In 1965, the British government blocked the BBC from broadcasting The War Game, a pseudo-documentary film it had commissioned depicting just what a nuclear attack on the UK would entail. The film, the government judged, was simply too “horrifying” for the public. Two decades after that, The War Game finally aired, prior to the release of the 1984 film Threads, which, in imagining the aftermath of a nuclear attack on the UK, was the first movie to deal with the scientific reality of nuclear winter.
When I was 11, I had nightmares for a few weeks after seeing a trailer for a nuclear doomsday film (The Sum of All Fears) that ran prior to a cinema screening of The Fellowship of the Ring (I had just read the three Lord of the Rings volumes). The Nazgûl were disturbing, of course, but they were not of the real world, unlike nukes. This January, I was confronted with The War Game at an exhibition on The Atomic Age at Paris’s Museum of Modern Art; I finished the exhibit in near silence. A week later, I watched Threads; it ruined the remainder of my afternoon.
