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Threads, the BBC drama-doc portraying the aftermath of a nuclear attack on Britain, has been shown on its fortieth anniversary, only the third showing since 1984.
The film’s unflinching, visually brutal and meticulously scientifically researched narrative has made it a Cold War cult icon, and new viewers repeatedly dub it the “most horrific film ever”. As the world sleepwalks into increasing conflicts with potentially existential consequences, the timing could not be more relevant.
Byline Times writer Duncan Campbell, a member of the 1984 Threads team that created the scenarios seen in the film, exclusively reveals here never-before-reported secret documents that unravel a deadly faultline in British politics.
For 70 years, the British political class has known but cannot face, and has strenuously tried to prevent the public from understanding the consequences of thermonuclear weapons. Threads, Campbell explains, uniquely put the consequences of their policies in everyone’s face.
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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 ha