Melting eyeballs. Third-degree burns. Fire storms. Mercy killings.
These are just some of the graphic scenes from Peter Watkins’ 1966 film, The War Game. I first watched it in 1985 at the age of 12 and was absolutely horrified.
The fact it was narrated by prominent newsreader Michael Aspel made it hit so much harder. To me, he was the avuncular voice of mainstream tea-time TV, so hearing him explain that the effects of a thermal nuclear explosion are like ‘an enormous door slamming in the depths of hell’ really brought things home.
Now, it’s going to be shown tonight on BBC Four. And despite how terrifying it is, I’d recommend everyone to watch it.
Set in Kent, it portrays a fictional nuclear bomb dropping and we see people’s severe retinal burns before the shockwave and mass fires hit. One graphic scene shows a whole family experiencing ‘death within three minutes’.
In the aftermath of the attack, there’s radiation sickness, hunger, looting and riots. Police execute people who are seen as troublemakers and shoot others with severe radiation exposure in mercy killings.
The widespread shock and despair are rendered particularly haunting: Children who were orphaned in the attack are asked what they want to be when they grow up. One says they ‘don’t want to be nothing’, but others can’t even speak.
The War Game was mired in controversy before it was even finished, as Julie McDowall explained in her book Attack Warning Red
Winston Churchill reportedly banned any broadcasts on that showed the horrors of nuclear war and ordered the BBC to submit any scripts to the Government for their sign-off. His defence secretary, Harold Macmillan, said that if the facts about nuclear weapons were presented ‘abruptly’ or in an ‘alarming’ fashion, the public may become ‘defeatist’.
Against this background, the BBC invited officials from Whitehall in 1965 to preview the film, it then concluded that the film was ‘too horrifying’ for an ‘indiscriminate audience’. The corporation tried to stress that it had reached this decision without ‘outside pressure of any kind’ but filmmaker Peter Watkins ended up resigning from the BBC in protest.
Watkins later claimed that the BBC told him privately that they feared it had the potential to ‘drive up to 20,000 [people] to suicide’.
It wouldn’t be shown on the BBC until 20 years later on the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, which is when I watched it as a child.
Around this same time, I watched another BBC film called Threads that had a deeply traumatising effect on me.
That portrayed grisly, graphic, and relentless detail on what the aftermath of a nuclear attack would mean for people and animals: agonising deaths, societal breakdown, sexual assault, and vomiting.
Watching The War Game just months after I’d watched Threads felt like the sucker punch that does more damage than the opening jab. Threads unsettled me hugely and as I was still trying to find my feet, The War Game came along and knocked me to the ground.
As a direct result of both of these films, I joined the Youth Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and became a full-on anti-nuclear zealot.
Days after the broadcast of both the films in 1985, I spent that week joining ‘die-in’ protests in local high streets, where we would collapse on the pavement as if a nuclear bomb had just gone off.
Later, I also helped to float candles in the River Thames to remember the victims, and my Dad got a call from the police to ask him to collect me from the American Embassy, which I’d try to chain myself to.
I owe this activism and sense of community to watching those two films, which is why I want you to watch it tonight.
In just 47 minutes, you can learn so much about how fragile our existence is, how cruel power – and the people who wield it – can be, and how science has taken us deliberately to the cliff edge of global destruction.
It’s the portrayal of the psychological trauma of the survivors that has stuck with me most. The film left me convinced that the very best thing to do in a nuclear war is to die as soon as possible.
These days, nuclear nerds like me sometimes compare Threads and The War Game the way others argue over Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, or Oasis and Blur. For me, the two films have had different legacies.
Threads became a lifelong obsession. I’ve watched it many dozens of times and I am a member of a Facebook group, Threads Survivors, where we discuss it in detail.
Next month, I’m going to Sheffield to visit some of the filming locations and to watch the premiere of a documentary about Threads and its impact. I’ve even got a Threads-related figurine and badges.
I won’t watch The War Game again tonight because it’s just too intense and lacks the humanity, occasional humour and other strange charms of Threads, but I think you should watch it.
It may just change your life – like it did mine.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing Ross.Mccafferty@metro.co.uk.
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