The War Game (2017) Timeline Explained – Every Event in Order

Britain's nuclear deterrence strategy depended on a large network of Royal Air Force V bomber bases scattered across the countryside, each of which would itself be a priority target during a crisis. Because those bases were dispersed alongside major civilian population centers, the film argues that no other nation concentrated this many potential nuclear targets into such a small area, magnifying the destructive footprint of any incoming strike.

• britain nuclear targets
• v bombers
• raf bases
• deterrence
• density

On 15 September, American forces in South Vietnam were cleared to use tactical nuclear weapons against the Chinese invasion, and the Soviet Union and East Germany immediately threatened to invade West Berlin unless the United States reversed course. When NATO attempted to repel that invasion three days later, the counterattack collapsed, forcing America to deploy tactical nukes and giving the Soviets a direct casus belli to launch their own strategic weapons.

Foreshadowing: The film's early explanation of Britain's vulnerability is paired with this chain of escalation, framing each stage as the inevitable trigger for the next.

• tactical nuclear weapons vietnam
• west berlin invasion
• nato counterattack
• soviet response
• escalation

The Soviet arsenal relied on liquid-fuelled missiles that had to be kept above ground and were therefore acutely vulnerable to a NATO first strike. Once American tactical weapons were used in Berlin, Soviet commanders understood that waiting even a few hours could mean losing their retaliatory capability, which is why they launched immediately at strategic targets rather than attempting to negotiate or absorb the first blow.

• soviet liquid fuelled missiles
• launch on warning
• first strike vulnerability
• retaliatory strike

Modern ICBMs and submarine-launched warheads travel at speeds that compress the time between detection and impact to mere minutes, and the film estimates roughly three minutes for an ICBM strike and as little as thirty seconds for a submarine-launched attack. With no early-warning radar network capable of giving the public more reaction time, the sirens serve only as a last-second alert for people who have nowhere to shelter.

• nuclear warning time
• icbm flight time
• submarine launch
• emergency sirens

The War Game argues that no mass shelter programme was undertaken because the government judged that a Soviet strike would be too large and too sudden for shelters to save the population at scale. Private citizens who attempted to build their own shelters were further frustrated by a nationwide shortage of construction materials once the state of emergency was declared, leaving families to fend for themselves with booklets and rationing instead.

Foreshadowing: The shortage of building supplies is first hinted at during the civil defence preparations sequence, before the actual strike confirms there is nowhere to hide.

• fallout shelters
• civil defence
• government shelters
• construction shortage
• civil protection

The Soviet warhead targeting RAF Manston detonated as an air burst about six miles from Canterbury, an altitude chosen to maximise the radius of thermal radiation rather than blast damage. At that range the flash reached temperatures high enough to instantly scorch exposed skin and liquefy eye tissue, which is why the film shows the eyeballs melting before the shockwave arrives twelve seconds later to demolish the building.

Foreshadowing: Earlier sections note that an air burst is more lethal than a ground burst over a wide area, a detail that pays off in this Canterbury scene.

• air burst
• thermal radiation
• canterbury
• raf manston
• flash burn

With the agricultural and distribution networks destroyed, remaining stockpiles were ruthlessly prioritised by the regional commissioners for police, soldiers, and officials needed to keep authority functioning. Starving civilians who were classified as non-essential were cut off, which is what triggered the riots, the seizure of a weapons truck and a food warehouse, and the eventual police executions shown later in the film.

• food rationing
• civil disturbance
• regional commissioners
• starvation
• riot

Earlier in The War Game, the boy suffers flash blindness from an explosion 27 miles away and his father carries him inside to shelter under a table. In the post-attack chaos the father is charged with obstructing government officers, the same offence for which several other civilians are shot, and his execution underscores how the regime has begun treating any resistance, however small, as a capital crime.

Foreshadowing: The boy's flash blindness sequence introduces the father whose later death links the humanitarian and political strands of the story.

• police firing squad
• obstruction
• execution
• blinded boy
• civil authority

Scurvy is caused by a prolonged absence of vitamin C, and the destruction of agriculture, transport, and food distribution in Kent wiped fresh fruit and vegetables out of the supply chain. With the population surviving on whatever dry rations remained and food warehouses seized or guarded by armed police, the resulting deficiency disease becomes one of the slow-blooming symptoms of nuclear war shown in The War Game.

• scurvy
• vitamin c deficiency
• food shortage
• post-attack disease

Each remaining doctor in Kent was left to treat at least 350 casualties, far more than medicine, beds, or staff could handle, so triage quickly collapsed. With radiation patients and people with burns beyond saving left to suffer alone, police were ordered to end their lives with firearms; The War Game frames these mercy killings as a rational consequence of medical infrastructure being destroyed along with the rest of the country.

Foreshadowing: The film foreshadows this collapse during the civil defence segment, where shortage of shelters signals that the medical system would face similar overload.

• mercy killing
• medical collapse
• triage
• casualties
• emergency services

A submarine-launched ballistic missile can originate from close coastal waters and travels at a lower apogee than an ICBM, cutting radar reaction time to under thirty seconds. The War Game contrasts this with the three-minute ICBM window to underline how Britain's geography, surrounded by patrolling Soviet submarines in the North Sea and Atlantic, made coastal counties like Kent especially exposed to almost instantaneous annihilation.

• submarine launched missile
• slbm
• warning time
• coastal strike

By Christmas Day the children in the Dover refugee facility have lost parents, homes, and any sense of normal childhood, and the adult question about what they want to be when they grow up is meaningless to them. Their reply, or their silence, expresses the film's central argument: that nuclear war destroys not only the present but the future itself, leaving survivors unable to imagine a role in a society that no longer exists.

Foreshadowing: Earlier scenes of orphaned or injured children plant the emotional arc that closes on this Christmas Day interview.

• orphans
• christmas day
• dover refugee facility
• don't want to be nothing
• future

The film's closing argument is that ordinary media coverage treats nuclear war as policy abstraction or cinematic fantasy rather than as the documented humanitarian catastrophe shown throughout the film. By closing on that accusation alongside the distorted recording of Silent Night, The War Game frames itself as a corrective, arguing that the public has been deliberately shielded from the visceral reality its own imagery portrays.

• press silence
• nuclear reporting
• media coverage
• silent night
• closing statement