‘The Most Horrific Film Ever’ Depicting Aftermath of Nuclear Attack on UK to Air Again 40 Years After it First Shocked Audiences

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Poland “may cease to exist” were it to intervene in the Russia-Ukraine war, warned Russian state TV pundit Andrey Sidorov on Sunday 29 September.

Two days later, the US Department of Energy announced that a bomb production line closed in 1989 had restarted and delivered the first of hundreds of “pits” (nuclear fission cores) for a new $140 billion network of Sentinel land-based ICBMs.

On Wednesday 2 October, the venerable Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reported that direct Iran–Israeli engagement could rapidly lead to nuclear escalation, and affect both US and Russian forces, especially if Iran was able to land attacks on Israel.

The same day, the Bulletin reported that at the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, the CIA had estimated a 50/50 chance that President Vladimir Putin would use nuclear weapons in his attack. 

On Friday 4 October, independent researchers published satellite images proving that, despite denials, more than 30 Iranian missiles had overcome Israeli defences and struck Nevatim air base, just 25 km from Israel’s nuclear weapons centre in the Negev desert and a likely departure centre for Israel’s nuclear bombers in war.

In East Anglia, two squadrons of US Air Force F-35 Lightning fighter-bombers from RAF Lakenheath near Cambridge exercise daily. F-35s were certified as “nuclear capable” in March 2024.

At the same time, the US National Nuclear Security Administration began manufacturing the Lightning’s potential payload, 480 B-61 nuclear gravity bombs.

Last month, Lightnings from Lakenheath signalled nuclear warnings to Russia by demonstrating that they could forward operate minutes away from Russian targets, using Finnish motorways.

Forty years ago, amid a stream of similar events at the height of the Cold War, producer Mick Jackson started researching the effects of the expected level of nuclear attack on Britain as part of a BBC commission to make a factually based drama.

Jackson travelled and interviewed widely, including working with the eminent US astronomer Carl Sagan, who had a year before warned of severe global darkening – dubbed the “nuclear winter” – that would follow a major nuclear exchange, devastating or destroying agricultural production after millions of tons of soot from firestorms were lifted into the stratosphere.

Sagan’s and subsequent studies showed that even a regional nuclear exchange involving a few dozen weapons could cool large areas of North America and much of Eurasian agricultural land by more than 20°C.

Written by the late Barry Hines, Threads first introduces a cast of ordinary folk living ordinary lives in Sheffield. While two central characters move towards the need for an unintended engagement and ultimately provide a post-war child, two months pass with a constant drone of news in the background, indicating a slow creep of international tension and providing hints of horrors to come, as confrontation develops in Iran. 

Although vehicles, clothing, shops and technology in the opening scenes of Threads are visibly in the past, Threads “isn’t an old movie at all”, Jackson said this month. It was “very close to the surface and has been since this movie was made”.

Once the bomb drops, you forget you’re looking at the Eighties because nothing that happens after that would be any different today. If a nuclear warhead goes off anywhere near you, it won’t matter if it’s 1984 or 2024, whether you’re in Sheffield, Seoul or Seattle – what nuclear weapons do hasn’t changed. It’s just the laws of physics

Mick Jackson,Threads producer

The scenes before the bombs drop in Threads are also not in essence “old”, but terrifyingly modern, as the last two years have shown.

In Threads, a leader is reported warning of “…consequences for all mankind” in one scene. Now, we hear Putin every month.

Despite the many nuclear-armed and near-nuclear autocrats dominating contemporary news cycles, we can likely expect to hear only denials if real nuclear escalation happens in the future. No government, of any salt, will tell citizens what will happen if real nuclear war were to follow. 

Threads begins “In an urban society, everything connects”. Jackson’s work is – so far as I am aware – the only attempt to date to realistically depict the struggle for survival in Britain or anywhere else years after the bombs and missiles have fallen, and the structures and connections – the threads – of a modern advanced industrial society have torn apart.

Writing about the anniversary a Sheffield Star reporter recently described how, because he first watched Threads in 1984, he expected not to react in 2024. He was wrong, he said, including “in the first 30 minutes when the chest-tightening, mounting dread was confined to fictional escalating news reports of an escalating war and the simple, suppressed fear on the faces of citizens who know ‘something’s up’.” Then he saw the scene where the first mushroom cloud can be seen from Sheffield on “a street I walk down every day … I had just gone cold all over.”

In 1996, I had the same reaction. Eleven years after BBC transmission, I was transferring my VHS copy to a DVD to give to peace campaigners in Australia. As I watched Threads’ opening scenes, I felt mounting anger, even sickness, at the deceptions visited on the characters as death approached and struck. Then it hit me hard. I was reacting to my own creation.

