"Threads" is the English analog to "The Day After" which was shot at roughly the same time on theme of the consequences of a nuclear war. "Threads" is the hardest to watch as it makes the suffering explicit and extrapolates the consequences out ten years past the attack. It also makes more protracted the steps taken toward war and shows the way society is already breaking down before the first bomb is ever dropped.
Even though the movie is a discipline to watch, it still goes soft on the likelihood of survival as it doesn't explain how people get water after the attack. Most probably any water they could find would be irradiated and would kill them. Their estimation of four to ten million people surviving ten years seems optimistic.
The reason for watching is the ongoing naval bumper tag the U.S. is playing with the Russian military vessels in the Black Sea. This kind of gamesmanship is inherently dangerous and, stealing blatantly from "Hunt for Red October," wars have started this way.
When there is this kind of gamesmanship between nuclear powers, it's a problem for everyone as they quickly forget these movies. Suddenly they are just fantasies and consideration of nuclear confrontation becomes valid again.
As of this writing, there are four hundred and fifty active Minuteman III ICBM's in the United States, each of which carries up to three nuclear warheads and each of those can be three hundred to five hundred kilotons in yield. The single warhead used to level Hiroshima was only fifteen kilotons.
The Russians have an equivalent count but a wider variety of missiles.
In what they laughingly call START (i.e. arms limitation treaty), there is the agreement to deactivate fifty weapons on each side ... but it doesn't say when.
So, pick out four hundred and fifty U.S. targets and drop three five-hundred kiloton nukes on them. Some percentage of them will not succeed in hitting their targets but this is all overkill on such a massive scale that it probably makes no difference if 10% or 90% get to their targets. At 10%, forty-five cities still get obliterated and whatever's left goes back to the Stone Age.
Even though the movie is a discipline to watch, it still goes soft on the likelihood of survival as it doesn't explain how people get water after the attack. Most probably any water they could find would be irradiated and would kill them. Their estimation of four to ten million people surviving ten years seems optimistic.
The reason for watching is the ongoing naval bumper tag the U.S. is playing with the Russian military vessels in the Black Sea. This kind of gamesmanship is inherently dangerous and, stealing blatantly from "Hunt for Red October," wars have started this way.
When there is this kind of gamesmanship between nuclear powers, it's a problem for everyone as they quickly forget these movies. Suddenly they are just fantasies and consideration of nuclear confrontation becomes valid again.
As of this writing, there are four hundred and fifty active Minuteman III ICBM's in the United States, each of which carries up to three nuclear warheads and each of those can be three hundred to five hundred kilotons in yield. The single warhead used to level Hiroshima was only fifteen kilotons.
The Russians have an equivalent count but a wider variety of missiles.
In what they laughingly call START (i.e. arms limitation treaty), there is the agreement to deactivate fifty weapons on each side ... but it doesn't say when.
So, pick out four hundred and fifty U.S. targets and drop three five-hundred kiloton nukes on them. Some percentage of them will not succeed in hitting their targets but this is all overkill on such a massive scale that it probably makes no difference if 10% or 90% get to their targets. At 10%, forty-five cities still get obliterated and whatever's left goes back to the Stone Age.
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