The film ends thirteen years after the war, where society has only recovered to a tiny fraction of what it was pre-war. It had basic electricity once again, but not much else.
What do you think would have happened in the decades after the film concludes, say fifty years later?
Would society have gotten gradually better, or worse?
[deleted]
Yeah but 50 years later these things wouldn't be missed because there wouldn't be many Over-50's around to remember these things.
[deleted]
refer to the Fallout series
shareI think the movie The Road is pretty telling of 50 yrs later (if infact that too was a nuclear war)
shareI think it would depend on how much long term damage was done to the planet. In the book _The Road_ (which is set about a decade after an unnamed global disaster), it appears that most if not all life in the oceans has been destroyed, as well as most plant life. If that is so, then the environment would be too hostile for the human population to recover as a major species. The Earth has incredible ability to heal itself, and it's possible after many decades the environment would again be hospitable. The question is, would there be enough humans left to develop an advanced society again?
If a heavily attacked country was somehow on its way to recovery, think about countries that wouldn't have been targets back in the 80s... Most of Asia, South America, Oceania, Africa. Of course, the whole world would have suffered economically but some countries would have bloomed. I can even see some giving aid (both the good and the bad kinds) to the UK well before 10 years had passed.
shareI can see some countries giving aid early on, but then shutting it down to save themselves soon afterward as the global economy goes back to a subsistence economy once people realize the flow of goods and services from the destroyed nations isn't coming back. "Me first" will rule for quite a while, I think.
share
I guess thta the impact would depend on how the rest of the world was damaged by the war. Obviously, Europe, the US and the USSR are gobally destroyed with very limited resources, poisoned soil and air and a disastrous nuclear winter.
The book Warday by Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka (1984) described in detail the impact of a nuclear attack on the US and the consequences on other countries economies, especially South America, Japan and Europe. It's a very different scenario from the one described in Threads but it gives a good vision on how a society can change after such a strike. The EMP destroyed all bank accounts, 401ks, pension funds, financial records, the stock market, the credit system and other assets stored electronically. The disappearance of an efficient central government leads to the lack of control with effects on society, education, economy, foreign policy, etc... It's a very interesting and haunting book that I read recently and it remains very informative.
______________________________________
The higher you fly, the faster you fall.
Hopefully we'll never have to find out what would really happen in the aftermath of a nuclear attack.
I would recommend the 1985 novel Children of the Dust by Louise Lawrence. I suspect the author had probably seen Threads herself. The book is divided into three parts. Part one is the immediate aftermath of a nuclear attack on Britain. Part two takes place 20 years after the attack. Part three is set 55 years after the attack. I should say Part three does stretch credibility a bit, but it's still an interesting read.
Don't forget that not all the world would have been destroyed. Much of the world was 'non-aligned' and many countries were not targeted. While they would undoubtedly suffer some of the consequences, there would be no physical destruction and deaths in the short-to-medium term and I'd expect a massive migration to Africa and S America, among others.
Now that an increasingly-belligerent Iran is fast developing nukes, I wonder if this will be repeated or remade?...
The consequences might be extremely serious, though. Bombs on US, Europe and the USSR would wipe out most of the biggest global food exporters at the time, with particular effects for foodstuffs like grain, and would also destroy their huge stores. Production and distribution of vital agricultural products like fertiliser would be severely disrupted, to say the least. That, on its own, would lead to severe rationing and serious shortages in well-ordered Southern nations, and severe famine in other parts. And ozone depletion in the southern hemisphere would also have a big negative impact on agriculture, even without a nuclear winter.
There would also be a serious danger of major political conflict. Several nations which were restrained by the superpowers and their major allies would now be free to attack other nations conventionally, and they would have big incentives to do so where oil, untainted agricultural land and other vital resources are at stake. Coups, inter-state or Middle Eastern conflict, ethnic or religious wars - if these events took place, they would be much more difficult to stop.
