In 2018, a false alarm told every citizen in Hawai’i to shelter from incoming nuclear missiles. This animated documentary chronicles the minutes where they prepared for the unthinkable
As a child of the 80s, and an anxious one at that, the nuclear threat loomed large in my ever-present inner turmoil. What if I was at school when the four-minute warning went off? I knew that even at my fastest I couldn’t run home in that time, and I was likely to be slowed by panic and crowds, too. Was Catford close enough to central London to ensure that we would be killed instantly when the first strikes came, or would we survive to endure radiation sickness and all the other horrors detailed in books such as Brother in the Land and Z for Zachariah? Mum promised me there would be enough signs that nuclear war was imminent for her to be sure to keep me home and that we would all die together, and with that scant comfort I went about my days.
Gradually, the threat has receded and adulthood – the last glorious half decade or so of it particularly – has yielded a rich crop of new choking fears to take its place. But that, of course, is true only for the more fortunate among us. For those who remain more proximate to the threat, such as the citizens of Hawaii, whose home is also the nerve centre for command control operations in the Pacific and an immediate target in the event of an attack on the US, there has never been that luxury. In On the Morning You Wake (to the End of the World), the latest edition of long-running documentary strand Storyville (BBC Four), we are taken in almost real time through the 38 minutes during which the entire island believed a nuclear strike was incoming and prepared en masse for the unthinkable.
