The fear of foreign birds...

It is a Tuesday evening and a nuclear warhead has hit RAF Finningley. I watch a woman piss herself with fear and hear someone sat directly behind me who should know better laugh.  On this particular Tuesday evening contemporary Sheffield is settling into a seasonal darkness of autumnal damp and decay. However, in the projection playing out on the wall of my University, the City of Steel is about to become molten. I am watching Threads, a docudrama portrayal of a nuclear war and it’s aftermath in September 1984, directed by Mick Jackson and written by Barry Hines.

Threads was produced at a time when fears about and the consequences of a nuclear attack were heightened. During the late 1970s and early 1980s Jack Kibble-White reports, in his article ‘Let’s All Hide in the Linen Cupboard’, that ‘the White House changed its nuclear strategy from… mutually assured destruction (MAD) to an idea that nuclear war was winnable.’Evidence of this can be seen in a piece from the Chicago Tribune by Kenneth R. Clark published in January 1985 just prior to the premier of Threads in the United States of America. Writing in his article ‘Threads: Nightmare After the Holocaust’, Clark reports the on-going argument between scientists such as Carl Sagan, who argued a nuclear attack would cause a nuclear winter leaving ‘our little civilisation absolutely imperilled’, and Edward Teller, ‘the father of the hydrogen-bomb’, who believed that such an attack would be survivable and limited to ‘the bombs fireball’. Clark states that ‘the President of the United States’ shared the view of Teller. In Great Britain, Kibble-White writes that ‘in a 1982 Gallup poll… 38% of respondents declared that they believed a nuclear war to be inevitable.’ With the public consciousness so preoccupied with the prospect of a nuclear strike it is unsurprising that, when first broadcast ‘on Sunday 23 September 1984 at 9.30pm… 6.9 million [people]… a remarkable 40% share’ of available audience tuned in to watch Threads.

Threads charts the attack and its aftermath through a series of juxtapositions and contrasts. Two families of different classes come together through their children in, as Kibble-White argues, almost a parody of the northern kitchen sink drama genre. The film opens in spring with Ruth proclaiming her love for the season and the ‘buds coming out’, only for this particular spring to give birth to a nuclear winter rather than the fruitfulness of summer. There is the metaphoric contrast seen through Jimmy’s love of foreign birds, how they act as a sanctuary for him until the human-made nuclear missiles migrate from Russia to cause such devastation. Jackson’s use of the docudrama genre, the interspersing theoretical scientific fact through title cards and voice-over between the action is also an affective juxtaposition. This blending of apparent fact and fiction creates a sense of realism to what is being played out on screen and, as you watch a plastic E.T. doll melt following the direct strike on Sheffield, it is clear that the director and writer do not wish this to be viewed as science-fiction.

I believe it was the combined affect of these juxtapositions and the level of realism that left me finding Threads thoroughly depressing and horrifying. As I watched, even though the threat and level of paranoia in connection with a potential nuclear war is not at the levels of the 1980s, everything I saw had the potential of coming to fruition. It also started me thinking about the recent debate that has arose with the vote on the renewing of Trident and whether the next potential Labour Prime Minister, Jeremy Corbyn, would not ‘push the button' to launch a nuclear weapon to defend Great Britain. With the Russians seemingly supporting incursions in Georgia, the Crimea, and Syria and NATO positioning themselves against them, how long will it be before tension levels are at the same high as the early 1980s? How long before foreign birds migrate for a nuclear winter?