As we remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a film the BBC suppressed 20 years later is more relevant than ever

~ Bleart Thaqi ~

Sixty years have passed since Peter Watkins completed The War Game, a film so stark and unflinching in its depiction of nuclear catastrophe that the BBC, who had commissioned it, chose to suppress it as “too horrifying”. The film simulates a nuclear attack on Britain, with a flashpoint in Berlin escalating into global war. A one-megaton warhead detonates over Kent, and the nation’s emergency planning fails immediately.

British civil defence manuals, ration cards, and siren tests offer only the illusion of preparedness. There are no heroes, no organised relief efforts, no triumphant recovery; only eyeballs melting in the heat wave, children blinded by flashes 27 miles away, and families suffocating under tables as their homes disintegrate. The real terror lies not just in the blast but in the aftermath: starvation, radiation sickness, martial law, executions, and social rupture.

Watkins achieved all this without a single professional actor, relying instead on untrained citizens, street interviews, and his now-signature style of handheld realism. The shaky camera, the flattened tones, the matter-of-fact narration, all gave the illusion of documentary, even though what we were watching was staged. Much of the dialogue is drawn from actual civil defence documents, medical literature, and government reports. The gruesome effects of retinal burns, radioactive contamination and re-emergent scurvy are not imaginative flourishes but extrapolations from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Cold War simulations.

The satirical inter-titles, quoting bishops and strategists defending the bomb, are based on genuine public statements. The film lays bare governments’ and militaries’ obscene confidence in their ability to manage annihilation. The BBC’s refusal to broadcast the film, combined with secret viewings for the Home Office and military officials, revealed that the gatekeepers of information feared that the public might wake up.

In today’s world, that provocation is once again urgently needed. For nearly three decades after the Cold War, nuclear weapons were treated as historical leftovers. Now they’re back in the conversation, not as shadows but as real instruments of policy. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has revived the spectre of nuclear confrontation in Europe. In South Asia, India and Pakistan’s long-standing nuclear rivalry simmers dangerously. Meanwhile, Israel and Iran exchange missile fire and threats, with Iran’s nuclear program creeping toward breakout capacity and Israel’s arsenal remaining undeclared but understood.

These are not cold, distant tensions; they are current, hot, and volatile. And in all cases, the logic of deterrence persists: that annihilation equals stability. That we can control the fire. 

But The War Game tells us we cannot. There is no limit to starvation. No plan for recovery from blindness and mass graveyards. The systems of order we trust to manage crisis fail within hours. Every institution is revealed to be built on the assumption of normalcy. What was true then is true now. Watkins understood this, and he understood the media’s role in masking it.

His interviews, staged but rooted in real beliefs, show establishment figures calmly discussing survivability and doctrine. Meanwhile, ordinary citizens express confusion or blind faith. A woman guesses that “Strontium-90” is a kind of gunpowder. A policeman speculates about keeping order. “Not more than a microscopic percentage of people in this country know anything about their present situation”. Watkins said in 1966. Replace “this country” with nearly any in 2025, and the sentence still holds.

The film’s climax is not a grand battle or act of heroism. It is a Christmas scene in a refugee camp. The children, orphaned and irradiated, have no dreams, no answers. “Nothing,” they say. Or they say nothing at all. Over the closing credits, a broken version of “Silent Night” plays.

Sixty years on, The War Game remains not only relevant, but necessary. Not because it foretells exactly what will happen, but because it shows what always can, and what, in some form, already has.

We ignore it at our peril.