It's probable that none of these conflicts would have led to nuclear war, and that, after a couple of decades, some sort of stability would have emerged. But life could still be pretty unpleasant for many, or even most, in the southern hemisphere, on a par with life in the worst of the twentieth century conflicts. But even that would probably look like paradise to those left in the UK....
Well, all computer simulations have lead to one answer: everybody loses.
---------------------------------------------
Applied Science? All science is applied. Eventually.
Thank you so much for recommending this book I ordered it off Ebay and LOVED it! Just finished it now.
Thanks greg-233.
Might check it out myself.
shareThe above book sounds very much like 'Warday' by Whitley Streiber and James Kunetka.
The synopsis of the 'docu-novel' is that the authors assume roles essentially as themselves, working as journalists, travelling around the United States five years after a global nuclear war.
New York and Washington was hit, but the war quickly ended after Britain, France and Germany declared themselves neutral.
The USA falls as a superpower, dependent on Japan and the United Kingdom for aid, and the USSR is devestated.
Like the above suggestion, petroleum falls to less than a dollar a barrel and self-sufficiency becomes the norm. With only so-called 'Gold Dollars' having any worth.
Its a great ready, with lots of stats and speculative suggestion.
This book has no journalists anyone outside 5 years after are dead. Thanks for the info though might check it out.
shareIt is really good! Check it out.
shareFound a copy of that in an old desk draw the other day.
shareBest case scenario would be a version of civilisation as it existed in the 1200-1300s. Society wouldn't "recover" so much as be redefined. Higher Education would be lost for a time, though eventually rediscovered (not all the books would have been destroyed) however as the new generation would be uneducated, most wouldn't be able to read them anyway. English would continue to change (as evidenced by Ruth's clipped version of Yorkshire English). Society would become tribal, nomadic for sometime to come. Perhaps in 100 years the soil will have recovered enough to allow a larger amount of agricultural work to be done, and you might see the rise of feudalism/fiefdoms again. Which would bring with it tribal warfare. The population will probably continue to drop and bottleneck to somewhere around a few million worldwide, before slowly increasing again. It would probably take another 1000 years for it to fully recover to something approaching modern society (if it ever does.)
shareJames Howard Kunstler wrote a book called "The World Made By Hand" which is a fictional depiction of a near-future upstate New York small town after a panoply of global crises, including a major war in the Middle East and even includes at least one nuclear bomb detonating in Washington DC.
I can't remember if there were others, but there was no mutual assured destruction widespread exchange. Part of the book's narrative thesis is that the petroleum economy basically comes to an end, and he's a pretty hardcore peak oil believer so he works in a lot of the side effects of basically having no hydrocarbons. Electricity is non-existent, although the book mentions people who keep a radio plugged in and turned on for occasional brief power surges where the power turns back on for a minute or two, but I think the narrator says that the last one was a couple of years ago.
Anyway, the lack of any functional electric power or transportation system leads to a total information deficit about what's happening more than a couple of days' ride/walk away.
The book suggest a return to something like a mid-1800s lifestyle. All food is locally grown in gardens or on nearby farms. The economy is mostly barter, although old silver and gold coins can be exchanged for some goods in limited situations. The town has a doctor, although the only medicine he has are herbal potions and laudanum for pain which is used when primitive surgery can be performed.
Another interesting bit is the salvage economy -- one group has occupied the town dump and operates it like a mine, sorting everything they find. The narrator is a carpenter and "buys" used nails and other supplies salvaged from the dump. Abandoned houses are meticulously disassembled for their materials. One group moves in from outside the town and takes over the old school building, repairing the roof by digging up the asphalt parking lot and melting it down to use the tar to patch the roof.
Overall, my guess is that levels of civilization probably don't fall much below the 18th century except in the swaths of the most destroyed areas with multiple strikes. The overpressure airblast radius of an existing Minuteman ICBM necessary to knock most buildings is only 5 km, so even within areas considered directly struck there would be a lot of standing buildings with their contents intact.
