The real effect of a nuclear weapon is not what it does to things, to buildings, to cities: it's what it does to society, what it does to people, wha… - 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.

That period had seen Reagan starting the Strategic Defense Initiative, the downing of the Korean Airliner by the Soviets, and [Reagan] calling the Soviet Union the Evil Empire. [...] It was perhaps the most dangerous time for the world since the Cuban missile crisis and...there was this feeling that BBC wasn’t dealing with this in any way. Everyone was very paranoid. The world was on the brink of nuclear war and no one knew anything about it.

There's the hospital sequence in The Day After and there's the hospital sequence in Threads. [...] In The Day After people are being wheeled in on gurneys and everybody's stressed, but they're coping with it as they would do on ER or something like that. In Threads, the floor is covered with muck and shit and blood and people don't have anything they can work with. [...] We see people having their legs amputated without an anesthetic, just something stuck between their teeth for them to bite on. That's what it's going to be like! And I wanted every part of this movie to be "That's what it's going to be like".