I watched Sky’s recent series The Wargame with fascination, working my way through the episodes until the small hours. In it, a group of former ministers, military figures and other officials role-play positions in a simulated COBR (Cabinet Office Briefing Room) crisis room, as they face an escalating military situation. Michael Gove plays the Prime Minister, Nicola Sturgeon the Deputy Prime Minister, Penny Mordaunt the Defence Secretary, Harriet Harman the Home Secretary, Jim Murphy the Foreign Secretary, General Sir Richard Barrons plays Chief of the Defence Staff. Other roles in intelligence, NATO and the US State Department are played by well-known figures.
The events begin with the murder of two key RAF pilots, a disruptive cyberattack, and the appearance of a Russian intelligence-gathering vessel off the coast of Scotland. The Russian vessel runs aground and sinks, for which Moscow blames Britain, then a Russian submarine sinks a nearby British warship, all of this leading to a chain of retaliations and counterretaliations which rapidly escalate, until the Prime Minister must decide whether to authorize a major British nuclear strike.
The Russian vessel runs aground and sinks, for which Moscow blames Britain, then a Russian submarine sinks a nearby British warship, all of this leading to a chain of retaliations and counterretaliations.
I found the series utterly compelling, and thought some of the participants were impressive, especially Gove, Sturgeon, Mordaunt, Murphy and Barrons. The scenario does not require a room full of heroes or fools, but people who can act rationally and conscientiously under circumstances of great pressure, whilst still realizing the horrifying ethical questions facing them.
The Wargame is part of a wider trend, which has emerged since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, of cultural and media productions constructing scenarios leading to catastrophic global conflict. These include the docuseries Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War (2024), Annie Jacobsen’s book Nuclear War: A Scenario (2024), and Kathryn Bigelow’s film A House of Dynamite (2025).
The rise of this type of cultural theme recalls vividly a much earlier period in my life. As a teenager, I had encountered similar fears from books, television, films, music and political argument, but had not expected them to become so immediate again. What has changed is my understanding of what was then at stake.
The Fear of Nuclear War
When I have taught students cultural history of the early 1980s, I have regularly stressed how powerful the fear of nuclear war was for many growing up in or living through that period. Most of those I have taught were born or grew up in a period following the fall of the Berlin Wall, and as time goes on, knowledge of the Cold War, or even communism, can be increasingly vague. My knowledge now of the fall of communism and has changed my perspective on the early 1980s, but this does not lessen the memories of the impact at the time.
I recall many discussions with others at my school as to whether or when we thought there would be a nuclear war. Some were convinced this would happen within the next ten years; others thought it would happen before the millennium. But most of those I knew were sure it would happen, so that it was just a question of which conflict would spark it. I remember feeling a sense of hopelessness and depression from all of this, wondering what the point was of planning for the future.
I recall many discussions with others at my school as to whether or when we thought there would be a nuclear war.
By 1979, there was severe strain on the earlier 1970s period of détente, with the Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and negotiations leading to the deployment of cruise and Pershing missiles in Western Europe. Furthermore, the election of Margaret Thatcher, who took a stronger line against communism than her predecessors, created renewed anxiety about the possibility that the Cold War would turn “hot”. Subsequent events, including the long Iran-Iraq War, and a confrontations with Libya which culminated in American air strikes in 1986, added to a sense of international instability and volatility. US President Ronald Reagan made his “evil empire” speech in March 1983, then went on to announce the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) later that month.
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament saw a huge rise in membership, and Greenham Common became notorious as a major site of anti-nuclear protest. The UK government made publicly available the pamphlet Protect and Survive in 1980, which had been produced in the mid-1970s but not yet released. This gave instructions on how to prepare a nuclear shelter using ordinary domestic furniture, on stockpiling and how to act after an attack, including how to deal with bodies in the event of deaths. This was mercilessly lampooned by comedian Jasper Carrott in 1982. Nonetheless, fallout shelters became a familiar phenomenon during the time.
The Culturally Productive Cold War
Two other works of art from that year were fundamental to how these fears had seeped into popular culture. One was Raymond Briggs’s unbelievably bleak graphic novel When The Wind Blows (made into an animated film in 1986). In this, an elderly couple survive a nuclear attack, but after leaving a fallout shelter, they see the devastation around them, and gradually succumb to radiation poisoning, dying alone. Then came the black TV comedy Whoops Apocalypse, imagining a nightmarish scenario in which a comically inept US president is advised by a fundamentalist fanatic, and a Labour government in the UK comes to join the Warsaw Pact. This is combined with a wide range of global incidents based on real events, which lead to the accidental detonation of a nuclear bomb in Israel, en route to being used to help the brother of the deposed Shah of Iran, then rapid escalation ending with global annihilation.
In 1984, the threat of nuclear annihilation was at the heart of a No. 1 hit, Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Two Tribes”. In the video, actors playing Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Konstantin Chernenko are in a wrestling match as a metaphor for the struggle for world domination. Over the top of the song, we hear narration from the original government information films of Protect and Survive (1975-76), spoken by actor Patrick Allen. Another song which hit No. 1 that year in the UK was the English version of “99 Luftballons” by the German band Nena; I recall few people noticing that this was a song evoking helium balloons being released and being mistaken for enemy invasion, leading to nuclear escalation.
But even all this could not have prepared us for the film Threads (1984), written by Barry Hines and directed by Mick Jackson, which depicts events in the Middle East leading to full-scale nuclear conflict, and focuses on the city of Sheffield. The build-up occupies just less than half of the film, the remainder being devoted to the traumatizing aftermath, involving terrible sickness, lack of sanitation, government paralysis, struggles for the most basic food, nuclear winter, looting, martial law and summary executions, and almost unwatchable scenes in hospitals managing with the barest of supplies, without anaesthetic or basic tools of hygiene. The horror extends beyond mass death to the brutal impoverishment of the world that remains, in which children inherit a society where education, language and knowledge have been decimated. Few can surely have been immune to the power of this picture, based upon real studies of the impact of such a catastrophe.
Threads involved terrible sickness, lack of sanitation, government paralysis, food struggles, nuclear winter, looting, martial law and summary executions, and almost unwatchable scenes in hospitals.
Whilst not directly linked to nuclear war, the BBC series Edge of Darkness (1985), scripted by Troy Kennedy Martin, touched on many of the same fears. In its shocking opening, a Yorkshire detective’s daughter is shot and dies in his arms. His resulting investigations uncover the existence of a secret illegal nuclear reprocessing plant, which his daughter and other environmental campaigners had been involved in attempting to infiltrate.
With stunning performances from Bob Peck as the detective, Joanne Whalley as his daughter (who reappears on multiple occasions as a ghostly figment of her father’s imagination) and Joe Don Baker as a rogue CIA agent, the series was intelligently written and grippingly paced, portraying a secret state fuelled by grotesque “nuclear entrepreneurs” who control the underground plant. It was filmed as a Dantesque nightmare. It also evoked the idea that the forces of the nuclear industry had become a power in themselves over and above the oversight of governments, and stood to control a hellish future in which humans and natural resources were secondary to their dangerous technocratic plans. The detective’s deep loss is the vehicle for his entry into a world whose ends seem almost impossible to grasp.
