Nuclear Winter
Eighty years of terrifying powers
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Western Europeans greatly increased the efficiency of their firearms. Up to that point, the standard musket was a large and terrifyingly noisy weapon that had a range of one hundred yards and took about a minute to load and reload. Three out of ten shots would fail. Wet weather could imperil the functioning of the musket altogether. In 1853, the British began replacing their muskets with Enfield rifles, and the French moved to a similar weapon. The range of fire increased to five hundred yards and it became significantly faster for men to reload. The Enfield was first used at scale by the British in the Crimean War. American-born inventor, Hiram S. Maxim, subsequently devised an automatic weapon that could fire eleven bullets a second. The British deployed this at scale too—against the Ashanti Empire (where modern-day Ghana is) in 1874 and in Egypt in 1884.
"At the end of the 1890s," writes Sven Lindqvist in Exterminate All the Brutes, "the revolution of the rifle was complete." European soldiers could fire while lying down, unseen, at targets a thousand yards away. The sheer volume of bullets that they could dispatch within mere seconds caused the maiming and death of hundreds of bodies within minutes. Winston Churchill, serving in 1898 as an officer in the 21st Lancers, found it all a bit unsettling. After the Battle of Omdurman in Sudan, he proclaimed the end of the old era of war, which had been marked by "vivid and majestic splendour," while the new era was one of unprecedented horror. The large force of about 35,000 to 50,000 tribesmen that attacked the invading British were defeated quickly: 12,000 killed, 13,000 wounded, and 5,000 taken prisoner, while the British lost only 47 men. "I could see it coming," wrote Churchill in his 1899 book, The River War. "In a few seconds swift destruction would rush on these brave men... About twenty shells struck them in the first minute... It was a terrible sight, for as yet they had not hurt us at all, and it seemed an unfair advantage to strike thus cruelly when they could not reply."
This profound imbalance in weapons capacity was the norm in most of the battles of conquest that the European powers waged against their colonial adversaries. The twentieth century opened with a world armed to the teeth, and yet the Europeans, along with the Americans, pushed for further efficiency, ever-more powerful weapons, and entirely new forms of killing. The calamitous World War I, during which the European powers turned most of their firepower on each other, killed about 40 million people—military and civilian. And then the final months of World War II brought an entirely new menace to the planet.
Late one autumn day, as the evening was settling in but before the darkness had dropped a cloak over the city, I walked down the pathway of our house and stood briefly on the sidewalk, which gives me a vantage point over the local intersection. Sometimes I do this: I just stand there and I look at trees or the sky or the houses. That evening I stayed longer than I might have done otherwise because I heard loud voices, and I then witnessed the following scene. There was a mother and her two children, arguing, walking north toward Whyte Avenue. The younger of the children said something that obviously bothered the mother. With scarcely a break in the argument, and without breaking stride, the woman slapped her girl across the front of her face. Then all three of these people just kept on walking. No one cried, no one complained—the argument continued exactly as it had before.
Sometimes I have an inexplicable fear of a dystopian future, and my lack of readiness for it. I worry that I am too soft, having been raised in a family in which violence is unacceptable. I’ve only taken a punch to my adult face exactly once, and that was from a complete stranger. I am too sensitive, motivated to keep things exactly as they are. My daughters will be raised with just as much comfort and peace as I was. The worst sights they’ve seen are transient people on drugs, shouting and swearing, or nodding off under the influence of opiates. We comfortable and prosperous dwellers of the suburbs are strangers to profound physical suffering on a mass scale. I’ve seen one dead body. It was a young man who had jumped off a bridge and into the icy waters of the River Seine. His inert corpse was dragged out by a rescue team and laid out on the concrete bank.
I think of families where the continual threat of violence makes children devious and predatory. They learn the peculiar patterns of behavior of an alcoholic father. They learn not to express their feelings. They know the hiding places. Learning the wrong lessons from their experience, when finally they get the chance to release some of their pent-up anger on others, they know how to pick out the weak from the strong. It all starts in the playground, the school hallway, the backyard, etc. I’ve not made a hobby of reading obsessively about war, but my general understanding is that war is a far better playing field for the children of such families. Cruelty becomes second nature. To experience pain is a temporary setback before gaining an advantage and repaying the pain tenfold.
Yet since the 19th century, war has become mechanized to the point that perhaps the psychological element is of less importance. There is a gratuitousness to the kind of war that started at the Battle of Omdurman. When I read about battles like that, my curiosity is quickly satiated. To devote hours to reading about the horror of thousands of dead and injured soldiers or civilians does not interest me. What interests me are the turning points—the prelude to war and the immediate consequences, those moments when it becomes clear that the status quo has been disrupted, that the era of peace is giving way to the era of violence.
In Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard, our hero is Jim, a boy of about eleven living with his parents in the Shanghai International Settlement. As a member of the elite class of European colonists, Jim enjoys a good education, trips to the movie theatre, a backyard swimming pool, visits to colonial mansions where guests are treated to cocktails and endless edible delicacies served to them with deference by small armies of Chinese servants. Jim is nevertheless keenly aware that the world is at war; it just hasn’t come to his neighbourhood quite yet.
The Japanese bombed Shanghai in 1937, leveling row after row of Chinese tenement buildings, and one bomb leveled Avenue Edward VII, killing a thousand people, "more than any other bomb in the history of warfare." When the novel begins, all this is history. The Europeans enjoy an affluent life constructed from an uneasy peace. Jim goes with his parents to a party at the home of Dr. Lockwood, which happens to be next to a disused airfield. Jim notices there are only a dozen cars in the drive and the chauffeurs are polishing the dust from the fenders, "eager for a quick getaway." The swimming pool has been drained. The gardener is removing a dead oriole from the deep end.
Bored by the party, Jim runs across the lawn and into the airfield. He sees "yellowing skeletons... embedded in the rain-washed mud." He tries to imagine what his own skeleton might look like. He plays in the cockpit of an abandoned single-engine Japanese fighter and then he plays with his balsa-wood fighter replica glider. This scene is written as if Jim is in a daydream. Nothing he sees is quite real—and then, suddenly, he notices a face looking up at him from a trench. The face is moving. It sees him. Jim then notices dozens more soldiers, resting, smoking cigarettes—an entire battalion. They are Japanese.
He hears the voice of his father calling him to come back.
“Jamie, we’re all waiting. There’s a surprise for you!”
Jim is aware that his father can see the Japanese soldiers too. Jim's balsa aircraft has become lodged in barbed wire. A Japanese sergeant plucks it out and throws it into the nettles. Jim wants it back but is restrained by an awareness of the danger he is in.
"Jamie, it's time for the fireworks," his father says.
"My plane's down there. I could get it, I suppose," says Jim.
He notices that it's an effort for his father to speak. His face is "strained and bloodless."
"We'll leave it for the soldiers—finders keepers," says his father.
"Like kites?"
"That's it."
Jim is going back the way he’s come, toward his father, walking away from the Japanese. He says, in reference to the man who threw his beloved toy away, "He wasn't very angry."
"It looks as if they're waiting for something to happen," his father replies.
"The next war?"
"I don't suppose so."
I can’t but help admire the precise construction that Ballard gives to the father’s ambiguous utterance. I don’t suppose so. It is very English. This is the kind of English sentence that fogs reality, like a pair of glasses when they get steamed up in the shower. You don’t see the world through such a sentence; the point is to avoid it.
When I was a boy of about Jim’s age, I took a walk with my father up Bredon Hill. He explained to me the theory behind Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). I am going to recall all this by memory and not bother to look up MAD online because my aim here is not intellectual. My aim is to retrieve that moment when I was first made aware of the perilous state of the world. My father told me that the world’s biggest superpowers, the United States and Soviet Union, possessed so many nuclear weapons that each country was fully capable of wiping out the other. Despite the potential destruction this delicate situation implied, being armed with many thousands of nukes actually served as a constraint on their military behavior. No country would dare to launch the first nuclear missile because to do so would assuredly bring devastation to its own lands. It sounded mad but there was an element of rationality behind it all.
There was a lot of talk about nuclear war that decade. The television show, Threads, first aired on September 23, 1984, and the effect on the British population was visceral and immediate. Many viewers were so distressed they could not get a proper night’s sleep. The BBC’s decision to air the program was the subject of considerable debate, with some of the opinion that a focus on the consequences of nuclear war had been too bleak. It risked sapping the national morale.
One of the many impressive things about Threads is that it incorporated the very latest scientific information that had only very recently been disseminated about the hazards of nuclear fall-out. For example, the term “nuclear winter” had been proposed only the previous year by Richard P. Turco. In 1983, Carl Sagan, Richard P. Turco, Brian Toon, Thomas Ackerman and James Pollock published "Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions" in Science, ensuring a wide audience for the nightmare hypothetical scenario.
Threads crept back into the wider discourse recently because last year marked its fortieth anniversary. In recent weeks, there have been reports that the makers of the Netflix drama, Adolescence, are turning their attention to remaking Britain’s most infamous nuclear drama. All the power to them. Threads did not enjoy a proper budget the first time around. It is testimony to the resourcefulness of its producers that it packs the punch that it does.
