which I loved as a kid) - that added a whole other level of credibility for me when I watched it as a teenager.
Yes, but I don't understand this comment. Were you mislead by the title into thinking it was a visceral urgent article about concurrency that included a vision of nuclear holocaust?
Not the OP, but I personally expected it to be a metaphor, and to colorfully describe a perpetually-impending disaster re: widely-used multithreaded applications, similar to the "horrors" of IPv4 exhaustion or Y2K-class bugs.
"Nuclear Attack Emergency Broadcast - Live Breaking News from London (fiction)" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VZ3LGfSMhA
It's the only piece of fiction that has made me feel deathly ill in quite the same way Threads did.
[EDIT] also, those familiar with The Day After should watch out for a little easter-egg toward the end.
[DOUBLE-EDIT] I'm just re-watching the end now and even with full knowledge that it is fiction, the Attack Warning Red sound is still absolutely horrifying.