Threads: The BBC drama which affected a generation of viewers
bbc.com
bbc.com
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.
Basically any contribution to a repository which got archived gets you the nod. Likewise for the Mars rover one.
> @alexjplant contributed code to 0 repositories in the 2020 GitHub Archive Program.
Maybe it was in a since-deleted repository?
Maybe try messaging github support to ask?
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.
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.
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.
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?!
'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!
For many weeks after I would look up at every plane passing over to see if it was dropping something.
"Look mummy, there's an aeroplane up in the sky
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?"
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.
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.
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.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/the-nuclear-vault-gallery-imag...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Okay. The rest of this thread is very much about nuclear weapons and their effects.
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.
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.
https://www.historyonthenet.com/reasons-against-dropping-the...
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
“Disbarred”? By who, exactly? And how?
Well, that's an interesting question.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
The idea that there's some form of "Honorable" war is disgusting propaganda from people who wish to control others through violence.
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?
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.
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.
https://www.niwrc.org/restoration-magazine/june-2017/today-i...
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
it is not controversial that the japanese-american internment camps were concentration camps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_camp
(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
By who?
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Wind_Blows_(1986_film...
I only saw Threads much later - I probably should be thankful for not seeing that as a kid.
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.
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.
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.
Citation needed.
I'm not clear on how this is an example of delayed PTSD.
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.
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 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.
There was a massive campaign to terrify the public by the UK government be it in relation to Protect and Survive or the IRA.
(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.
It cut fire deaths from chip pan fires to basically fuck all, within a month.
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.
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!
edit: corrected my age
[0] http://www.weirdretro.org.uk/the-finishing-line-the-banned-p...
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:
https://www.lulu.com/shop/stephen-brotherstone-dave-lawrence...
There's a second volume covering 1980's TV:
https://www.lulu.com/shop/dave-lawrence-and-stephen-brothers...
I'm always puzzled by statements like this. Human beings are not so fragile, even when they're 9.
Teachers aren't the people to decide to show that kind of content to 9-yeard olds without parental warning/approval.
Who the hell wants to invade Russia? Who the heck is threatened by them? No one's coming for them, they don't need the nukes.
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.
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.
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.
I've read a book about that same theme that was mostly written online as some kind of collaborative effort if memory serves.
Edit: found it:
Imagine something like "The Walking Dead" series, but without the unscientific zombie horror and constant cheap gore.
And lots of other funny lines.
The series is from 1982 and then there's also a film of the same name in 1986. There's some heavyweight comedy actors in both.
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."
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.)
But if a country is invaded that is something that you can actually do something about, on the spot and see the result.
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 ?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Years_and_Years_(TV_series)
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.
'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.
Or, even worse, subject them to the terrible torture of "filling asylum paperwork."
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-66157259
(</sarcasm>)
When that becomes billions knocking at the door, even the most liberal lefty in the west will say "nope, can't do it".
Think about the US/Mexico walls. Now think of that scene from World War Z where the zombies storm Jerusalem.
It's going to be genocide, it won't be pretty at all.
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/01/19/national-guard-migra...
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/22/1171450334/two-men-shot-at-a-...
In Europe it's not shooting, but the treatments are called "bordering on torture" (by pro-migrants ONG, naturelle) https://www.liberation.fr/international/europe/une-violence-...
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".
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.
Also, a cataclysm that kills bugs but spares Charlize Theron ? Come ooooon..
It seems to me that modern television is very watered down compared to what was shown in the 1970s/80s.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085630/?ref_=nm_flmg_eps_tt_2
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).
Here's a 1 minute clip that is spectacular: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WoDQBhJCVQ
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.
I disagree about it being over-hyped as I can't think of any other shot that has a similar level of planned difficulty.
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.
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?
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!!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Game
[2] http://pwatkins.mnsi.net/journey.htm (NOTE: not SSL!)
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'm not sure about that. A biolab takes only a few tens of thousands of dollars to setup to start dangerous experiments.
I felt much worse after Requiem for a Dream and immediately regretted watching it. But I was younger at that time.
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.
It destroyed my innocence. Every time a plane went over I was scared it was the Russian ICBMs coming to nuke us.
What a fucked up thing to do to a child.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or1UX7z8YBM
"A little peace and quiet", 1985.
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?
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.
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.
Anyway, kind of fun to watch (kind of)
[0] Without Warning https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6J4pfT2qLb4
[1] Alternative 3 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7YHrCAQ1Dlg
[2] Special Bulletin https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cDZQsVNZ3SE
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Wind_Blows_(1986_fi...
The Doomsday Clock [1] has literally never been closer to midnight.
https://thebulletin.org/2023/01/press-release-doomsday-clock...
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.
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:
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.
Either way it certainly hastened the move to plastic milk cartons.
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.
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?.
If you look at the TAS article it's made clear that their end goal was reunification of Ukraine and Russia. You can read it yourself here.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220226051154/https://ria.ru/20...
>> 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.
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.
https://lifeinhellarchives.tumblr.com/image/176779648696
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).
there is an awful lot of misery that would happen for a few decades
this isn't going to be Fallout 3, it's going to be The Road for a few decades.
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.
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.
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.
Also, the "nuclear wasteland" business is pure sci fi.
Money and power
China doesn't manufacturer everything you use in your daily life for humanitarian reasons. They do it because they can earn money doing it.
It was devastating to watch, and to know the death and misery depicted is exactly what would be suffered if major geopolitical disputes escalate.
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."
highly recommended
i will never watch it again
as obscure pointed out, it's on the archive, while that still exists: https://archive.org/details/threads_202007
maybe watch it at a time when you have good emotional support and time to recover for a few days afterwards?
today there are bigger threats but the risk of a second nuclear war hasn't gone away yet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Game
"The blast wave from a thermonuclear explosion has been likened to an enormous door slamming in the depths of hell"
The full movie ~45 minutes is here: https://vimeo.com/532331716
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.
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]
That still gets a laugh in Australia.
[1] https://www.uwa.edu.au/Profile/David-Blair
[2] https://www.amazon.com/First-Final-War-Information-Australas...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Communication_Station_Ha...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Would Australia really still be a country if all it's major population centers are evaporated and turned into craters? It would be a pyrhic victory.
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.