"Joey, Do You Like Movies About Apocalypses?"

"Joey, Do You Like Movies About Apocalypses?" My latest paper, for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. This has been one of those weeks in which a bunch of my articles that have been in the works for multiple months happen to come out around the same time. On Tuesday the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published my paper on the future of American network power. Yesterday, my first paper for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists appeared about a much darker topic. Strangely, they asked me to write about one apocalyptic film associated with nuclear war. What could I, the author of Theories of International Politics and Zombies and the teacher of “The End of the World and What Comes After,” possibly know about fictional apocalypses?! Accepting the assignment I chose the 1984 British film Threads in a paper entitled, “The brutal, powerful legacy of Threads,” which will be accessible to one and all until July 15th.1 For those readers unfamiliar with Threads, think of it as the gritty English reboot of the searing 1983 film The Day After. That is not really a joke — take a gander at the film’s trailer. From my article: Threads is a difficult watch—and therefore somewhat less effective in attracting viewers who are not fans of apocalyptic cinema. The evidence that Threads influenced public sentiment or public policy about nuclear weapons at the time of its release is limited at best. This is in stark comparison to two films that came out a year earlier: Nicholas Meyer’s The Day After and John Badham’s WarGames. Unfortunately, however, Threads’ scenario about how a nuclear war might break out has acquired new relevance in the 21st century. Furthermore, as a statement about the futility of nuclear war planning, the film is mordantly effective. What do I mean about the futility of nuclear war planning? I’m glad you asked! One more excerpt: The more darkly amusing legacy of Threads is that it is perhaps the best fictional rendering of what sociologist Lee Clarke labeled “fantasy documents”—disaster planning for worst-case outcomes that alter the underlying system, in which the plans seem detached from reality. In fantasy documents, unrealistic assumptions are often made about catastrophic outcomes in order to promulgate standard operating procedures for such contingencies. As Clarke noted in his book Mission Improbable: Using Fantasy Documents to Tame Disaster, preparing for nuclear war—particularly in the area of nuclear civil defense—often leads to absurd assumptions and plans. Clarke explained, “To mount an effective case that it makes sense to talk about defending against thermonuclear bombs and restoring to normalcy a society devastated by nuclear destruction demands that the singularity of nuclear war be dispensed with…. [thereby offering] the potential to transform the rarefied world of nuclear war planning into something more mundane and hence more rational” (Clarke 1999). Any large organization needs to engage in planning in order to convert radical uncertainty into more psychologically manageable forms of risk—a point that Clarke noted in his book…. Clarke, however, is hardly the only social scientist to note the absurdity of how governments plan for contingencies surrounding a nuclear war (Ellsberg 2017). Sociologist Lynn Eden concluded in her 2004 book Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation that for decades, US nuclear planners radically underestimated the damage that would occur from a thermonuclear war from uncontrollable nuclear fire (Eden 2004). As Eden explained in a 2021 article for the Journal of Peace and Nuclear Disarmament: “As they work, planners strip out the human meaning of the consequences of the hypothetical actions they are planning. They do this because the complex and detailed tasks that command their attention have already removed vivid references to human society” (Eden 2021). All of these tropes are on vivid display in a subplot of Threads You’ll have to read the whole thing to understand how Threads plays with these tropes — as well as why the film winds up being uncomfortably relevant for thinking about escalation in 2026. Also, many thanks to my podcasting partner in crime Ana Marie Cox. I had not watched Threads until we decided to discuss it for Space the Nation during our nuclear winter series in early 2025. That conversation helped form my thinking about what to say in this essay. I believe the film is available on YouTube.