Captain Oates

The 1960s Civil Defence / Public Information films about nuclear attack are collected on an excellent DVD:

British Nuclear Scare Stories of the Cold War

available at Amazon

Amazon.co.uk: Cold War - British Nuclear Scare Stories: DVD: Cold War

Also, Protect And Survive films from 1976 + others on DVD from Amazon

Moor Larkin

I remember this movie as being my wake-up call.

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ChristineCB

Am I wrong in thinking THE WAR GAME's film-makers should have had enough available education to provide the public with more correct instructions about a nuclear war?

Or was "If you're close enough, kiss yer ass goodbye" so reprehensible that the gov'ts decided that lying to the public and giving false hopes was the better option?

After all, it's not like the Dead would come back and sue the gov't for lies and misinformation.

"What else could we do?"

When I see the '50s monster films, the bad effects of radiation was sufficiently known so filmmakers created stories using some degree of knowledge. Still, the appearance of a Harryhausen dinosaur ("awakened by radiation testing"), Godzilla ("freed by H-bomb tests in the Pacific") and the numerous giant insects (Them!, Beginning Of The End) are only slightly more fantastic than some of the public service "instructions".

AND WHY DID THESE PUBLIC SERVICE FILMS DIE?

I have a feeling that the lack of late '60s Nuclear War Survival films is a tacit agreement that "Kiss yer ass goodbye" was probably the more appropriate "instruction". Did the gov'ts stop wasting money producing these propped-up hope type films?

By the '70s and into the '80s, I think there were more films about the Last Man On Earth scenario than public-service/THE WAR GAME type films.

Yes?

Good grief - could we have entered a time-period where gov'ts actually DID consider "Saying nothing is closer to the truth so why bother lying?"

Wow - what an accomplishment! Maybe Hope does spring eternal!

MarkG

Read 'War Plan UK' if you can find a copy: it goes into great detail on the government's nuclear war plans and is a pretty scary read. They had little but contempt for the people of the UK, and only wanted to ensure the war wasn't disrupted and preserve themselves.

For example, they had a deliberate policy of closing most major roads in the country and going on TV to tell people they'd be safer staying at home, even if those people knew they were living near a major military target that would be vaporised in the first few minutes of a nuclear attack (see the 'Protect and Survive' video on that subject, for example).

Some of the official communications in the 'war games' they ran even referred to members of the public who were trying to escape devastated cities as 'zombies'. There was also a great quote from one of the local government war plans about how a nation was like a forest, and war planning was designed to preserve the 'great trees' (i.e. politicians) because a forest could withstand the loss of much of the 'undergrowth' (i.e. the rest of us).

Unfortunately the book has been out of print for quite a while with copies currently going for about 120 quid second-hand online.

Steve Crook

People used to believe the government

Steve

MarkG

In this case, I think everyone came to realise that the whole thing was pointless: any serious nuclear strike on Britain was going to wipe out 90% of the population and the government itself would never recover.

From what I remember many councils started to refuse to even join in the 'war games' by 1980 or so for that reason.

ChristineCB

MarkG, your cynical views of gov'ts assessments of its citizens' worth seems reasonable based on film-release dates alone.

Kramer's ON THE BEACH arrived in 1959, closer to Godzilla and Harryhausen radiative monsters than the British THE WAR GAME (1965). Obviously Kramer and those writers were aware that a nuclear-winter scenario was likely, and that survival didn't matter since was only months, weeks or days - not some once-considered 'infinity'.

Six years later, THE WAR GAME arrives on BBC-TV.

I wonder if furniture wax sales increased the next week?

Or maybe prospective homebuyers had a new item to consider: "How tall are the street gutters?"

MarkG

'The War Game' wasn't shown on TV until the 80s, was it? I remember seeing it on TV years ago and the BBC making a big thing about the government preventing it from being shown in the 60s. Which isn't surprising, it would have scared the poo out of most people who watched it back then and caused a serious threat to the government's war policy.

'On the Beach' is actually the least plausible 'serious' nuclear war film I'm aware of... I haven't actually seen the movie, but I did read the book years ago. Fallout decays far too fast to kill off everyone on the planet the way it happened there.

