threads---select references and bibliography

Threads—Select References and Bibliography

Kevin Hall

January 21, 2013

Threads—Select References and Bibliography 1

1 IntroductionThe following reference material was used in Threads either as a factual or dramaticreference. Many of the references were used to either substantiate the on-screen cap-tions and news reports, or were used to approximate casualty, fall-out or blast effectsor to simulate the events after the attack. As producer Mick Jackson made made BBCdocumentaries such as Horizon, the factual and scientific rigour of Threads has muchto be commended.

This document is intended as a brief introduction to the scientific and historicaldata which contributed to Threads and it is highly recommended that readers obtainthe actual references cited for more thorough discussion of the topics Threads raises.

2 The Nuclear Winter EffectIn 1984 when Threads was first broadcast, the issue of the nuclear winter effect wasseriously investigated at the time. The nuclear winter theory was at first an unforeseeneffect of nuclear war, before this theory was widely developed it had been taken asa given that nuclear attack would result in significant devastation but it had not beenthought it could threaten the existence of human society. The depth of scientific thoughtwhich contributed to the nuclear winter theory was considerable not least that it raisedawareness of the long-term consequences of nuclear war which had been traditionallyoverlooked. What the nuclear winter theory helped to bring about was maturity to thedebate about using nuclear weapons because it began to bring about the realisation thatthe mass of people would probably not be killed or injured by the direct effects of heatand blast but instead would have to live on in a miserable post-attack world of sickness,disease, hunger and famine.

The first serious thinking on global warming (or global cooling, depending on theoutcome) was proposed by Manabe and Wetherald in 1967[1]. This paper made theconnection with CO2 levels being critical for the balance of world temperatures andthat production of too much CO2 could have a catastrophic environmental impact.

As this effect was debated, sometime later in 1980 an article by Luis W. Alvarez[2]and his associates began work on the extinction theory which looked at why dinosaursdisappeared 65 million years ago. Alvarez’s theory was that there was evidence ofan asteroid collision around this period. Had the asteroid of been 10 km or more indiameter, the debris thrown up by the impact would have changed the Earth’s climateand triggered an Extinction Level Event.

By 1982 Paul J Crutzen and John W Birks realised that the same reasoning couldalso be applied to nuclear war[3]. They forecast that a large scale East/West nuclearwar would lift up enough smoke and dust to darken the skies and contain enough hy-drocarbons and oxides of nitrogen to produce dangerous levels of pollution.

It was in 1983 that solid evidence was presented that would form much of the post-attack environment depicted in Threads; an article by Turco, Toon, Ackerman, Pollackand Sagan (often referred to as “TTAPS”) predicted that multiple nuclear explosionscould, depending on their number, yield, target and size blanket the Earth in a cloudof smoke and dust that could take between 3 and 12 months to fall to Earth reducingsunlight by up to 99% and drop temperatures by some 40oC in the interiors of theNorthern Hemisphere[4]. A companion study by Paul Ehlrich and associates arguedthat prolonged dark and cold would cause such a severe blow to food production thatmass starvation would be inevitable[5].


The TTAPS paper became a vital work of reference because in earlier studies thecreation of large amounts of smoke and dust to imbalance the planet’s atmosphere hadbeen largely disregarded although in papers produced to espouse a particular point ofview. For example in 1975, in a report prepared for the US Arms Control and Disarma-ment Agency, makes what could be seen as a erroneous analogy between volcanologyand nuclear war[6]. The paper argues that based on 1975 estimates, a 10,000 mega-ton nuclear war would “tear up 25 billion cubic meters of rock and soil,” which wastwice that of Krakatoa’s explosion in 1883. The paper fails to acknowledge that thedisplacement of the rock and soil reveals only part of the outcome. If the yield ofthousands of megatons of nuclear weapons were detonated over urban and industrialareas it ignores how much debris would be thrown out by the resulting conflagrations(or “superfires”). Although the fine particles of rock and soil would fall back to Earthquickly, the millions of tons of smoke, hydrocarbon particles and other aerosols wouldstay in the atmosphere longer, possibly for many months and have a much more pro-found effect[7]. As TTAPS indicated, it would not need the phenomena of firestorms tooccur for the necessary amounts of smoke and dust to be produced—firestorms havebeen a controversial subject as to whether they would form after nuclear strikes. How-ever the substance of the TTAPS inquiry was that so much of the urban landscape ishighly flammable would make the arguments over firestorms irrelevant.

