What worries me at the moment is President Trump and many in his administration are using the same kind of language about winnable [nuclear war and] … - Mick Jackson

From the point where the bomb happens, the whole nature of the movie changes. In the first half of the movie, I hope, you have a very full soundtrack. You have all the soundtrack of TV broadcasts and radio broadcasts, the sound of birdsong in the country, the sound of musical things happening, the sound of traffic and city noises. And from the moment that the bomb drops you don't have anything. You don't even have the teletype, all these things, they just type out in silence, and all you hear is wind. [...] You hear voices of people screaming, coughing or whatever. You hear wind, you hear no birds. [...] It's gone. That world is gone.

We're not in the 1980s anymore to remember how terrified everybody was, how paranoid everybody was about the end of the world being nigh. In the year that I had prepped this movie in 1983, the Korean airliner was shot down by the Russians, Reagan gave his "Evil Empire" speech, Strategic Defense Initiative, "Star Wars" started and people like Herman Kahn in the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica [...] were talking about "winnable" nuclear war and game theory, and I just thought "people who talk like that, and people who behave like that, politically, and make speeches like that, they're doing that because they have no real sense, no physical sense of what a nuclear war would be like."

Barry came up with the idea of the two families – one working class, the other lower-middle – and what their lives were like. Sheffield seemed a good place to set it, and Barry knew it well. It was bang in the middle of the country, and a good way from London. Strategically, it also made sense: there were industrial and military targets nearby.
Both of us were interested in the idea that none of these characters would ever have a god’s-eye-view of events, and never find out what was happening outside their immediate experience, certainly not outside Sheffield. That seemed to be the way most people would have to deal with a nuclear apocalypse, with most forms of communication vaporised.