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Seven Days to Noon: containing the atomic threat

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 January 2013

DAVID SEED
DAVID SEED*
Affiliation:
School of English, Cypress Building, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, L69 3BX. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

The 1950 Boulting Brothers film Seven Days to Noon is one of the earliest British films to engage with the atomic bomb and uses a number of strategies to contain the public fears of the super-weapon. When an atomic scientist steals one such device and threatens to detonate it in central London, an elaborate but efficient security system swings into action. Drawing on the imagery and practices of civil defence during the Second World War, central London is evacuated while the army hunts down the scientist, who is presented as undergoing a psychological crisis as a result of his work. Although he is finally located and the bomb disarmed, the film only achieves its reassuring message by suppressing the Communist threat from within (which would become the subject of Roy Boulting's 1951 film High Treason) and from abroad, which differentiates Seven Days from comparable American films of the period. Presenting an idealized version of Londoners' stoicism, the film actually shows the disproportion between the specifics of daily life in the city and the massive destruction the new weapon could wreak. The acquiescence of Londoners in their orderly evacuation is only possible because of their virtually total ignorance of the true nature of the bomb.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 45 , Issue 4: Special Issue: British Nuclear Culture , December 2012 , pp. 641 - 652
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2013

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References

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3 Probably as much for its emotive force as for any scientific reason, the military calculate that the bomb would flatten an area from Rotherhithe to Notting Hill. By contrast, in the civil defence film The Waking Point it is calculated that a bomb with the equivalent force of 20,000 tons of TNT would destroy most things within a circle with a five-mile diameter.

4 Forbidden Area was one of the first novels to describe Soviet ‘sleeper’ agents, who were living as conventional Americans under bogus identities until activated for subversion.

5 Murrow contributed to the special issue of Collier's magazine on atomic war, ‘Preview of the war we do not want’, with his report ‘A-Bomb mission to Moscow’, Collier's, 27 October 1951, p. 19, and also made a guest appearance to play himself in Sink the Bismarck! (1960).

6 Grant, Matthew, After the Bomb: Civil Defence and Nuclear War in Britain, 1945–1968, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p. 11CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It is difficult to be sure how much of British government planning impacted on the public consciousness because it was conducted in the strictest secrecy, unlike in the USA.

7 The Civil Defence Act became law in 1947 but was not implemented until late the following year. In addition to Easingwold, civil-defence training camps were also set up at Falfield and Taymouth Castle. A Civil Defence Staff College was established at Sunningdale.

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9 The connection with the Second World War was embodied in the director general of Civil Defence Training, Sir John Hodsoll, who had played a leading role in the earlier conflict.

10 The Waking Point is collected in the 2005 DVD of British Civil Defence films Protect and Survive.

11 Guy, Stephen, ‘“Someone presses a button and it's good-bye Sally”: Seven Days to Noon and the threat of the atomic bomb’, in Burton, Alan, O'Sullivan, Tim and Wells, Paul (eds.), The Family Way: The Boulting Brothers and British Film Culture, London: Flicks Books, 1999, pp. 143–154, 147Google Scholar. Guy gives useful information on the topicality and reception of this film and my essay has profited from his discussion.

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21 Walk a Crooked Mile describes the Communist infiltration of a California atomic research facility. The investigation is carried out jointly by representatives of the FBI and Scotland Yard.

22 Willingdon's jottings include a quotation from Milton's Samson Agonistes (‘O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon’), which reinforces the apocalyptic dimension to his deadline and also alludes ironically to Arthur Koestler's novel about Stalin's execution of the old guard, Darkness at Noon (1940).

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24 For a discussion of this film see Guy, Stephen, ‘High Treason (1951): Britain's Cold War fifth column’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (1993) 13, pp. 35–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Andre Morell plays the same Special Branch officer as in Seven Days, Superintendent Folland.

25 The message of the film was taken seriously enough for it to be mentioned in the British Cabinet in July 1951. Guy, op. cit. (11), p. 153.

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27 The forty-ninth man of the film's title is the one member of the Communist group who manages to evade capture. Unusually, the film actually shows a detonation, but only when the bomb is dropped on a United States testing ground.

28 Smith, op. cit. (17), p. 346.

29 Guy, op. cit. (11), p. 151.

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32 George published his novel under the name Peter Bryant. It was subsequently used as a partial basis for Dr Strangelove. George served as an RAF navigator in the Second World War and was so disturbed by the possibility of nuclear war that he committed suicide in 1966.