I watch a lot of post-apocalyptic television series and movies. In fact, I watch so much of it that Netflix categorizes my favorite genre as “Extreme Survival In Twisted Worlds”. That is an actual category. I have also read the survivalist literature and literature on extreme survival shelters. You can call a company and have one delivered that they will sink in your back yard. Some include sophisticated features like cooling your shelter exhaust so it cannot be picked up by infrared detectors. If you have several million dollars to spend you can get a deluxe survival condo located in an old missile silo. That assumes that you have adequate warning of the impending apocalypse to travel there. The standard post-apocalyptic fiction seems to assume that there will be significant numbers of survivors, that they will be well prepared, and the only worries will be ruthless leaders and defending yourself and your resources from them. The only exception I can think of is the movie version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, that is focused on the grim post-apocalyptic existence of a man and his son. But even in that story there was a relatively happy ending.
A week ago, I was watching clips from Jason Pargin. He is an author who offers insightful sociocultural
commentary on various topics. The one I
saw was about this topic in general. He observed that most post-apocalyptic
movies and television series are inhabited by attractive people who don’t seem
to be in that much distress. They all
seem to have survival skills and are getting along famously. The only exception seems to be when they need
to use their survival skills in physical confrontations with roving hordes of
zombies or rival camps trying to steal their food or personnel. Even then they prevail. He suggested the 1985 film Threads as
a counterpoint. The movie is about a
nuclear attack on the United Kingdom.
His point was that this was probably a much more accurate depiction of
post-apocalyptic survival and it is grim – even decades after the event.
On that recommendation I was able to find the movie on a
streaming service and watched it from beginning to end. It starts off in a couple of cities in the
UK, and we focus on a few familiar people and their routine. There is background news that the US has
started some kind of military operation in Iraq and Russia is starting to
respond. There are some antiwar protests
about it in the UK. Eventually it
escalates to a single nuclear device attack from Russia responded to by a
single nuclear weapon from the US.
Tensions increase and eventually a high-altitude nuclear weapon is
exploded over the UK as an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that knocks out
communication. That is followed by nuclear attacks on major cities. We witness the mushroom cloud, anxiety, and
panic. There are a massive number of
deaths from the initial blast and burn injuries. There are an equal number of people exposed
to radiation and injuries that nobody can treat. There are no medical systems left that can
treat or triage the massive number of injured.
That should be intuitive for anyone who lived through the COVID epidemic
because at one point the mass casualty systems in many countries were
overwhelmed by that respiratory infection.
By comparison a nuclear attack in any major city would produce hundreds
of thousands to millions of injuries.
Most of these people would die without care.
Removal of dead bodies was another problem. There was insufficient manpower and fuel left
to bury or burn them. There were scenes of bodies everywhere. They were burned from radiation and
decomposing. Sanitation was a problem
with no clean water, sewage, or garbage disposal. Rats and dogs were everywhere spreading
contamination and disease. People had to
seek shelter in partially demolished buildings that could not protect them from
radioactive dust. In the days following
the blast more people came down with and died from radiation poisoning. At one point the public officials who were
supposed to be managing the disaster just gave up. The landscape was littered with survivors
wearing dirty clothing, shivering in the cold, with nothing to eat or drink. Diseases that has been gone for centuries due
to improved sanitation were back and killing survivors.
The confrontations depicted in the usual post-apocalyptic
movies were still there but on a much smaller scale. It was no longer village versus village. It
was two people against one and all three significantly debilitated. As the nuclear winter set in from debris
blown into the atmosphere – there was some cooperation manually harvesting
crops that were still in the ground. It
was a slow process due to the poor physical health of the survivors, a lack of
food, and the lack of operable farm equipment.
Once those sparse crops were harvested there was not much hope for a
planting season.
Threads does highlights at several intervals after
the nuclear attack. About 20 years after the attack, they estimate that there
are about 1.0 - 1.5 million people left in the UK or about the number that were
there in Medieval times. In 1985, there
were 56.6 million people in the UK.
Threads accurately depicts the catastrophic changes
that are likely to occur after a nuclear war.