I provided the main scenario of deception I was watching to Mick and Barry, even writing some of the documentary-style lines spoken by the narrator. Looking into that abyss, it seemed that the trauma of the Cold War, which ended in 1991, might only then have lifted. That small comfort died as the Russian tank army advanced on Kyiv. 

I was one of seven program advisers Mick recruited to help create detailed background scenarios and provide the science underlying Threads. Two outstanding members of the group had worked on the Manhattan Project and so were among the original “atomic scientists”.

Arthur Katz, of the US Office of Fusion Energy, had just written Life After Nuclear War (1982), about the United States. I published War Plan UK, revealing the Government’s secret war plans in the event of an attack and the unavailability of civil protection. 

The most distinguished member of the group was (Professor Sir) Joseph Rotblatt, a Polish-British physicist who had left the atom bomb team at Los Alamos when the project’s purpose, to counter possible Nazi weapons, was no longer necessary.

As a radiation biologist at Barts Hospital in London, Joe was central to civil understanding of the effects of bombs and fallout for the next 50 years. Ten years after helping make Threads, he was awarded the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize “for efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international affairs and, in the longer run, to eliminate such arms”. 

Fellow team member and emergency planning officer Eric Alley, then recently appointed by the Home Office as civil defence adviser, brought government planning lines on civil defence to the scenes depicting official responses before and after the attack.

Although his views were at odds with mine and other advisers, in practice there was, as I recall, little dispute as to the scenes Hines and Jackson crafted and filmed. The Threads scenario nodded to and accepted lines then being pushed by the Government, including that an initial limited nuclear exchange might occur.

Many scenes were framed around official Home Office circulars that I procured and supplied. My book makes a cameo appearance as a prop. The film shows council officials police, and ordinary folk following this Government guidance with increasing fear and declining effectiveness. Ultimately, the guidance changed nothing.

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How Many People Would Perish

The production considered and provided contrasting estimates of postwar effects. Estimated numbers of remaining survivors were periodically assessed. Most of the UK population will perish within a few weeks of an attack of the type then (and now) expected by the Government.

We discussed how many could be alive after the attack and its aftermath. What would be the nadir of the British population, fit or sick? The final numbers seen came both from Home Office estimates – 11 million – and from the British Medical Association, Scientists Against Nuclear Arms (SANA) and others – four million souls. 

Home Office calculations of fallout deaths did not consider that most homes in Britain, inside which they told people to build fallout shelters, would first, at least, have had all their windows broken by multiple detonation shockwaves (blast), as the Threads narrative observed.

Modern audiences have seen blast waves for real when, in 2020, an accidental non-nuclear explosion in Beirut, estimated to have a yield of half to one kiloton, damaged most of the city and killed 214. I have little doubt that had the Beirut footage been available in the 1980s, it would have been included in Threads. 

The smaller and more plausible estimate of how many in Britain would survive after being thrown back to pre-industrial subsistence agriculture and in sudden cold matched the population levels of late medieval England.

Nothing Jackson used was scientific or medical invention. When the lead character, Ruth, dies in her thirties ten years after the attack, she is seen severely suffering from cataracts, the product of thousands of hours experienced from far heavier solar radiation passing through a damaged ionosphere while toiling in fields.

When Ruth’s child is later raped, the script has the children born post-attack speak in a degraded, guttural language. For this, Jackson drew on studies of feral children and isolated societies. Other sources were accounts of the siege of Stalingrad, and reports following Hiroshima. 

Three months before transmission, Jackson provided BBC management with a detailed 10 page fact check memorandum, citing sources and documents for every major scene and statement. The memo records that the Home Office had denied that an attack as high as 200 Megatons was likely, or that it would likely be preceded by an EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) attack that would knock out electrical and electronic systems across much of Europe.

They were, bluntly, lying. On my desk now there is a large pile of declassified official attack estimates from the 1960s and 1970s, saying precisely and in the same terms the words the Home Office denied.

For example, in a November 1970 Top Secret assessment of the “likely scale and nature of the attack on the United Kingdom”, the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) reported that “150 land-based ballistic missiles would impact” in a first wave, followed by 185 bombers. Two or three nuclear weapons would be assigned to most UK targets to assure their destruction, JIC also assessed. 

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The Fallout – a National Secret

Jackson, we on the Threads team and 1984 BBC viewers could not know and were not permitted to know that thirty years before, in extreme secrecy, the British government had reached the same broad conclusion about the effect of thermonuclear war as Threads depicted, a selection of declassified documents held in the National Archive now show. 

The first and existential and decisive document, written in 1955, is a Top Secret 32-page report on “The Defence Implications Of Fall-out From A Hydrogen Bomb”, commonly known as the Strath Report.

The Strath Report was Top Secret and unheard of in 1984. It was declassified in 2002. Over time, the findings in the Strath report and its sequels were to destroy almost every member of hope at the highest level of UK nuclear war planning in the UK, many documents show.

