However, both BBC internal documents and declassified Cabinet papers of the period reflect the high degree of political anxiety generated by the film and suggest that although the BBC was keen to assert its independence and its liberalism, The War Game was indeed the victim of high-level censorship. The popular press of the day, for their part, largely approved the ban, often reading the film as propaganda for the youthful Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

     The film imagines a period of some four months, beginning with the days leading up to nuclear attack. In a show of solidarity with the Chinese invasion of South Vietnam, the Russian and East German authorities have sealed off all access to Berlin and have threatened to invade the western sector of the city unless the United States withdraws its threat to use tactical nuclear weapons against the invading Chinese. When two North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) divisions attempt to reach Berlin, they are overrun by communist forces, triggering the U.S. president's release of nuclear warheads to NATO. The Soviet Union calls NATO's bluff, leading to a preemptive strike by the allies and, in a self-protective measure, the Soviet launch against Britain.

     Shot in newsreel-style black and white, and running just over three-quarters of an hour, The War Game works on a number of levels. The main discourse is that of the documentary exposition itself, chronicling and dramatizing the main stages and the key features of the countdown to attack and the immediate consequences of the bombing. A second discourse, also playing on the relationship between documentary and drama, takes the form of two types of vox pop interviews, which punctuate the text: interviews that illustrate the contemporary public's consciousness of the issues, exposing widespread ignorance; and clearly fictional interviews with (imaginary) key figures as the attack scenario itself develops and extends.

     Further elements go some way to suggesting contexts for the public's failure to perceive the realities of nuclear war. One strand of the film highlights the pathetically inadequate information purveyed by the official civil defense self-help manual (cover price: nine old pence). A fourth level of comment, provided by intertitles, exposes the bankruptcy of statements on the nuclear threat emerging from religious sources such as Vatican Council II of the Roman Catholic Church.

     The film concentrates on southeast England and, in particular, the town of Rochester in Kent. It bleakly illustrates the social chaos of the period before attack, focusing on the personal and ideological conflicts likely to arise from the enforced evacuation of large numbers of the urban population and on the impracticality of building viable domestic shelters capable of withstanding the power of the nuclear bomb-as the price of basics such as planks and sandbags escalates nonetheless. The film depicts the immediate horrors of a nuclear explosion by invoking memories of the firestorms of Dresden and Hiroshima, the earthquakes and the blinding light, 30 times more powerful than the midday sun, which is capable of melting upturned eye­ balls from many miles away.

     The remainder of the film concentrates on the rapid disintegration of the social fabric in the aftermath of the attack, as civilization disappears. In images of chilling and provocative power, policemen are depicted as executioners of the terminally ill and of minor criminals. The effects of radiation sickness are explained and illustrated, along with the psychological devastation that would befall survivors and the dying in a mute and apathetic world. There is a good chance of all this happening, the film suggests, by 1980.

     The film's enduring power thus derives from a variety of sources. These include its cool articulation of momentary images-a child's eyes burned by a distant nuclear airburst as the film itself goes into negative; a bucketful of wedding rings collected as a register of the dead; a derelict building that has become an impromptu furnace for the incineration of bodies too numerous to bury; "Stille Nacht" playing on a gramophone, which, in the absence of electricity, must be turned by hand.

     At a structural level, the film achieves its overall rhetorical power through both its mixture and its separation of documentary and dramatic modes. It does not, for example, offer the purely "dramatic" spectacle of later TV nuclear dramas such as the U.S. The Day After (1983) or the British Threads (1984), with their more traditional identifications around character and plot. Nor does it simply document the drama in the manner of Watkins's previous Culloden (1965), in which the television camera revisits the battlefield of 1746 and interviews participants, or of Cathy Come Home (1966), Ken Loach 's similar merging of the domains of documentary and drama to survey the rising problem of homelessness in 1960s Britain.

     The War Game, on the contrary, confuses and yet demarcates the two modes, documentary and  drama . The "dramatic" sequences, with their highly "d ocu­ mentary" look, are retained as fragmentary and discontinuous illustrations of an ongoing documentary narrative, which itself disorientingly moves back and forth between, on the one hand, statements and assumptions that this is "really happening" before our eyes  and, on the other hand, other signals and warnings that this is how it "could be" and "might look."

     The British television audience was deprived  of The War Game for two decades, until a moment in history that was ironically close to the events in Eastern Europe that canceled the particular cold war scenario underpinning the film. The banning of it, however, made the film a cause celebre, and its notoriety grew in the troubled later 1960s, as the film reached significant audiences in art-house cinemas and through the antinuclear movement. Introducing the 1985 broadcast, Ludovic Kennedy estimated that, by then,  the film had already reached as many as 6 million viewers.