BTW, I was poking around on youtube and there are a lot of old British nuclear war movies on there. The 1950s and 1960s civil defence films are actually pretty interesting, showing how they would have tracked the fallout from a limited nuclear war in that period and warned people about it. You can also see that the 'Protect and Survive' shorts were basically just updated versions of the earlier films.

I just searched for 'civil defence' and 'protect and survive' and that found most of them. Parts of 'The War Game' and 'Threads' are on there too; 'Threads' seems a lot better than I remembered, I'll have to get the DVD.

smudge

PIFs still exist, although not known as PIFs these days and nowhere near so abundant as at their peak. You usually have to be up very early in the mornings to see the modern equivalents and generally on lesser satellite channels who haven't quite sold enough airtime to advertisers....

The old GRANADA PLUS on SKY quite often used to start the daily run with one or two of these. In recent months CHALLENGE TV have been showing updated versions of the classic 'Joe & Petunia' ads, including 'DIAL 999 AND ASK FOR THE COASTGUARD'.

To those of us of a certain age it's weird to see the Coastguard in front of a computer terminal and Joe with a mobile 'phone....



SMUDGE

Welcome to my house. Enter freely, and of your own will...

Moor Larkin

That's a good one.......

I have seen the movie but wouldn't pretend to remember much about it, not having seen it in twenty or thirty years. The abiding concept that has stuck with me, and was quite unusual in a Gregory Peck-era movie, was that pretty much everyone dies

That's pretty much all the information Joe Public needs to know about global nuclear war.

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MarkG

As I said, I've read the book. Either they threw the source material away, or they all died from fallout being carried around the globe in a totally unrealistic manner.

Moor Larkin

Most movies throw the source material away don't they?......:

I'm sure you're scientifically correct. Survivable nuclear war somehow seems to make it seem more likely to occur. Perhaps it would be better to suppress the idea.

Whatever happened to that nifty idea: the Neutron Bomb? It was supposed to kill everyone but leave their property intact wasn't it? I can't imagine why it was *banned*.

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MarkG

'Threads' and 'The War Game' are both examples of movies about survivable nuclear wars. I don't think anyone watching them is going to look forward to one.

In fact, I'd say they're probably more offputting than 'On The Beach', since they show the real ways that people die in such a war rather than a fantasy.

Banned by who? Neutron bombs were just nuclear bombs built so small that the radiation risk was higher than the blast risk... there's nothing particularly special about them. With traditional bombs anyone who receives a radiation dose sufficient to kill them would also either be vaporised by the fireball or killed by the blast.

ChristineCB

MarkG, I'd argue that war films don't portray much realism. I do believe one thing would happen: if the warring powers wanted to keep integrating our atmosphere with their fallout, they could do it sufficiently so an ON THE BEACH scenario would occur.

I also believe they could create 'survivable' nuclear wars, too, but since there are people intent on killing everyone on one side, I don't worry too much about "plausibility" being a film's judgement factors.

To me, the believability of ON THE BEACH isn't fall-out clouds. It's a character study of the humans who face that possibility. The sub sailor that stays in San Fran and prefers to die there. The vote of the crew to return home. Anthony Perkins' belated death (why didn't he kill himself after that first uttered sentence with that wretched accent?!! He was killing ME with it!)

I don't really judge ON THE BEACH for the war-effects' plausibility, but rather the perversion of a happy-go-lucky song like WALTZIN' MATILDA into the film's incredibly melancholy score. Such an incredible use of a song, like BLUE VELVET, but MATILDA is even more pervasive in its film.

THREADS, THE DAY AFTER, and a few others could be accurate depictions of survivable nuclear war, but I don't think any of their film-tins could be stacked up in my windows and save me from the bomb blast.

Now - if I had a recently-waxed kitchen table - ! Or a tall street gutter to crawl up next to - !

I just don't think "plausibilty", "realism" and "war films" have any more relationship than "Godzilla" and "my backyard".

MarkG

Again, I disagree: most people will try to survive even in dire circumstances, not just lie down and die. I think 'On The Beach' says more about the author and the post-WWII malaise across Western culture than it does about real people.