As Sagan noted in his 1990 book, A Path Where No Man Thought, the problemwith using volcanology as an attempt to debunk the theory of nuclear winter[8] is thatthey set no urban fires and similarly, comparing atmospheric testing from the 1950syields similar explanations, these tests set no fires[9] as they were all performed overcoral atolls, in deserts or in other wilderness areas such as Siberia.

Sagan also went on to describe that the volcanic eruption in 1883 did have a seriouseffects on world-wide temperatures and climate. Globally temperates decreased by by1oC and the following year became known as the “year without summer”. For moreinformation see Sagan and Turco (1990), pages 99–100 for more details on how vol-canic eruptions and nuclear testing can be debunked entirely from having no relevanceto the theory of nuclear winter.

Care should be taken in the evaluation of government sources. Government mate-rial is often intrinsically political where it tries to craft an awkward balancing act be-tween saying any potential aggressor would be dissuaded because of the overwhelmingresponse of the UK’s nuclear deterrent, yet also tries to suggest if deterrence failed andthe UK was attacked the effects although bad, would not be catastrophic. The govern-ment could not admit that becoming a potential aggressor simply increased the chancesof encouraging external aggression.

Yet by the last 1950s and the first tests of the USSR’s hydrogen bomb the UKgovernment realised just how precarious the nature of nuclear deterrence was. It wasthis which forced through significant change in the outlook of civil defence and theeffects of nuclear weapons because there could be no adequate civil response to theuse of hydrogen bombs—the 50s was a decade which saw the threat from the USSRincrease from a dozen or so Hiroshima-sized bombs to megaton sized weapons capableof destroying entire cities.

Many noted scientists and scientific groups that have studied the possible outcomesof nuclear war (Sagan, Ehlrich, et al as well as groups such as International Physiciansfor the Prevention of Nuclear War) have all argued that such tactics are irresponsi-ble. The theory is that whichever side strikes first, whichever side militarily wins, bothsides are ultimately committing suicide because the global effects of nuclear war areinescapable, unlike conventional war. The argue that once an attack has begun, as-


sured destruction means the war will end very abruptly once the combatant sides areexhausted but the effects of the war are potentially of global proportions.

In Sagan’s 1990 follow-up to the TTAPS report, A Path Where No Man Has Thought,some minor revisions are made to the original agrement. In it Sagan now estimates that“as few as 100 cities burning simultaneously may be enough” to cause nuclear winter.

The onset of nuclear winter is not just a short-term disaster. Although the firststage of the winter may last no more than a year, it is the long term change is whatmay greatly threaten the survival of mankind. After the skies clear and the dangerfrom the worst of the fallout has gone, single degree changes in average temperaturecould cause mass starvation on a continental scale. For example, it has been speculatedthan a 1.5oC drop in average summer temperature could cause most of Canada’s wheatproduction to be wiped out. The rapid changes in temperature (up or down) would notallow the plants time to naturally adjust to a new average temperature.

Additionally, with ozone-depletion the extra ultra-violet light can significantly dam-age crops as well as the threat from insect pests that are considerably resistant to radi-ation and would thrive in the post-attack world multiplying in the billions from all theunburied or uncremated corpses. Also natural insect predators such as birds and smallmammals would be severely depleted after nuclear war which would also encourageinsect numbers to rise.


3 Attack Data on the UKThere have been some in-depth reports and studies on the effects of nuclear war on theUK. Unfortunately there has not been a great number however what lacks in quantityis more than made up for in the quality of the material that has appeared. Many workshave had to be carried out in ignorance of official statistics or assistance because of thepall of secrecy that has surrounded this subject for decades. As a result the investiga-tive nature of the writing means there are occasional omissions but each work can beregarded as being probably the most authorative of its subject.

3.1 Openshaw, Steadman and Greene “Doomsday – A Nuclear At-tack on the United Kingdom”

Stan Openshaw and his colleagues initially produced a paper which eventually grewinto Doomsday, a scientific study of a range of possible nuclear attacks and their directeffects on the population. This work is a reference on a range of speculative attacksand in-depth data is provided on the possible extent of the attacks looking at casualtiesrates, extent of physical and geographical damage and what environment survivorswould could to find themselves in after the war.

Apart from more than a dozen attacks of increasing yield proposed by the authors(including a 213 megaton attack very close to the one dramatised in Threads) it alsoincludes full analysis of Home Office and MoD exercises and their attack patterns usingthe same computer model.

It is a rigorously academic book as it compares and analyses both their own andexternal attack data and is often at pains to describe and list major differences. Manyof the Home Office attack exercises are often revealed in analysis to deliberately reducethe numbers of casualties by means of almost incredible speculation such as the USSRfiring missiles which miss targets as large as entire cities!

