When the Wind Blows is a 1982 graphic novel, created by British artist Raymond Briggs, commonly known for its critiques against government issued preparations for nuclear war. Utilizing a cartoonish design, this graphic novel follows a retired couple, Jim and Hilda Bloggs, and their journey through surviving a nuclear attack on Britain launched by the Soviet Union. The novel was later adapted for different entertainment types including an animated film, radio play, and stage play.
The book follows the story of the Bloggs, a couple previously seen in the book Gentleman Jim. One afternoon, the couple hears a message on the radio about an "outbreak of hostilities" in three days time. Jim immediately starts construction of a fallout shelter (in accordance with a government-issued Protect and Survive brochure, which he has collected from a public library), while the two reminisce about the Second World War. Their reminiscences are used both for comic effect and to show how the geopolitical situation has changed, but also how nostalgia has blotted out the horrors of war. A constant theme is Jim's optimistic outlook and his unshakeable belief that the government knows what is best and has the situation under full control, coupled with Hilda's attempts to carry on life as normal.
During their preparations, the action is interrupted by two-page dark illustrations, the first being a nuclear missile on a launch pad, labelled "MEANWHILE, ON A DISTANT PLAIN....", the second a squadron of Warthogs, labelled "MEANWHILE, IN THE DISTANT SKY....", and third a nuclear submarine labelled "MEANWHILE, IN A DISTANT OCEAN...."
The Bloggs soon hear of enemy missiles heading towards England and make it into their shelter before a nuclear explosion. They spend all the first day within the fallout shelter; on the second day, however, they start suffering from aches and pains in their bodies and still feeling tired, hinting that they have already started being exposed to radiation. They start moving about the house, exposing themselves to more radioactive fallout. Undaunted, they try to continue life as normal, as if it was the Second World War again. They find the house to be in shambles, with both the water and the electricity cut off. On the third day, misreading advice given in government leaflets, they come to believe that they must stay in the fallout shelter for just two days rather than two weeks. Thus, they go outside, to find that their garden and likely the whole area has essentially been reduced to a wasteland with dead trees and grass in their garden, and that there are no sounds such as the trains that would usually be running; Hilda also thinks that the bomb has caused nice weather, as the day is bright, hot and near-cloudless (different from the nuclear winter seen in the film). While out, they notice the smell of cooking meat, unaware that it comes from the burning corpses of their neighbours.
Jim and Hilda exhibit considerable confusion regarding the serious nature of what has happened after the nuclear attack; this generates gentle comedy as well as darker elements: amongst them, their obliviousness of the fact that they are probably the only people left of their acquaintance. For instance, they repeatedly state that they should go out and purchase supplies. As the novel progresses and their emergency water supply runs out, they resort to collecting rainwater. Though they are wise to boil it, it is still contaminated with radiation, and thus their situation becomes steadily more hopeless, as they begin to suffer more effects of radiation sickness. At first they suffer headaches and shivering, moments after the bomb. Then, from the second day, Hilda suffers from vomiting and diarrhoea. On the fourth day, Hilda's gums begin to bleed, and she finds blood in her diarrhoea, which they mistake for haemorrhoids. On the fifth day, Jim also shows bleeding gums; both are suffering blue bruising but mistake these for varicose veins. Finally, Hilda's hair begins to fall out. From then on, she insists that they go back into the fallout shelter and wait for help to arrive (though it never does).
The book ends on a bleak night, when Hilda insists Jim, who has now lost the last of his optimism, should pray; he begins uttering phrases from Psalm 23, which pleases Hilda. However, forgetting the lines, he switches to The Charge of the Light Brigade , whose militaristic and ironic undertones distress the dying Hilda, who weakly asks him not to continue. Finally, James's voice mumbles away into silence as he finishes the line, "...rode the Six Hundred..."
The paper potato sacks they have wrapped themselves in then darken, in line with their ebb of consciousness, growing debility and ultimate deaths.
The book was made into an animated film by director Jimmy Murakami in 1986. The couple are voiced by Sir John Mills and Dame Peggy Ashcroft. The soundtrack consists of songs, many with an anti-nuclear theme, by prominent rock musicians and groups, including Roger Waters, Genesis and David Bowie.
