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The broadcast of Threads (BBC) on 23 September 1984 was a key moment in the Cold War imagination of nuclear catastrophe. Directed by Mick Jackson, and scripted by Barry Hines, the docudrama was widely trailed, attracted a large audience and was influential in defining a vision of what nuclear war would mean. The early 1980s had seen a resurgence in Cold War tensions with both superpowers adopting more bellicose rhetoric and actions; with nuclear war felt by many to be a distinct possibility, nuclear protest had also re-emerged as a shaping influence on the political landscape. Yet Threads is now, if not quite forgotten, certainly little known: with some notable exceptions, few critics have written about it and it has rarely been screened since its first broadcast. This article seeks to recover Threads and argue for its significance in providing 1980s Britain with a vision of what nuclear war would mean. It shows how it works within and against established television genres, exploiting the tensions between dramatic and documentary aesthetics, and how scheduling framed it as significant by placing it within the context of other documentary and discussion programmes. Finally, the article assesses the long-term impact of Threads. Although it swiftly faded from popular memory, it had a lasting impact on a specific demographic within its original audience: those who were adolescents or young adults when it was first broadcast. Not coincidentally, it was this generation who provided many of the new recruits for CND and other protest groups during the 1980s.

Analyses of nuclear fiction have tended to focus on the literature of the United States, particularly that of the 1950s. This article not only switches attention to British literature, but makes the case for the 1980s as a nuclear decade, arguing that the late Cold War context, especially renewed fears of global conflict, produced a distinctive nuclear literature and culture. Taking its cue from E.P. Thompson's rewriting of the British government's civil-defence slogan, 'Protect and Survive', as 'Protest and Survive', it identifies a series of issues -gender and the family, the environment and socio-economic organization -through which competing nuclear discourses can be read. In particular, it argues, British fiction of this period functions by undercutting the idea that protection is possible. Hence, although few nuclear texts advocate particular policy positions, they are characterized by a politics of vulnerability. Proposing for the first time the existence of a distinctive 1980s nuclear culture, it seeks to suggest the broad parameters within which further research might take place.

[She joined] hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, middle, and an end.'In a sharp double renunciation, the narrator, in this passage from Breakfast rif Champions, neatly draws together two commonplace assumptions: that life is meaningful, and that stories are meaningful. Significantly, in rejecting the idea that life is like a story the narrator, who by implication is very dose to Vonnegut himself (later in the novel he appears as Kurt Vonnegut), also rejects the idea that teleological development~a beginning, a middle, and an end -is anything more than an illusion in either stories or life.The association between narrative development and meaning (tlcssons to be learned') is apposite, for the hackneyed demand that stories have a beginning, middle, and an end is surely founded on the assumption that it is in a traditional sequencing of events that meaning resides: beginning must develop into a recognizably distinct middle, and the end must modify and resolve the issues raised in the middle. When beginning, middle, and end are strung together in one story, a causal and teleological development is implied, and the identification of the cause driving events is what gives meaning to the story.Even where plot development is little more than a sequence of events lacking a coherent linking narrative drive, say in a picaresque tale, meaning might arise from the teleological imposition of meaning upon the tale by the reader: one thinks here, for instance, of Daniel Defoe's prefaces to Roxana and Moll Flanders where the potentially shocking disregard for consequences by the eponymous narrators, is muted by disclaimers that direct the reader, in the words from Roxana, to take 'Instruction and Improvement' from the stories." In order to do this, the flow of succeeding events needs to be divided up, in the process of reading, so each falls into a beginning (a state of innocence), a middle (much the most interesting, the fall from grace, which

Nuclear Criticism emerged late in the Cold War as a short-lived but important critical enterprise, seeking to understand the cultural impact of military and civilian nuclear technology. Critics argued that the possibility of a civilization-ending nuclear war affected the production and reception of literary texts, and that scholars should reflect this in their research and their teaching. 'Cultures of Terror' looks afresh at this critical moment and makes two claims.First, it argues that in Nuclear Criticism two broadly oppositional trends in literary studies came together, one ethically orientated, while the other was more sceptical of an ethics of literature and rooted in cutting-edge theoretical debates. Second, it calls for a new Nuclear Criticism. Such a criticism can, in part, revisit 'nuclear' texts of the Cold War era, reading them with perspectives made possible by the post-Cold War perspective. It can, also, though embark on a more radical enterprise, questioning the simple assumption that nuclear issues ceased to be pressing with the fall of the Berlin Wall, tracing the morphing of nuclear anxiety into other fears, and contextualizing contemporary conceptions of 'terror' in terms of an earlier geopolitics of nuclear anxiety.