• Doomsday. Britain after a nuclear attack

• Stan Openshaw, Philip Steadman and Owen Greene

• Oxford. Blackwell. 1983

• ISBN: 0631133941

3.2 Campbell — War Plan UKDuncan Campbell was a major contributor to the script of Threads. His 1982 book,War Plan UK, is widely regarded as the most authoritive account of Cold War civildefence in the UK both in terms of detail and breadth.

Throughout Threads, from the initial introduction of Clive Sutton as Sheffield’sWartime Controller to the martial state of the UK 13 years after the attack (wherepeople were shot for stealing bread and naked corpses hung on gallows), War Plan UKwrote a substantial part of the factual text of the play.

War Plan UK is an essential guide to decades’ worth of government muddle, mis-management and waste on Civil Defence and how official advice was deliberately de-signed to mislead the public. More than 20 years on, no one has come close to writingsuch a thorough and powerful text on the disaster that was Britain’s Civil Defencepolicy and the suicidal politics of nuclear deterrence.


• War Plan UK. The truth about civil defence in Britain

• Duncan Campbell

• London. Burnett. 1982

• ISBN: 0091506719

3.3 Clarke — Nuclear Destruction of BritainMagnus Clarke’s the Nuclear Destruction of Britain was an in-depth study of the scaleof nuclear attack the UK might expect and the possible effects of it. In the eventClarke’s estimate of 187 megatons was extremely cautious, Openshaw et al estimateda Soviet attack to be much higher and since the end of the Cold War Clarke’s figureshave indeed proved to be smaller than what was targetted at the UK.

However, Clarke’s study of the social, physical and psychological effects of nuclearattack on the UK are clearly referenced in Threads in the post-attack years. Clarke’sstudy of a country shattered by the effects of war is genuinely haunting. He notes the“zombie” like state of survivors, the collapse of morale to the extent he refers to it as a“point of no return” in meaning that national recovery would become impossible.

His description of post-attack Britain is scientifically robust and his point of viewis objective and not politically biased which makes his arguments all the more con-vincing. Many of the “best” and “worst” case scenarios are often contrived by those inpromoting a discrete political agenda.

If there was a criticism of this book it is the amount of material Clarke devotesto possible Soviet invasion after nuclear attack. This would seem extremely unlikelybecause of the policy of assured destruction of both sides in the conflict and alsothere would be very little reason for a Soviet invasion of a highly irradiated and blast-damaged island where the easiest way to defeat the UK would simply be to ignoreit.

• The nuclear destruction of Britain

• Magnus Clarke

• London. Croom Helm. 1982

4 Programme Advisors—Misc

4.1 Eric Alley/The Home OfficeQuite strangely Eric Alley is listed as one of the programme advisors on Threads. From1984 to 1986 Alley was a Civil Defence Advisor to the Home Office, his career goingback to Emergency Planning at Humberside Council and further back to the days ofthe Civil Defence Corps.

Presumably in the name of objectively producer Mick Jackson (who had madedocumentaries) thought it was best to let the Home Office and its advisor more or lessrepresent themselves and on the face of it both families Threads focuses on followHome Office advice to the letter.

Alley made a statement that[11]:


“If they [CND] mean that everybody is going to die, they may be right, butthey have no right to play God and say that. All right, we are not going tohave a National Health Service; we are going back to another Stone Agesociety. But there will be survivors and people are going to have to lookafter themselves.”

probably did more to dismantle his reputation than anything else. It is clearly in therealm of the absurd and helps to highlight Alley as being a government advisor. Notonce did he consider the fact that almost no one has the skills to live in a 20th century“Stone Age” and never did CND suggest everyone would die in a nuclear war, farfrom it, their biggest fear is that so many would have to live through the misery of theaftermath.

Alley had also done much to harm his reputation six months after Threads hadbeen broadcast in a swipe against the TTAPS paper. In March 1985 Alley had circu-lated a paper by former Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientist Cresson H Kearneywho Alley referred to as “our friend” when the paper went to the desk of EmergencyPlanning Officers all over the UK. Kearney said in his paper that the TTAPS report was“error-ridden,” information “propagandised as established scientific fact1” and that itwas “to produce destabilizing weakness and piece meal capitulation to expanding So-viet tyranny.”

Dafydd Elis Thomas, a Plaid Cymru MP raised this letter with a junior Home Officeminister to ask why it was distributing a “politically motivated scientifically unsoundlibel on TTAPS by a retired American crank.” As it turned out Kearney’s paper hadbeen sent by the Association of Civil Defence and Emergency Planning Officers whichAlley was chairman of whilst working at the Home Office—how convenient!