By 1970, only a tiny handful of “indoctrinated” civil servants were permitted to know that in nuclear war even small elite “nuclei of government” would be lucky to survive at all, let alone fellow citizens. Very few Ministers, save Prime Ministers, have been permitted to know the true expected effects of the attack.

For decades, those who calculated the post-nuclear future systematically lied to the larger out-group of governance (among them many ministers, civil servants and senior military officers in the 1980s and 1990s) about the Government’s real plans for war. They were given “cover stories”.

No attempt was made, in any official documents I have seen or been told about, to consider the state of human beings in Britain in years after nuclear attack, and when “government” had ceased.

They did not dare to look further. Jackson did.

What would be left of people and society a year after the attack? Two years? Five? Ten? Twenty? It would be trite to expect that, as some campaigners then claimed, every single person in Britain would die. It would also be absurd to imagine that, as implied in Home Office publications, 14 days after an attack families all over the country would pop out from cellars or from under stairs, collect cuppas from the local emergency feeding centre, and commence a “recovery phase” under the benign governance of official “controllers”. 

The schism described above began in 1954, after the United States detonated a 15 Megaton hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. Joe Rotblatt, then working from St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, demonstrated that the radioactive fallout from the test was far greater than stated officially. His report created an international incident, as a new generation of Japanese – fishermen caught in the fallout plume – again fell sick due to US nuclear weapons. 

Guided by British philosopher (Lord) Bertrand Russell, Rotblatt and a group of Nobel laureate scientists prepared a plea to all nations to ban further nuclear developments. They wrote “it is feared that if many H-bombs are used there will be universal death, sudden only for a minority, but for the majority a slow torture of disease and disintegration”. Albert Einstein signed the petition the day before his death in April 1955.

In London, in secret, Cabinet Secretary Sir Norman Brook reacted by appointing a Central War Plans Secretariat, led by William Strath, to advise on the effects of the new weapons.

In Downing Street, Prime Minister Winston Churchill fretted on learning that the BBC was proposing to interview Rotblatt and include him in a planned Panorama broadcast.

At Broadcasting House, the BBC were warned by a defence minister that it would be difficult for the Government to present the issues in a “well-balanced manner” if “an entirely different and possibly much more pessimistic picture were painted in the press”. The planned BBC programmes with Rotblatt were dropped. From then, for the next 30 years, thermonuclear truth dared not be spoken to power. 

Strath’s secret report assessed that after a hydrogen bomb attack on Britain, “loss of life on a massive scale would be unavoidable, all movement would be completely disrupted and property would be obliterated to a vast extent … The energies of the remaining population of the United Kingdom would have to be devoted to the problem of personal survival, and that little if any effort would be available for other purposes.” 

“No part of the country would be free from the risk of radioactive contamination. A single attack … could deny us the use for varying periods of some thousands of square miles of our agricultural land and the standing crops from a much greater area. Open water supplies for sections of the population would become undrinkable for a few weeks. The risk of starvation in the period immediately after the attack would be high.”

Strath offered possible remedies, entailing massive relocation of population and industry and the provision of shelters to mitigate the attack. For the upper echelon of the civil service, this was thinking the unthinkable.

Chairing the Cabinet’s official Home Defence Committee five days later, Sir Norman Brook resolved that it would be “unwise to give undue publicity to the horrors of the hydrogen bomb”. Demand for a protective program of realignment to cope would, he warned, “disrupt the economy”. 

In 1960, the Ministry of Defence Joint Global War Study Group was told that as few as 28 megaton weapons targeted on Britain would “cause breakdown of the coordinated function of the nation.” At the time, the Soviet stockpile was over 1,600.

In 1961, a Joint Intelligence Committee report on the “Likely Scale and Nature of’ Attack on the United Kingdom” concluded that a first-strike Soviet attack “would likely use 330 nuclear weapons .. there is little doubt that this attack would cause even greater devastation than that set out in the Strath report”.

“An attack of this magnitude would cause the United Kingdom to cease to exist as a corporate political entity,” the report concluded.

Less than a decade after the Bikini test and the Strath Report (and Rotblatt’s warning), a select few UK nuclear war planners were advised that now not even a small nucleus of Government, hiding far from London, had more than an uncertain and limited chance of survival.

After Prime Minister Harold Wilson took office in October 1964, he and key ministers were advised that previous civil defence plans, and an immense network of underground bunkers and communications built across Britain during the 1950s, had been assessed as effectively useless – whatever the government might continue to say to the public and to other authorities for the next 30 years. Wilson accepted the recommendation and asked for new plans.

At the start of 1965, Wilson instructed a wholesale review of British civil defence policy. No official biography or history mentions that before this, he had learned of the grimmest conclusions from 10 years of study of the H Bomb. 

