The vision of nuclear holocaust in Threads (1984) remains visceral and urgent
theparisreview.org
theparisreview.org
"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.
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.
"the sound of the blast from a thermonuclear bomb has been likened to that of an enormous door slamming in the depths of hell."
[1] - https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Seven-Days-in-May/950294
Really, really good, but more scary than anything I have ever seen in my life. So-called "Horror movies" are fairly tame in comparison.
The only animated feature that is guaranteed to make this grown man weep like there's no tomorrow.
[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Barefoot-Gen-Vol-Cartoon-Hiroshima/dp...
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.
Maybe I can use custom CSS.
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.
Playing it loudly in a Starbucks or at the office for example.
Quite a brilliant piece of art.
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.
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...
Because, you know, Russia is trailing waaay behind US in GDP.
And if we will take a look at military spending in % of GDP, Russia actually spends _more_ than US.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2015/06/25/the-bi...
Even for tiny values of "x" I still can't call this a decided improvement on the nuclear risk.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
It wouldn't be easy, but it can be done.
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=JQGHqScEFtoC&lpg=PP1&dq=ho...
What makes you think this?
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.
Is it?
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).
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.
The classic KGB tactic "accuse the enemy of exactly what you are doing" is all too transparent here.
[1] http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/is-nuclear-w...
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".
[1] http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/is-nuclear-w...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_missile_defense_...
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.
I don't think so!
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.
But you're right, the Crimea is both in scale, scope and ambition on a different level.
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.
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.
Wut? Pretty sure that's totally false. US ICBM control stations are manned by Air Force personnel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Force_Global_Strike_Comman....
The military still had control, even after they changed the codes on the warhead activation locks to all zeros: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_Action_Link#Develop...
If you're talking about civilian control of the military, you're talking about the President and Secretary of Defense, not a dude in a bunker.
That's not what the comment was talking about. This is what I was responding to:
>> Military doesn't man the ICBMs. They are controlled by civilians
That's not talking about manufacturing, and it's a totally false statement.
Military personnel still turn the launch keys, when the order comes.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative#B... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoatmospheric_Kill_Vehicle [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-Based_Interceptor
@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."
You contradicted me so I am going to vote you down :(
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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.
And then you had the false nuclear alert incident in 1983.
Thank hell we have a man like Stanislav Petrov. This guy is a hero, he may literally have saved the world from a nuclear war.
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.
Much like terrorism though you didn't live in constant fear, but there was a certain gallows acceptance
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.
Considering the relative difference in our reaction to TDA I'd concur you shouldn't watch Threads. It's that much more intense.
"The War Game" is similarly realistic, although somewhat dated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Game
It appears to be available here: https://archive.org/details/TheWarGame_201405 (clip here: https://youtu.be/Nzd_VE-bfhA )
Can confirm: Threads is substantially worse than The Day After.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GJttnC8PoA
The bit where the effects of the heat of a nuclear weapon are shown on meat in a butchers window (around 6:40) literally gave me nightmares.
It was an interesting time to grow up in.
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.
> And we recognize, acutely and uncomfortably, the fear and hatred with which she’s treated as a refugee.
Escpecially with the impact of immigration in the Brexit vote, it's worth pointing out just how few refugees that the UK has accepted.
The UK had 9,000 applicants (and 5,000 accepted) [0] vs Germany's 600,000 and Sweden's 110,000.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugees_of_the_Syrian_Civil_W...
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.
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.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals...
[1]: http://www.oecd.org/dac/stats/documentupload/ODA%202014%20Ta...
Maybe it would be beneficial to flood both Donald and Ivanka Trump's Twitter feeds with links to the film?
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?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After#Effects_on_polic...
It'd be interesting to see a work of art that includes our culture's awareness of prior works of art.
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.
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.
Amazon has it on Kindle for $3.99: https://www.amazon.com/Warday-Whitley-Strieber-ebook/dp/B00X...
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.
Wag the Dog squared.
[1] - http://www.radiolab.org/story/nukes/
[2] - http://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-59-the-destroyer-o...
And then I remembered that POTUS needs an external threat to make him look precedential.
Well written. Love that the author groups these three. The class system and rats are the last to leave the UK.