The 1950 Boulting Brothers film Seven Days to Noon is one of the earliest British films to engage with the atomic bomb as a subject. It was released against a very specific background of crises in the Cold War. The Berlin blockade had run from 1948 to 1949 and later that year the news broke that the Soviet Union had detonated an atomic device. Then, in 1950, the Korean War broke out. The Soviet test meant that the Western monopoly of the super-weapon was broken and that Western security was compromised. Civil defence (CD) in Britain had rather lapsed after the end of the Second World War but it was revived in 1948. CD plans were developed ‘according to the wartime specifications’, with evacuation topping the list.Footnote ¹ It is crucial to remember that the film was released in the same year in which decisions were taken to start a bunker programme. In other words, the release pre-dated any substantial CD defence measures in Britain and, as we shall see, this presented the makers of the film with a problem: how to represent the new threat posed by the atomic bomb. The film traces out a process of containment given a less nationalistic character than that proposed by Alan Nadel in Containment Culture (1995), where he declares, ‘If containment … names a foreign and domestic policy, it also names the rhetorical strategy that functioned to foreclose dissent, pre-empt dialogue, and preclude contradiction. The United States, empowered by the binding energy of the universe, was to become the universal container.’Footnote ² Although the subject of Seven Days to Noon had international implications, every effort is made within it to reduce such implications and contain its narrative within the pattern of resistance familiar to Londoners from the recent world war and within the parameters of individual psychosis.

The film's subject concerns one Professor Willingdon, who has been working at a secret government facility for the construction of atomic bombs. His conviction that these weapons are evil reaches crisis point and he steals one device, sending to the prime minister a letter which warns that, unless Britain withdraws from the arms race, he will detonate it in central London. This is the starting point of the action, which subsequently revolves around the search for the professor and his device. The extended set piece in the second half of the film is the evacuation of a twelve-mile area around Westminster.Footnote ³ At the last minute the professor is discovered and the bomb disarmed. The film maintains an impressively consistent suspense throughout by its repeated references to days and hours, to the time which is running out within the professor's deadline. The film's title and its handling of time link it with a cluster of Cold War narratives which use the countdown to signal a dreaded point of climax that must be deferred. The British edition of the American novelist Pat Frank's novel Forbidden Area (1956) carried the title Seven Days to Never, signifying the imminent approach of a nuclear war triggered by Soviet subversives.Footnote ⁴ However, the most famous Cold War icon of time running out was the so-called Doomsday Clock, which has featured on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1947, initially set at seven minutes to midnight. By a happy coincidence for the Boulting Brothers, the promotional logo of London Films, which made Seven Days, is a shot of Big Ben, and the film reminds the viewer of the passage of time through this national icon, which makes up part of the building complex that Professor Willingdon has chosen for his target.

As soon as his ultimatum is received, a government plan swings into action. The Boulting Brothers drew on the Second World War for the film's montage sequences showing the evacuation of central London over the days preceding the professor's deadline. The model for the mobilization of trains, buses, boats and even horses and carts, coordinated by the army and CD wardens, was the evacuation in the first week of September 1939 when four million people were moved out of English cities, the majority from London. Two smaller evacuations followed in 1940 during the Blitz and in June 1944 when London and the Home Counties were under attack from the V-weapons. News reports on the September 1939 evacuation, echoed in the film, praised its smoothness. The film also includes an American broadcaster reporting for NBC on the evacuation just as Ed Murrow covered the Blitz for CBS. The report confirms the efficiency of the government procedure, declaring, ‘We've just checked all London's civil atomic defence centres and learned that the evacuation of this capital city is proceeding smoothly and slightly ahead of schedule.’Footnote ⁵ The announcement attempts to conflate a procedure from the war with the new atomic threat as if one were a continuation of the other. In his analysis of post-war British civil defence, Matthew Grant shows that just such a continuity operated, observing that ‘civil defence planners in London [assumed] in early 1946 that the British public would be able to cope with the strains and stresses of nuclear war as it had dealt with bombardment by the Luftwaffe’.Footnote ⁶ Indeed, in the film characters draw parallels with Dunkirk and scenes near St Paul's still show bombed areas from the war. Even the church where the professor finds refuge carries a sign appealing for funds to repair its bomb damage from the Blitz ten years earlier. These images suggest a direct continuity between the Second World War and the film's present. As the crisis mounts, a newspaper headline from the Daily Graphic asks, ‘IS IT WAR?’