There was also a BBC Radio 4 dramatisation in 1983, with the voices of Peter Sallis and Brenda Bruce, directed by John Tydeman. [1] The programme won the Broadcasting Press Guild award for the most outstanding radio programme of 1983. [2]
When the Wind Blows was adapted for the stage in 1983 by Samuel French Inc., one year after its original comic publication. [3] Concord Theatrics, the parent company to Samuel French Inc., has gone on to adapt other books to plays, such as Animal Farm by George Orwell. [4] The earliest known date for script publication is December 1, 1983, and it has since been performed several times. [5]
The two pamphlets mentioned in When the Wind Blows are based on actual public information series such as Protect and Survive . [9] These sort of pamphlets go back as far as 1938, when the British government put out a leaflet, The Protection of Your Home Against Air Raids. [10] It was updated after the Second World War to Advising the Householder on Protection against Nuclear Attack [11] which was originally published in 1963, around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Protect and Survive was published in 1980, shortly before Briggs began work on When the Wind Blows.
Many of James and Hilda's preparations came directly from the pamphlets:
Briggs was not the only one to criticise the pamphlets about preparation for nuclear war. [12] One of the best-known critiques was E. P. Thompson's anti-nuclear paper, Protest and Survive, [13] playing off the Protect and Survive series.
Criticisms like Protest and Survive point out the inadequacies of the preparation procedures posed by the pamphlet Protect and Survive. In contrast, by the comic format or graphic novel genre, Briggs is able to depict a more realistic account of the effects of nuclear attack on civilians, like James and Hilda. In When the Wind Blows, James makes reference to the bombing of Hiroshima and uses his knowledge of that event to infer what could happen to him and Hilda and to make sense of his own experience before and after the nuclear attack. Unlike the nuclear preparation pamphlets, Briggs's depictions of James and Hilda's experience with radiation sickness actually align with real accounts. [14]
Civil defense or civil protection is an effort to protect the citizens of a state from human-made and natural disasters. It uses the principles of emergency operations: prevention, mitigation, preparation, response, or emergency evacuation and recovery. Programs of this sort were initially discussed at least as early as the 1920s and were implemented in some countries during the 1930s as the threat of war and aerial bombardment grew. Civil-defense structures became widespread after authorities recognised the threats posed by nuclear weapons.
A fallout shelter is an enclosed space specially designated to protect occupants from radioactive debris or fallout resulting from a nuclear explosion. Many such shelters were constructed as civil defense measures during the Cold War.
Nuclear fallout is the residual radioactive material propelled into the upper atmosphere following a nuclear blast, so called because it "falls out" of the sky after the explosion and the shock wave has passed. It commonly refers to the radioactive dust and ash created when a nuclear weapon explodes. The amount and spread of fallout is a product of the size of the weapon and the altitude at which it is detonated. Fallout may get entrained with the products of a pyrocumulus cloud and fall as black rain. This radioactive dust, usually consisting of fission products mixed with bystanding atoms that are neutron-activated by exposure, is a form of radioactive contamination.
A cobalt bomb is a type of "salted bomb": a nuclear weapon designed to produce enhanced amounts of radioactive fallout, intended to contaminate a large area with radioactive material, potentially for the purpose of radiological warfare, mutual assured destruction or as doomsday devices.
Testament is a 1983 drama film based on a three-page story titled "The Last Testament" by Carol Amen (1933–1987), directed by Lynne Littman and written by John Sacret Young. The film tells the story of how one small suburban town near the San Francisco Bay Area slowly falls apart after a nuclear war destroys outside civilization. It was one of the films, along with The Day After and Threads that portrayed life after a nuclear war, mostly in response to an increase in hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union.
The effects of a nuclear explosion on its immediate vicinity are typically much more destructive and multifaceted than those caused by conventional explosives. In most cases, the energy released from a nuclear weapon detonated within the lower atmosphere can be approximately divided into four basic categories:
Protect and Survive was a public information campaign on civil defence. Produced by the British government between 1974 and 1980, it intended to advise the public on how to protect themselves during a nuclear attack. The campaign comprised a pamphlet, newspaper advertisements, radio broadcasts, and public information films. The series had originally been intended for distribution only in the event of dire national emergency, but provoked such intense public interest that the pamphlet was published, in slightly amended form, in 1980. Due to its controversial subject, and the nature of its publication, the cultural impact of Protect and Survive was greater and longer-lasting than most public information campaigns.