What is perhaps less well known is Kearney is the author of Nuclear War SurvivalSkills (1982) which featured a foreward written by the very much pro-nuclear EdwardTeller. Given the sheer idiocy of a book like Nuclear War Survival Skills (based onexperience?) which the TTAPS paper could potentially have consigned to the dustbinof history it makes sense Kearney tried to write a defence of it only Kearney is no CarlSagan and no amount of sneering could put that right.

• Note: should you wish to read it, Kearney’s book is available on the web:http://www.oism.org/nwss. It is worth reading both as a curiosity andthe fact his references were all long out of date by the books first printing in 1982and extremely dated by the book’s second edition in 1987. (As a personal anec-dote I found this book extremely unscholarly and the evidence circumstantialand selective.)

5 Government Texts — Great BritainSince the end of the Second World War, the British government has had numerousemergency plans for war as well as producing booklets and circulars (from the HomeOffice and more recently, the Cabinet Office) for local government as well as the Policeand emergency services and the general public. The role of hospitals came under theemergency planning of both the NHS and the Regional Health Authority.

Unfortunately the background details to many of the documents and films depictedin Threads are still classified, the Public Records Office will not release many of themost useful documents until the latter part of this decade (2006-2010).

1he must have been reading a different paper to the one I had. . .


One of the most important and infamous documents produced was the booklet “Pro-tect and Survive”[12] and the series of public information films made to accompanyit. This was largely a revision of the “Advising the Householder” booklet from 1963which was specific information about precautions the public should take if it came un-der nuclear attack. Previous to this through much older films also made by the COI,such as recruitment films made for the Civil Defence Corps[13] , attacks on the UnitedKingdom were foreseen to be largely conventional affairs, few if any government pub-lications considered the outcome of a large scale nuclear exchange.

At many times during Threads, Protect and Survive is an important part of thedramatic text. For example, the shelter built in the Kemps’ home is based on the advicegiven in the Protect and Survive booklet[14]. Ruth’s parents sheltering in their cellar isalso following the same advice from Protect and Survive, both in the booklet but alsoin the films[15].

Although it easy to dismiss Protect and Survive as ludicrous and cheaply madenonsense, it is important never to lose sight of the seriousness of the subject. In thefirst instance, the COI did not have any frame of reference on how to deal with thepublic during nuclear attack. The result of this is that Protect and Survive shares somestriking similarities with Air Raid Precaution booklets produced by the Home Officeduring the Second World War[16].

The United States on the other hand had been developing Civil Defence materialssince the early 50s, just after the first Soviet nuclear trial. It was very difficult toimagine what public reaction would be or how to illustrate the precautions withoutcausing widespread panic.

Protect and Survive took a great deal of its information from a more detailed docu-ment called Nuclear Weapons produced by the Home and Scottish Office in 1974. Thisdocument is an in-depth report into the effects and power of nuclear weapons; it is anextremely abstract report that is significantly watered-down for insertion into Protectand Survive.

There are numerous problems with Nuclear Weapons; the first is a lack of genuineobjectivity. In page after page the report consistently attempts to downplay the effectsof nuclear weapons when there was and is plenty of evidence to the contrary, and cer-tainly in 1974 the burgeoning evidence was becoming overwhelming. Unfortunatelywe can only second-guess why this government document is so prejudiced. The old ar-guments of “avoiding panic” will not do; this documents reads more like propaganda atdefending Britain’s policy of deterrence and did not examine the effects of nuclear warshould that demurrant fail. The document discusses firestorms and forms the opinionthat they would not occur in the UK because building regulations and fire-resistant ma-terials of 1974 created a wholly different environment to that experienced in Dresden,Hamburg and Tokyo in World War II.

It is fascinating to consider how wrong-headed this hypothesis is because unlike the1940s, most homes, offices, shops and factories were not filled with man-made chemi-cals and materials. These materials when ignited burn at extremely high temperaturesdespite having low ignition thresholds; they also produce highly toxic by-products inthe form of gas such as carbon-dioxide, hydrogen-cyanide, sulphur-dioxide, acids andchlorine. The document also fails to discuss what proportion of British housing-stockwas pre-war, the concrete monoliths of the 60s and 70s were extremely fire resistantbut this doesn’t mean all UK housing was as modern.

