Being a child of the late Cold War means that occassionally you spent your sunday morning watching old nuclear holocaust documentaries. (Some disturbing images of Hiroshima victims as well as footage from a civil defence exercise; be careful.)
It was just a casual tweet mentioning this particular documentary that sent me down the rabbit hole of early eighties British nuclear war programmes. This was the stuff of literal nightmares for me as a child growing up in eighties Holland, seeing nuclear war casually referenced on the news and even on children’s television. It’s hard to imagine forty years later just how dangerous that period of 1979 to 1986 felt like, that idea that at any moment the bombs could drop. That nuclear war was inevitable not because either side wanted it but simply because there were too many weapons, too many complexities that made certain the war would happen by mistake sooner or later. Though it didn’t help that we got an American president talking about winning a nuclear war and who deliberately upped tensions to the point the Soviet leadership became convinced he was planning to strike first.
What fascinates me about this documentary, a 1980 Panoram special, is its tone. When we think about 1980s nuclear holocaust angst we tend to remember movies like Threads or The Day After or Raymond Briggs’ when the Wind Blows or the various pop songs about nuclear war that were a staple of the hit parades. All very emotional outbursts of rage and horror of what we might do to ourselves, all of which contributed to that anxiety me and so many other children felt growing with them. But here there’s none of this emotion, just calm, rational men talking in posh accents about the end of the world and how it might come about. There’s no sensationalism, but the horror of the subject is conveyed anyway; as Paxman’s heard saying at the end of it: that’ll send them to bed happy”. That remark may be as much about how unprepared the UK government was for the prospect of nuclear war as the actual horrors of the war itself, because the focus of the documentary is firmly on the former.
How to survive a nuclear attack, a 1981 Thames Television TV Eye documentary on Operation Hot Seat, a monthly exercise rwargaming the aftermath of a nuclear strike on Britain. Held for local and regional government officials including the emergency services, police and army, the intention was to prepare them for their roles after the bombs dropped. Again a very understated sort of documentary, following civil servants as they go about arranging food for the population of their fictional county and brainstorm how to deal with looters. Everybody involved takes the exercise very seriously, but you do wonder if all these people would show up if the real thing had happened and if so, how much control they would’ve really had. Even in the exercise the participants come to the conclusion that just expecting people to obey their instructins is futile when people are cold, hungry and slowly dying of radiation poisoning. The absurdity of it all is best shown in the quote taking from it I’ve used as the title for this post.
On the 8th Day, a documentary from 1984 shows that all the preparation and planning for the “post-attack era” are just so much nonsense, as it explains the concept of nuclear winter and how long the climate would be destabilised after a nuclear war. What the bombs and the radiation hadn’t killed owuld be finished off by the immense dust clouds kicked up by the war blocking out the sunlight, plunging Europe and America inot a new ice age. Featuring the always calm voice of Carl Sagan as he explains the horrors of it all.
Nuclear Nightmares is a 1979 Peter Ustinov narrated documentary about how nuclear war could start. Written by Nigel Calder, it was his book of the same name that was a primary driver of my own nuclear nightmares back then. A very pre-Reagan view of nuclear deterrence, when you could still assume that rational men where in control of the nuclear arsenal. One of the more cheery parts in this documenary is John Erickson stating that the 1980s would be the most dangerous decade for nuclear war as technological advances favoured the side that attacked first.
A British Guide to the End of the World is a much more recent BBC Arena documentary, using much of the footage created for the previous documentaries, focusing both on the idea of what was planned to happen after the nuclear attack and the realities of what the preparations for waging nuclear war meant in reality. Which this documentary does by looking at the treatment of British service men present on Christmas Island during the first tests of British nuclear weapons and how the radiation they ingested there impacted their health and that of their children. It’s not just that they got deliberately exposed to radiation, but that the UK government completely abandoned them to their fate even after its affects became clear. That disdain may be the real horror of the nuclear age.