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Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

I'm young enough to be on the tail end of it, but I remember seeing When The Wind Blows as a kid in the late 80s and being aware of what could happen. Curiously, the whole movie is now on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9aHT-IlkHo (it's animated)

For anyone with a morbid curiosity over nuclear war, THREADS is worth a watch too. I didn't learn about it until very recently but supposedly it was on prime time British TV in 1984 and scared the bejeezus out of everyone in its rendition of what might happen to the UK in the case of nuclear war. It's also on YouTube! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MCbTvoNrAg

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They showed us Threads in primary school. I don't remember much of it to be honest, other than finding the accents hilarious (as Lancastrians we were brought up to fear & hate the Yorkist dogs).

I think it shook up the teachers more than us, but I guess that's to be expected. We were too young to really have felt the paranoia of the times.

They showed it to us at Primary school too. I'm from south Sheffield though so the accents sounded quite posh to us :-)I do remember being freaked out by any loud noises in town for a few months afterwards.

I watched it again a couple of years ago. It's amazing to think about how close we actually came to nuclear war not so long ago and now we're in a position where people can campaign for self disarmament of nuclear weapons.

We had people campaigning for unilateral disarmament then as well. TBH I still don't think it's a valid position when you have rogue states such as Pakistan and North Korea with nuclear weapons.

Beware, watching threads may lead to spending the afternoon staring at the wall with a blank expression for up to four hours after it finishes.

It is worth noting that Threads was partially based on a UK goverment exercise that assumed a 205 megaton attack on the UK (Square Leg) - a real attack probably would have been far far worse (higher numbers of smaller bombs, much higher total yield).

A real attack in the UK might have been far worse than the one shown in Threads!

A scenario in which more people were killed more quickly could only be better.

The thing I took away from Threads is that as soon as you see the mushroom cloud, it's in your interest to ensure that you die as soon as possible.

I've just remembered the final scene. :(

There is also Peter Watkin's excellent "The War Game":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Game

I'd not heard of that, thanks! It's also on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrGg8PfkbZw

Threads is great. It's not just "the nuclear attack" but goes on for months and years after the attack.

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