[6][7] The film was eventually televised in Great Britain on 31 July 1985, during the week before the fortieth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, the day before a repeat screening of Threads.
[8] The film begins by describing Britain's nuclear deterrence policy of threatening would-be aggressors with devastation from the Royal Air Force's nuclear-armed V bombers.
The Soviets immediately launch their own nuclear weapons at strategic targets, as their above-ground liquid-fuelled missiles are highly vulnerable to a NATO first strike.
The riots soon turn into armed skirmishes between the authorities and desperate civilians; the latter are shown seizing a truck carrying a shipment of weapons and a food warehouse.
Elsewhere, individuals convicted of causing civil disturbance or obstructing government officers are executed by police firing squads, with the father of the blinded boy from earlier in the film being among those shot.
Due to food shortages, scurvy re-emerges as a consequence of a lack of easily-available vitamin C. On Christmas Day in a Dover refugee facility, children orphaned in the attack are asked what they want to be when they grow up; they either "don't want to be nothing" or simply remain silent.
Another child is described as only having seven bedridden years to live before dying from a chronic illness resembling leukemia, while an expectant mother who was exposed to radiation is unsure if she will suffer stillbirth.
The public are generally depicted as lacking all understanding of nuclear matters with the exception of a character with a double-barrelled shotgun who successfully implemented the contemporary civil defence advice, and heavily sandbagged his home.
The film does not focus on individual experiences, but rather the collective British population, who rely on government preparations and are not fully convinced of the dangers of nuclear war until the final hours before the attack.
Of his intent, Watkins said:[11] ... Interwoven among scenes of "reality" were stylized interviews with a series of "establishment figures" – an Anglican Bishop, a nuclear strategist, etc.
... in the madness of statements by these artificially-lit establishment figures quoting the official doctrine of the day, or in the madness of the staged and fictional scenes from the rest of my film, which presented the consequences of their utterances?To this end, the docudrama employs juxtaposition by, for example, quickly cutting from the scenes of horror after an immediate escalation from military to city nuclear attacks to a snippet of a recording of a calm lecture by a person resembling Herman Kahn, a renowned RAND strategist, hypothesising that a third world war would not necessarily escalate to a stage involving "the ultimate destruction of cities" and, indeed, that stopping the conflict before then would give the belligerents around ten years of post-war recovery in which to prepare for the next five world wars.
The effect of this juxtaposition is to make the speaker appear out of touch with the "reality" of rapid escalation and of the likelihood of cities being utterly destroyed as depicted immediately before his contribution.
Similarly, the film briefly cuts away from the destruction inflicted on Canterbury to show a textual statement by two bishops from the Vatican's ecumenical council who argue that the faithful "should learn to live with, though need not love, the nuclear bomb, provided that it is 'clean' and of a good family", before then cutting back to Canterbury's fate, while a spoken statement by an Anglican bishop about his continued belief in "a system of necessary law and order [and] in the war of the just" is immediately followed by a scene of a family burning to death in their car during the Rochester firestorm.
He writes that the film finds Watkins "at his very best, angry and provocative and desperate to tell the truth, yet not once dipping below anything but sheer greatness from a filmmaking perspective [...] an unquestionable masterpiece of raw journalism, political commentary, and unrestrained terror.