Meanwhile, in 1964, in Kent, the BBC was shooting a documentary. Directed by Peter Watkins, the War Game graphically depicted the aftermath of a nuclear attack. Like Threads two decades later, the War Game showed hideous casualties, food riots, looters and firing squads. 

Unfortunately for Watkins, Lord Normanbrook, previously Sir Norman Brook, the official who had commissioned and then buried the Strath report became Chairman of the BBC Governors in 1964.

On hearing about the War Game, he tipped off his Cabinet Secretary successor, advised him to talk to the Prime Minister, and arranged for a secret showing at Broadcasting House. Normanbrook’s view was that the film “should not be shown without some prior reference to the Government”. Hearing of this, Watkins resigned and never worked for the BBC again.

On 26 November 1965, the War Game was banned by the BBC. It was never then shown until after Threads had aired. Two years later, the War Game was awarded the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

In July 1967, civil service notes indicate that Wilson signed off on the new, ultra secret policy that led to the eventual abandonment and dereliction of the many underground and protected headquarters ordered by his predecessors.

On 1 May 1968, the Government disbanded the Civil Defence Corps and put all other plans on so-called “care and maintenance”. 

It has not been known, until now, that most of the vast estate of bunkers and communication sites built in the 1950s were effectively abandoned on the same day.

Most were then kept on the Government estate for up to forty years before being sold off or demolished. Many are now Cold War tourist attractions or hobbyist projects, typically signposted as “Secret Nuclear Bunker”(s) in Scotland and across England.

The largest redoubt to be abandoned, an underground quarry near Bath that was converted between 1957 and 1961 to hold over 5,000 civil and military staff and originally codenamed SUBTERFUGE, is now in the care of English Heritage. For a few years in the 1960s, the massive complex was designated as the Central Government War Headquarters.

Increasingly through the 1980s, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Government demanded that local authorities be compelled to create control centres and make plans for nuclear war and civil defence.

Her policies were controversial and widely unpopular with many cities and some counties, leading to the creation of “nuclear-free zones” and legal and political stand-offs between councils and the Government. It was in this milieu that Threads was born.

At the same time, I worked voluntarily for the Greater London Council (GLC) as a co-opted Member and civil defence adviser. The GLC and many other Councils asked the Government for planning assumptions – a reasonable and essential response for a public body tasked with making plans.

The Home Office responded that they had no planning assumptions and that plans should be “flexible”. Home Office Ministers told BBC television interviewers that planning assumptions “do not exist”.

On my desk as I write is a copy of a 130-page Home Office file labelled “Top Secret, Home Defence Planning”, and “Attack Assessments and Effects of Attack”. Inside are numerous lists of “Probable Nuclear Targets in the United Kingdom: Assumptions for Planning”, followed by target lists, with bomb weights and numbers of warheads expected to come by missile or bomber, and their “DGZ” (Desired Ground Zero).

On the cover sheet, I see that the file had frequently been signed out by officials who we knew, and who local authority staff regularly met at meetings. The weights of attack they depicted were significantly larger than those used for Threads. 

Only one copy was made of one early Top Secret target list (illustrated). The file has pages of meticulous civil service notes, adding new bases or removing old targets, year on year, for revisions. This file, and some others like it, have been released in the last twenty years. Now, the National Archives catalogue says that this file, which is older than Threads, has been “temporarily retained by Department”. Experienced researchers have spotted other similar removals of nuclear war related files from the National Archives since Trident submarines were introduced. The feeling induced by the opening scenarios of Threads come back.

As Threads was being made, the GLC came under increasing legal pressure to comply with Home Office demands including the promotion of pabulum such as the notorious “Protect and Survive” pamphlet seen in the film.

I proposed to Ken Livingstone that the GLC strike first by getting independent planning assumptions from the best experts that could be found. The GLC then created a GLAWARS (Greater London Area War Risk Study) Commission.

Our commissioners included top Congressional and US government advisers as well as a former director of the US National Security Agency, Admiral Noel Gayler. The report cost £500,000 and was delivered in 1986.

Joe Rotblatt was one of GLAWARS’ many consultants, contributing on health policy and effects. The blue ribbon panel concluded, unsurprisingly, that London would inevitably be destroyed by the expected level of attack. “The prospect facing those who initially survived would be fear, exhaustion, disease, pain and long, lonely misery. Avoiding a nuclear war is still the only way of avoiding this fate”. Two months before the Commission’s report was published, in June 1986, Thatcher had the GLC abolished.

In interviews this month, Mick Jackson has frequently recounted the stunned silence and the “night of nightmares” the country experienced when Threads first aired.

The next morning, he received a letter with profuse praise from Labour leader Neil Kinnock. “The story must be told time and time again”, Kinnock wrote. Jackson concurs and says the situation has not changed, so “don’t look away”. Watch it.

Threads is available on BBC iPlayer https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02kgkkg

Additional research, Mike Kenner. National Archives research, Wendy M. Grossman