Nuclear winter is the term for a theory describing the climatic effects of nuclear war. Smoke from the fires started by nuclear weapons, especially the black, sooty smoke from cities and industrial facilities, would be heated by the Sun, lofted into the upper stratosphere, and spread globally, lasting for years. The resulting cool, dark, dry conditions at Earth’s surface would prevent crop growth for at least one growing season, resulting in mass starvation over most of the world. Alan Robock, 2010
Threads documents this within only one hour and fifty minutes. While the BBC might have been utterly miserly in supporting the production, the creative team did their utmost to play to their strengths. For the viewer, the feeling of being fully immersed in a real, unfolding crisis is near-suffocating, and the pacing is unrelenting.
The opening scene is of a young couple, Ruth and Jimmy, sitting in a car on a hill overlooking the valley where their hometown, Sheffield, is laid out like in a diorama. The conversation between them is rather awkward. It is clear that Jimmy is more keen on sexual intimacy than Ruth would like. When he realizes he’s offended her, he darts out of the car to pluck her some flowers and they kiss gently. A flash forward in time allows us to learn that Ruth has become pregnant. Her parents are not entirely happy about it. In the background, a television is constantly playing. Tensions are ratcheting up in Iran and the screen shows jet fighters taking off. The first half of Threads portrays the increasing tension as the international stand-off between the Soviet Union and the United States over the situation in Iran becomes “hot” and the residents of Sheffield slowly realize they might have to prepare for a bombing. Ruth’s family meets Jimmy’s family. The couple head to an apartment in a high rise to prepare for a new life on their own with a newborn. And then it becomes clear that there won’t be a new life as they imagined it. The local authorities head for a bunker. Ordinary residents like Ruth and Jimmy are advised to stay in their homes. When the first of the nuclear bombs explodes, the couple are separated from each other. The unfolding chaos is depicted with a dispassionate lens. None of the people in this film emerge as characters, per se, not even the young couple. Scrabbling about the burning rubble, suffering the effects of radiation sickness, storming the hospital, desperate for medical care, their movements are more like those of frightened animals. Threads makes several jumps forward in time—from a few days after the bombstrike to a few weeks to several years. Life gets steadily more bleak. There are scenes in the final fifteen minutes that are utterly depraved. It’s pretty clear that the living have plenty of reason to envy those that died in the initial minutes of the catastrophe. Threads puts the boots to the very idea that there could be anything resembling bravery or purpose in WWIII. It was decades before the BBC would allow the program to be aired again.
After the party at the opulent mansion of Dr. Lockwood, Jim journeys home with his parents in the car and he learns that the family will be temporarily abandoning their residence on Amherst Avenue and moving into his father’s company’s suite on the tenth floor of the Palace Hotel. This is the first sign that the family, even if they’re not telling Jim, are preparing for the worst. The following morning, Jim dresses in his usual school uniform, but then pauses in front of the window which affords him a view of the waterfront. The HMS Petrel has been occupied by Japanese sailors from the neighbouring Idzumo. There is gunfire. Explosions. Jim’s father shouts at his son to get away from the glass.
“Am I going to school?” Jim asks. “It’s the scripture exam.”
"No, Jamie. Today there'll be a school holiday. We're going to see if Yang can take us home."
Yang is the family’s chauffeur. Jim’s family enjoys the service of several servants, just as all of his friends do. But these affluent westerners are about to lose literally all their privileges. The attempt to leave the hotel exposes Jim’s family to the violence that has suddenly gripped the city since the Japanese attack on the port. They are among numerous clients of the hotel who are hammering at the doors of the elevator, which will not open. Jim’s father forces his wife and son to the staircase. At ground level they approach their car when Jim is knocked over by a Chinese man running past. He picks himself up and follows his family. The car-ride exposes Jim’s family to yet more madness. There are Japanese motorcyclists and Japanese tanks on the streets, and intersections that have become impassable because of the volume of traffic. The reader becomes vaguely aware that the car has come close to the waterfront. Jim’s father leaves the car and orders his son to take care of his mother. The father runs to the water, pushing his way through the crowd, as bullets fly in all directions. Jim's mother is next to go, ordering Jim to come along. "Get up, Jamie, we're going home."
Are they attempting to board an American or British warship? I don’t know. It’s all so chaotic by this point. There are more explosions in the port. In the next chapter, Jim is on his own on a hospital cot. He is told by hospital staff that his father is with civilians on another ward. There is no mention of his mother except when a nun on duty tells him he should go home, back to Amherst Avenue. “Your mother will take care of you.”
