Threads - Plot

Plot

Young lovers Ruth Beckett (Karen Meagher) and Jimmy Kemp (Reece Dinsdale) decide to marry due to an unplanned pregnancy. As they and their families are introduced into the plot, news reports over the course of several weeks indicate that the Soviet Union has invaded Iran following a coup, and that the United States military, with British support, has intervened. As the situation escalates and events transpire, Sheffield City Council is directed by the Home Office to assemble an emergency operations team, which establishes itself in a makeshift bomb shelter in the basement of the Town Hall.

The crisis deepens as the Soviets use a nuclear warhead, delivered by a surface-to-air missile, to destroy incoming American B-52 bombers attacking a Soviet-occupied airbase in Mashhad. The Americans respond by detonating a battlefield nuclear weapon at the airbase. Hostilities temporarily cease. Britain is gripped by fear: as supplies and food run low, some retailers resort to profiteering, with looting and rioting erupting. "Known subversives" (including peace activists and some trade unionists) are arrested and interned under the Emergency Powers Act.

At 8:30am (3:30am in Washington, D.C.) on 26 May, Attack Warning Red is transmitted, sending the emergency operations team into frantic action. The city's air raid sirens sound, and Sheffield erupts into panic, prompting Jimmy and his workmate Bob to take cover under their van. A warhead detonates over the North Sea, creating an electromagnetic pulse that disrupts power and communications over the region. Minutes later the first salvo of Soviet nuclear weapons strikes NATO targets in Western Europe, including RAF Finningley 20 miles (32 km) from Sheffield. The flash and mushroom cloud cause panic. People caught in the open are injured by flying debris as the blast blows out windows across the city. As the blast wave passes, Jimmy and Bob clamber out and Jimmy runs to his car, shouting that he is going to try to reach Ruth, but the car will not start so he sets off on foot through the chaos. He is never seen again. The Becketts hurry to their basement while the Kemps (Jimmy's parents) desperately rush to finish a shelter they were preparing out of mattresses, bags and doors. Jimmy's younger sister, Alison, was sent to the shops minutes before the attack Mrs. Kemp is seen shielding her youngest son, Michael, as a blast blows in the front windows of the house. Minutes later, Michael is seen crying in the aviary. He is still there when a larger nuclear warhead detonates directly over Sheffield.

As the exchange escalates, strategic targets including steel and chemical factories in the Midlands are attacked with nuclear weapons, instantly vaporising thousands of people and ravaging everything with fire. The worldwide nuclear exchange is 3000 megatons, with 210 megatons falling on the United Kingdom. Two-thirds of all homes are destroyed by blast or fire and immediate deaths are between 17 and 30 million. Nuclear fallout keeps rescuers from fighting fires or rescuing those trapped in the debris. A montage of a firestorm shows milk bottles melting, animals writhing amid the flames and human corpses burning. The staff in Sheffield emergency operations team are alive (except one member killed by falling debris) but they are trapped beneath the rubble of the Town Hall. Initially, they are able to contact what remains of local fire and police services by radio. It is not possible for rescue teams to reach them, since radiation levels are too high and all approaches are blocked.

Within hours, fallout from a groundburst at Crewe begins descending upon Sheffield. As their severely damaged home offers little protection, the Kemps suffer from radiation sickness, and Mrs. Kemp is also severely burned (the narrator points out: "the symptoms of radiation sickness and panic are identical"). A day after the attack, they stumble outside to search for Michael, looking in horror at the devastation and fires around them. They find Michael, dead, under a pile of wreckage in the front garden. The Becketts are better protected in their cellar, but Ruth's grandmother (who had been sent to live with them as hospitals were cleared for expected casualties) dies. After helping to move her body to the front room, Ruth leaves the cellar and wanders through the devastated city. Little has been left standing and corpses are everywhere along with dazed, traumatised and injured survivors. Eventually, she arrives at a hospital in Buxton, 20 miles from Sheffield. There is no electricity, no running water and no sanitation, and drugs and medical supplies have long since run out. Crowds of people await treatment, with floors are covered with blood, pillowcases being torn up into makeshift bandages and injured limbs being amputated without anaesthetic. The narrator points out that the entire peacetime resources of the National Health Service, had they survived, would be unable to cope with the casualties from just the one bomb that hit Sheffield. In the aftermath of a full-scale nuclear attack, "as a source of help or comfort he is little better equipped than the nearest survivor."

When Ruth returns to Sheffield, she goes first to the Kemps' house and finds Mrs. Kemp's body in their shelter. She then returns to her own home, where her grandmother's body is decaying under a blanket. The cellar is full of flies and vermin and she realises her parents, if they are there, must be dead. In fact, as a previous scene has shown, they have been murdered by looters, one of whom is himself shot by soldiers who chance upon the gang leaving the house. By this time order has dissolved and "starving mobs" are seeking food in many places around the city. Looters, including Alison Kemp, are shown being held behind wire. Mr. Kemp is among a rioting crowd at a food storage depot who are dispersed by tear gas and gunfire. He dies some time later from radiation sickness.

One month after the attack, soldiers dig into the town hall basement and find the bodies of the emergency operations staff, who have all died of suffocation. No efforts are made to bury the dead as the surviving population is too weak for manual labour. Burning the bodies is considered a waste of what little fuel remains and so millions are left unburied, which leads to the outbreak of diseases such as cholera and typhoid. The government authorises the use of capital punishment and special courts are given wide-ranging powers to shoot prisoners. As money no longer has any value the only viable currency is food, given as a reward for work or withheld as punishment. Workers who die slightly increase the average daily food rations to the survivors. Due to the millions of tons of soot, smoke and dust that have been blown into the upper atmosphere by the explosions, a nuclear winter develops. Ruth is later working on a farm, having defied official advice and fled the city, eventually giving birth alone in a farm out-building to her daughter, Jane. With nobody to help, Ruth is forced to cut the umbilical cord with her teeth.

A year after the war, sunlight begins to return but food production is poor due to the lack of proper equipment, fertilisers and fuel. Damage to the ozone layer also means this sunlight is heavy with ultraviolet radiation. Cataracts and cancer are much more common. The remaining survivors are weakened from illness and hunger.

A few years on, Britain's population falls to medieval levels, around 4 to 11 million people. The country has managed only very little recovery. Survivors, including Ruth and her daughter, work in the fields. Children born since the attacks are educationally stunted and speak a broken form of English. This is due to the effects of radiation, as children born after the attack suffer from mental retardation and/or physical deformities, including Ruth's daughter. Prematurely aged (possibly as a result of cancer) and blind with cataracts, Ruth dies, survived by her 10-year-old daughter Jane (Victoria O'Keefe).

As shown by screen captures, the country gradually starts to rebuild with limited amounts of coal mining and some mechanisation from traction engines. Three years after Ruth's death, Jane and two boys her age are caught stealing food. When they try to escape, one boy is shot dead as they flee. She and the other boy wrestle for the food and they end up having what the script describes as "crude intercourse" and Jane is allegedly sodomized. Months later, she is seen stumbling through the rubble of a city, pregnant and at full-term. She finds a makeshift hospital, which has electricity. The final scene shows Jane giving birth and the play ends just as she is about to scream in horror as she looks upon her baby.