I might even expect by 10 years after, a return to 1920s levels of technology -- inefficient engines run on biodiesel or alcohol fuels and a salvage/recycling economy repurposing salvaged metals. Probably a pretty decent recovery of steam power and possibly some rudimentary regional economies based on rail and river transportation. If you could get any kind of coal mining going again, you might produce an energy surplus necessary to make a lot of mechanization possible via steam power and some kind of metal production.
In larger areas that didn't suffer direct strikes, you might even see a kind of 1930s/1940s level of technology based around simple diesel engines, especially if they had access to hydropower. If you have access to a surplus electrical supply, you can run remaining machine tools and harness the energy for simplified distillation and refinement of crude fuels.
I think it would probably take centuries to get past 1940s technology -- it takes a huge amount of economic organization, power generation and material science to get electronics back to the tube stage, let alone the transistor stage.
Society in the northern hemisphere (primarily North America, Europe, Russia and China and the countries immediately adjacent) would probably revert to subsistence-level military dictatorships imposed by the remnants of their armed forces. They wouldn't have money economies as all the banks and financial records would be destroyed or irrelevant - everything would be done by barter or forced labour. There would probably only be limited electricity generation for specific functions such as radio, military communications and power for military or community facilities such as schools.
Cities would be largely abandoned as the labour power to make them livable in any reasonable timescale would simply not exist, although they would undoubtedly be scavenged for raw materials and supplies. Most people would have to be agricultural labourers so it would make sense for them to move to rural villages and towns, clean them up and live there. Education would be rudimentary except for the lucky few taken to be schooled in countries in the south. Healthcare would be next to nonexistent due to lack of drugs or antibiotics. Essentially they would function very like medieval European societies with pockets of technology here and there.
The larger southern hemisphere nations such as Brazil, Argentina, maybe Australia and New Zealand, and the like, would be much better off. They would not have sustained anything like the damage of the main combatants so would largely recover after a few years. Once their own societies and economies had stabilised they would send expeditions to assess the damage to the northern nations. If they find functioning governments they would probably negotiate trade and technical assistance agreements of some kind. Children of the local elites, and probably at least some especially talented others, would be taken to the surviving advanced nations for proper technical and/or administrative education, so that they can help oversee the reconstruction of their own nations.
I disagree withe the assumption that the southern hemisphere would not be hit.
There are American allies in Asia (South-Korea, Japan, Taiwan, The Philippines, Thailand and Australia, to name a few).
There are US bases and forces dotted all over the south-pacific.
So Asia and Australia would definitely be hit.
- You don't have to be a nuclear nation to avoid getting wiped out in a nuclear war.
Look into five-eyes, nine-eyes and the like, and you'll quickly find out that there are coalitions across the board, all over the world.
South America (at the time), had several states who were communist and Soviet friendly, thus a potential target for American bombs.
South-Africa (which may also have nukes) is an ally to the US and so are several other African nations, others were Soviet friendly, Israel-friendly or Chinese allies, possibly with bases or armed forces of these nations stationed.
IMO Africa (because of it's size and small military interactions with the superpowers, South-Africa exempted), would be least directly impacted.
But if you thought there were famines there before, it will be hell as soon as all aid and medicine stops coming in from the west. The continent will erupt into a mass-murdering pit of hell.
Ironically though, when the dust finally settled and the radiation levels again were negligible, it seems that Man once again will be walking out of Africa, to populate the earth :)
Wouldn't just turn into Planet Of The Apes? Sorry, couldn't resist.
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
Many point out that large areas of populated land would not be targeted. Many of those areas rely on transport developed and constructed by highly developed nations, sea planes delivering medicines in Polynesia.
The life expectancy of many tiny countries has increased along with a decrease in infant mortality due to medicines manufactured in highly developed countries.
Cheap bulk sea transport to supplement the food stores of large Island nations not directly affected by a global exchange of nuclear firepower would suffer famine whether those nations had the wealth to pay for food or not.
The list is endless, the title of the film is "Threads", the title and the opening short monologue tells all.