Jim leaves the hospital, now completely alone. He makes his way back to Amherst Avenue. It's empty. He falls asleep by his mother’s bed, nuzzling her nightdress. A sadder scene is harder to imagine. He waits for his parents for three days but they never show up. He recreates his own version of a normal childhood, sitting at the dining-room table for his meals, sleeping in his old bedroom. He decides to go visit the home of his closest friends, the Raymond twins on Columbia Road. There he only sees two amahs (women who are obliged to give their labour as domestic servants to the rich). The amahs are dragging a dressing table down the steps. Jim asks for his friends and when they ignore him, he attempts to step past them and further into the house. One of the amahs reaches out and slaps him in the face.
“He had never been struck so hard, either in school boxing matches or in fights with the Avenue Foch gang,” Ballard writes.
Despite all the chaos that had occurred heretofore, it was at this very moment that I thought to myself: Here it is, the official beginning of the war for Jim, having lost the protection usually afforded to children in times of peace. Nothing will ever be ‘normal’ again. He is rushing headlong into history and the future has been swallowed whole.
The usual patterns of memory don’t quite work when it comes to experiences as traumatic as war. In a normal day, one can say things like, I got up at six o’clock, I ate Weetabix for breakfast, I had a shower, I helped the children get dressed and fed and ready for school, and at ten past eight we all left in the car. But when the intensity of an experience shatters these everyday routines, it is only fragments of memory that remain. Many people will not even want to hold on to what few fragments they’ve got.
Since the first bombs were dropped on Japan, the world has somehow avoided another attack of equal or greater magnitude. Is this a victory for MAD? I do not know. We have had eighty years of terrifying powers, yet that’s the blink of an eye compared to the long winter that would follow if someone were to make a fatal miscalculation now.
NOTES
If I had finished writing this within days of starting it, I would have offered up the amateur opinion that perhaps it would be an Israeli strike against Iran, backed by the United States, that would perhaps be the tipping point toward full scale nuclear war. But I didn’t finish this piece according to my initial schedule; everyday life reared up in front of me and by the time I returned to writing, it was a war between India and Pakistan—both of them nuclear powers—that represented the most grave threat to the status quo. And I feel my sense of inadequacy returning, the feeling I mentioned above—of being too soft for war. Yet I think we’re all probably too soft for it. Ballard’s interview with James Naughtie of BBC4 is revelatory:
Shanghai — particularly during the Japanese occupation from 1937 onwards — was a very, very brutal place, and I don't think the reactions of my younger self were any different from those of other English boys, or French boys, or German boys, in Shanghai at the time. You know, one's got to think of this violent city — where human life counted for absolutely nothing — where if you fainted with hunger and fell to the pavement you lay there until you died, and no one paid the slightest attention to you. It's very difficult to realise that moral indignation is a rare quality, and it needs a base of great human security in order to flourish. Once you actually are exposed to the relentless tide of human evil, you no longer make judgements about it, and I think the book tries to be truthful to that fact.
What I am calling softness is perhaps an innate sense of morality, cultivated by security, and by my desire for my family and I to actually flourish, rather than the opposite.
Television
Threads, (1984). Studio: British Broadcasting Corporation. Director: Mick Jackson Writer: Barry Hines
Books
Empire of the Sun, J.G. Ballard, HarperCollins Publishers, 1984
Exterminate All the Brutes: One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide, Sven Lindqvist, English translation, 1996, by Joan Tate. Originally published in Sweden in 1992 by Albert Bonnier Forlag
Articles, etc.
Interview with J.G. Ballard, by Robert Lightfoot and David Pendleton
https://www.jgballard.ca/media/1970_oct_friends_magazine.html
Pattern 1853 Enfield, Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_1853_Enfield
Battle of Omdurman, Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Omdurman
“The night the country didn’t sleep: 40 years of Threads, the BBC’s traumatising TV movie,” BFI, September 17, 2024
https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/threads-bbc-nuclear-war-drama
“Probably oblivion.” Emma Claire Foley, The Baffler, April 10, 2015
https://thebaffler.com/latest/probably-oblivion-foley
“JG Ballard’s apocalyptic art,” The New Statesman. September 11, 2024
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2024/09/jg-ballards-apocalyptic-art
Peer-reviewed
Robock, Alan, 2010: Nuclear winter. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, PDF file
Alan Robock, Lili Xia, Cheryl S. Harrison, Joshua Coupe, Owen B. Toon, and Charles G. Bardeen. 2023. "Opinion: How fear of nuclear winter has helped save the world, so far." Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.
https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/23/6691/2023/
Photos
“Do you remember when shocking apocalyptic drama Threads was filmed in Sheffield in the 1980s?” by Andy Done-Johnson, The Stat. June 25, 2020
https://www.thestar.co.uk/heritage-and-retro/retro/remembering-shocking-drama-threads-filming-2895556
“Battle of Omdurman: The Last British Cavalry Charge,” Eric Niderost. Warfare History Network, June 2011
https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/battle-of-omdurman-the-last-british-cavalry-charge/