The imagery in the film is much grimmer than I am describing in this
essay. I found the final scene so gruesome that I am not mentioning it here. I
don’t think it is necessarily important to watch it all. It does not take much imagination to think
about what will happen if suddenly the power goes out, municipal safe water systems
shut down, and you no longer have a safe food supply or medical care. More importantly – you no longer have the hope
that any of these systems will ever be restored. One of my concerns has always been – what
happens to the people who are taking life saving medication every day for
chronic problems. What happens to the
millions on CPAP for sleep apnea? Most of them will encounter very serious
problems in the next 1-3 months and that assumes they were able to save their
current supply of medicine.
How does Threads compare to other films in this
genre? The closest approximation is
probably The Day After
a 1983 American movie that depicts similar levels of mayhem and destruction but
alludes to the severity of the destruction at the end saying an actual attack
would be much worse than what is depicted.
There is apparently is a 2025 film called Nuclear Winter that
I cannot find anywhere. There are several
films that leave the results of a nuclear attack up to the imagination of the
viewer. Fail Safe is a
classic film demonstrating the catastrophic consequences of mistakes with
nuclear weapons but the viewer only experiences the anxiety and fear of the
government and military officials. The
recent Kathyrn Bigelow film A
House of Dynamite uses a similar approach while pointing out the folly
of anti-missile systems. There are scores
of survival manuals available from government web sites that describe is detail
what happens during a nuclear attack and what you need to protect
yourself. None of them say anything
about what it will be like when all the services and infrastructure that you
need every day to live is permanently gone. There are certainly glimpses of
this from conventional weapons. The devastation
in Palestine is a recent example. But
even the horror of what happened in Palestine seems to be minimized and sanitized
on a daily basis as if it can be argued away.
The scariest prospect of living in the 21st
century is that there are no peace movements anymore. The only realistic prevention strategy is to
maintain the peace and international relationships and there are few people who
talk realistically about that. All the
current world leaders seem poorly equipped for that task. Many seem to adhere to the Athenian precedent
from 415 BC when they ignored an appeal from the Island of Melos based on their
neutrality. Instead, they attacked and
massacred all the men and enslaved the women and children. In today’s world we see the dynamic of power
over morality being played out on a regular basis. A related issue is the people in power are
old men with questionable values and motivations. They have no stake in the
future and the immediate goals of many are self-enrichment and fictional
legacies. Many of them are convicted
criminals or have been charged with war crimes.
Many clearly have no interest in averting a climate apocalypse that will
amplify the power over morality dynamic that has been present since prehistoric
times. That is hardly a group I would assemble to prevent nuclear war. It seems
that modern man has very advanced destructive technology being managed by the
same primitive brain.
A significant portion of the general populations of each country
do not seem much better. Instead of recognizing the sanctity of the universal
struggle for existence and all that involves they tolerate megalomaniacs and,
in many cases, seem to worship them. In
the United States, billionaires and an impending trillionaire are all
considered geniuses and given privileges (most notably lower taxation rates)
that the average citizen does not have.
The media hangs on the predictions of this elite group as if they are
accurate. While this group profits from taxpayer supported subsidies and contracts,
many of the people paying the taxes can’t afford food, housing, child care, or healthcare. In
the US, the people and the Congress representing them seem powerless to change
the recent more malignant course of power over morality. Much of that
powerlessness comes from new trends in negating reality and science by politics
and rhetoric. It is easier to listen to
an antivaxxer rant than contemplate a burned-up world with nothing left to sustain
human life. It is as if the zombie
apocalypse has already happened and the people have become a slow-moving herd of
the undead, watching their little screens while the world burns.
None of this makes me very hopeful about the future. If you
can deny that vaccines have been the single most significant mortality reducing medical achievement
in history you can deny a nuclear winter with tens of millions of dead bodies
littering the landscape.
And remember a nuclear war is not "winnable" or containable based on geography. It is much more likely the end of civilization and probably our species.
George Dawson, MD, DFAPA
Graphic Credit:
Palestinian News & Information Agency (Wafa) in contract
with APAimages, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Description: Damage in Gaza Strip during the October 2023 - 29
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Damage_in_Gaza_Strip_during_the_October_2023_-_29.jpg
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