A combination of the intense heat, low flash point and toxic chemicals produced byburning would not only produce a firestorm (see the work of TTAPS) but also would beproduce a smog of deadly pyrotoxins that when mixed with airborne soot would ensure


it was trapped at low levels in the atmosphere. Within the report of Nuclear Weapons,there is no substantial evidence of why a firestorm would not occur; they only offerrelatively vague anecdotal evidence to support their analysis.

The continuity of why this matter is important is observable in both the print andfilm versions of Protect and Survive; according to the logic of the Nuclear Weaponsreport, secondary fires are a considerable but “easily preventable” hazard which is whyProtect and Survive makes great effort to warn the public of the dangers and to tackleany small fires in the home immediately. The problem is that fires spread quickly inmodern homes and without mains water the public wouldn’t have anything to fight fireswith. It is extremely likely that after an attack there would be an acute drop in mainswater pressure through either damage to pumping stations or the loss of power.

The cause of the fires rises from a tenuous leap of logic within Nuclear Weapons;the document claims that if windows are whitened they will reflect back much of theradiated heat from the fireball of the detonation. It then argues that as the flash fromthe explosion travels much faster than the front of the overpressure, it won’t matter ifthe windows then break because the heat will have already been reflected.

This does not answer several questions: Reflected where and what about non-reflective surfaces? What about multiple nuclear explosions? Important targets wouldhave been attacked several times in all probability. Given that the heat of a fireballfrom a nuclear explosion can greatly exceed that produced by the surface of the sun.At these kinds of temperatures most materials will either turn to a vapour (gas) or willspontaneously ignite. For example iron will boil at 2750oC a temperature that is wellwithin the millions of degrees centigrade generated by the hydrogen bomb.

Firstly the evidence in Nuclear Weapons is largely derived from that observed inHiroshima and Nagasaki and early nuclear tests in Nevada. Both the war-time use ofthese weapons and the Nevada tests did prove that even thin materials in light colourscould prevent much thermal damage and injuries. Of the sub-200 kiloton weapons,blast becomes a more serious danger than fires. However, in the hydrogen bomb testsin the Pacific it was shown that the opposite effects are true; these weapons can causemany secondary fires through rupturing gas mains and electrical sub-station destruc-tion, this would also mean that oil and gas storage facilities would be vulnerable tostarting large secondary fires. This is critical as the weapons of the Warsaw Pact werenearly all of the 500 kiloton and higher yield range.

The discussion of thermal radiation does not linger on what could happen to non-reflective surfaces. Wood-framed buildings, oil-refineries, chemical plants, paper mills,forests and warehouses are all highly vulnerable to ignition from the thermal effects ofthe bomb; the varying degrees of light (visible light, ultra violet light and x-rays) canall travel much faster than the mach-front (overpressure) and can cause instantaneousignition in the case of wood and paper or can cause chemical and oil products to flash-over, similarly to how a fat-pan can catch fire in the home.


References[1] S. Manabe and R.T. Wetherald, Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a

Given Distribution of Relative Humidity, Journal of Atmospheric Sciences, 24(1967): 241

[2] Harold W. Bernard, The Greenhouse Effect, Cambridge, 1980

[3] Paul J. Crutzen and John W. Birks, The Atmosphere after a Nuclear War: Twilightat Noon, Ambio, Vol 11, No 2-3, p. 114, 1982.

[4] R.P. Turco, et al, Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Ex-plosions, Science, V. 222, No;4630, December 23, 1983.

[5] Paul Ehlrich et al, Long Term Biological Consequences of Nuclear War, Science,V. 222, No;4630, December 23, 1983.

[6] U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Worldwide Effects Of Nuclear War– Some Perspectives; 1975.

[7] Op Cit, R.P. Turco, et al.

[8] Carl Sagan, Richard Turco, p.124–125, A Path Where No Man Has Thought,Random House, 1990.

[9] Ibid, p.99–100

[10] Carl Sagan, Richard Turco, p.182, A Path Where No Man Has Thought, RandomHouse, 1990.

[11] The Guardian, Thursday people: Rustic’s Nuclear Retreat, 18 December, 1986

[12] Great Britain, Central Office of Information, The Stationery Office, 20th May1980

[13] Protect and Survive, ASIN: B00005ATG7, Catalogue number: DD3496, video-cassette

[14] Great Britain, Central Office of Information, The Stationery Office, 20th May1980

[15] Protect and Survive, ASIN: B00005ATG7, Catalogue number: DD3496, video-cassette

[16] Stan Openshaw, Philip Steadman and Owen Greene, Doomsday. Britain after anuclear attack Oxford. Blackwell, 1983 .p.235

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