Raymond Redvers Briggs was an English illustrator, cartoonist, graphic novelist and author. Achieving critical and popular success among adults and children, he is best known in Britain for his 1978 story The Snowman, a book without words whose cartoon adaptation is televised and whose musical adaptation is staged every Christmas.
"Duck and cover" is a method of personal protection against the effects of a nuclear explosion. Ducking and covering is useful in offering a degree of protection to personnel located outside the radius of the nuclear fireball but still within sufficient range of the nuclear explosion that standing upright and uncovered is likely to cause serious injury or death. In the most literal interpretation, the focus of the maneuver is primarily on protective actions one can take during the first few crucial seconds-to-minutes after the event, while the film of the same name and a full encompassing of the advice also cater to providing protection up to weeks after the event.
The four-minute warning was a public alert system conceived by the British Government during the Cold War and operated between 1953 and 1992. The name derived from the approximate length of time from the point at which a Soviet nuclear missile attack against the United Kingdom could be confirmed and the impact of those missiles on their targets. The population was to be notified by means of air raid sirens, television and radio, and urged to seek cover immediately. In practice, the warning would have been more likely three minutes or less.
Since their public debut in August 1945, nuclear weapons and their potential effects have been a recurring motif in popular culture, to the extent that the decades of the Cold War are often referred to as the "atomic age".
A blast shelter is a place where people can go to protect themselves from blasts and explosions, like those from bombs, or in hazardous worksites, such as on oil and gas refineries or petrochemical facilities. It differs from a fallout shelter, in that its main purpose is to protect from shock waves and overpressure instead of from radioactive precipitation, as a fallout shelter does. It is also possible for a shelter to protect from both blasts and fallout.
Survival Under Atomic Attack was the title of an official United States government booklet released by the Executive Office of the President, the National Security Resources Board, and the Civil Defense Office. Released at the onset of the Cold War era, the pamphlet was in line with rising fears that the Soviet Union would launch a nuclear attack against the United States, and outlined what to do in the event of an atomic attack.
Fallout Protection: What To Know And Do About Nuclear Attack was an official United States federal government booklet released in December 1961 by the United States Department of Defense and the Office of Civil Defense. The first page of the book is a note from then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara explaining that the booklet is a 48 page book made for the result of the first task he was given when he assumed responsibility for the Federal Civil Defense Program in August 1961. The task, assigned by President John F. Kennedy, was to "give the American people the facts they need to know about the dangers of a thermonuclear attack and what they can do to protect themselves."
Nuclear War Survival Skills or NWSS, by Cresson Kearny, is a civil defense manual. It contains information gleaned from research performed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory during the Cold War, as well as from Kearny's extensive jungle living and international travels.
World War III, sometimes abbreviated to WWIII, is a common theme in popular culture. Since the 1940s, countless books, films, and television programmes have used the theme of nuclear weapons and a third global war. The presence of the Soviet Union as an international rival armed with nuclear weapons created persistent fears in the United States and vice versa of a nuclear World War III, and popular culture at the time reflected those fears. The theme was also a way of exploring a range of issues beyond nuclear war in the arts. U.S. historian Spencer R. Weart called nuclear weapons a "symbol for the worst of modernity."
When the Wind Blows may refer to:
When the Wind Blows is a 1986 British adult animated disaster film directed by Jimmy Murakami based on Raymond Briggs' graphic novel of the same name. The film stars the voices of John Mills and Peggy Ashcroft as the two main characters and was scored by Roger Waters. The film recounts a rural English couple's attempt to survive a nearby nuclear attack and maintain a sense of normality in the subsequent fallout and nuclear winter.
"Mothers Talk" is a 1984 song by the British band Tears for Fears. Written by Roland Orzabal and Ian Stanley and sung by Orzabal, it was the band's seventh single release (the first to be taken from their second album Songs from the Big Chair and fifth UK Top 40 chart hit. The song was released six months in advance of the album, and enjoyed moderate success internationally.