As someone born after the Cold War, that film opened my eyes to the fear of nuclear winter in a way I didn't grasp learning history. Fantastic piece of cinema, highly recommended.
Equating watching a scary drama in 1984 with something as severe as PTSD and saying it's a very real thing for an entire generation is over the top. Baby boomers, sure they dealt with the cold war pretty realistically.
UK-born Gen X here. We entirely expected to be nuked before we were 40. If millenials can have PTSD from climate change [0], then we had PTSD from the cold war.
Whether or not it counts as PTSD, I remember it being a stressful time, causing worry that has persisted through to the present. There were the films, of course; When the Wind Blows and The Day After are films I watched (the former was also available as a graphic novel IIRC). I'm not sure about Threads, but I definitely saw The War Game (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Game). The scene with firemen trying to put out a firestorm and being suffocated has stuck in my head.
The Protect and Survive booklet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protect_and_Survive) was around to instruct families in how to construct temporary makeshift shelters against nuclear blast. I recall such planning, including watching a film explaining how long the various Protect and Survive shelters might last at different distances from a blast ("The occupants of this shelter will be fine, for 6 seconds until the blast wave hits..." etc. etc).
Military training at school (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_Cadet_Force) also involved, from time to time, lectures from liaison officers who would remind us of the odds against us in terms of land forces, and how long we might hold out before things went nuclear (should the Warsaw Pact have attacked NATO).
Doesn't the P in PTSD require climate change to be over before it can be classified as such? Shouldn't it be called Ongoing or Anticipatory rather than Post?
I dunno. Try watching it. It’s one of the few movies I’ve seen that I’d call literally “life changing” and certainly convinced me that nuclear war is the most immoral act our species is (currently) capable of undertaking.
I first read that back in high school and it is legitimately one of my favorite books - I re-read it every few years.
I think in my area it was pretty broadly assigned reading at the time - lots of other high schools in the US assigned it - though no idea if that’s still the case (the book certainly isn’t perfect - the female characters are incredibly one-dimensional) but I hope it is still commonly read.
I see On the Beach as being Threads-Lite. On the Beach is certainly upsetting but wow, does Threads show a more upsetting version of similar dynamics. Plus none of the characters of Threads are as uncomplicatedly virtuous as the characters of On the Beach.
Not quite "boomer" but vividly recall air alert sirens being played for evacuation exercises to seek shelters in Norway when I was a child of I guess 6 or 7 in the late 70s.
"Better dead than red." That's another one I vividly remember circulating, a bit later (early 80s).
The threat of nuclear war was very real. I guess we got lucky in the end.
