More nuclear reactions

Jonathan Hogg’s piece The Nuclear 1980s (April) needed to be somewhat longer to do full justice to its subject: the cultural responses to the fixation with nuclear war in that decade.

One example meriting inclusion would have been the superb 1985 BBC thriller Edge of Darkness with its conspiracy – involving the illegal manufacture of plutonium – between the British government and a (fictional) US corporation. The ultimate purpose of the conspiracy, the development of a space laser defence system that sounds similar to Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative (or ‘Star Wars’) programme, is only clarified in the final episode, but that still merits the show’s inclusion in a piece on nuclear anxieties in the 80s.

Other TV productions from that era worth mentioning are the play Z for Zachariah, set in the aftermath of a nuclear incident, and the comedy mini-series Whoops Apocalypse with most of its characters acting mad in a Dr Strangelove-type way, as they collectively plunge the world into the ultimate disaster. Chris Gibbings, East Yorkshire