The use of the Second World War for civil defence practice was by no means an invention of the Boulting Brothers. In April 1950 Collier's magazine sent their correspondent John Lear to visit the CD training school (one of the three established by the 1948 Civil Defence Act) at the Hawkhills, Easingwold, near York, in order to experience at first hand what was happening there.Footnote ⁷ His general experience made a very favourable contrast with the USA:

During a discussion with one of his instructors Lear learns the awkward truth that the image of the atomic bomb as all-powerful was one probably promoted by the USA while it enjoyed a monopoly of that weapon, an impression very difficult to change to cope with the fact that the bomb was now possessed by the Soviet Union. The polemical purpose of Lear's report on his experiences, starkly entitled ‘Hiroshima USA’, thus was to counter five years' counsel of helplessness with reassuring advice directed towards the average citizen about the limited scale of atomic blasts (drawing on the evidence of Hiroshima) and the practical resources they could draw on, taking British CD practice as a model, which in turn was based on the experiences of the Second World War.Footnote ⁹

The 1951 CD recruitment film The Waking Point, made by the Crown Film Unit, appears to endorse the calm practicality projected in Seven Days to Noon and recommended by Lear. Coincidentally, much of it was shot in the same training school at Easingwold and the trainee protagonist goes through exactly the same exercises in firefighting and rescue. The film opens with scenes from contemporary newsreel shots from danger points like Berlin and Hong Kong in order to establish the urgency of the subject, an urgency which becomes muted as we watch the training sequences. However, there is an inset section which pulls against the orderly preparations being shown. The protagonist is called from his bedroom with the news that war has suddenly broken out and that he must report to his shelter immediately. There he has to elbow his way through a queue of volunteers who have arrived too late for any training. Then the warning siren sounds and we see a montage of people running in panic to shelters which rapidly fill to capacity. We see the protagonist looking up into the sky and glimpse the flash of a bomb which would either blind him or kill him outright, at which point he is shaken awake. It was only a dream after all, and the concluding shot of the film shows the protagonist declaring, ‘It hasn't happened. There's still time.’ One of the convictions driving the professor in Seven Days is precisely that there isn't time and the dream sequence in The Waking Point briefly presents a counternarrative to orderly CD procedures, which the concluding words attempt to soften.Footnote ¹⁰

Clearly the nuclear subject, however, cannot be easily fitted into a rerun of the previous war. Stephen Guy, the only critic to give this film the attention it deserves, has argued that ‘the fundamental fear which the film probed and brought into light for audiences was the terrible prospect of atomic war’ and that, although it is not named officially, the audience would draw the inference that the new enemy was the Soviet Union.Footnote ¹¹ However reassuring the sequences of stoical Londoners evacuating their city might seem, they evoke a set of circumstances no longer applicable. The analogies with the Second World War seek to contain the atomic threat and celebrate the resilience of Londoners by taking the Blitz as a precedent. The problem here lies in taking a model of incremental local destruction which had become totally anachronistic by 1950, since the new super-weapon had radically altered the scale of destruction. In other words, there is a disparity at the centre of the film. Willingdon gives the nation an ultimatum it would not have in a nuclear exchange. There is a further disproportion between one individual and the thousands of deaths he could cause. Willingdon, in that sense, casts a long shadow, which is exactly what he does when he walks through the evacuated streets of London by night. Searchlights operating laterally project his hugely elongated shadow in front of him.

There are, then, at least two nuclear subjects being presented in the film. The one focuses on a threat localized in the professor and in his target area, which the analogies with the Second World War attempt to contain. The second is the broader, international subject of nations poised in hostile confrontation. Well before Britain's Cold War enemy had taken on an identity, in August 1945 the prime minister, Clement Attlee, recorded in a memorandum that there was no point in constructing nuclear shelters. ‘The answer to an atomic bomb on London’, he noted, ‘is an atomic bomb on another great city’.Footnote ¹² These words undermine the film's reassuring depiction of a calm, orderly evacuation by admitting that there is no defence. The prime minister's radio announcement to London, the nation and the world in Seven Days cleverly straddles the two subjects. First he places London's situation in its Cold War context, the very thing which Willingdon naively misreads, justifying his government's foreign policy by the global situation. He declares, ‘The development of these weapons isn't our choice but our necessity’, and then turns to the media: ‘Such an appeal [to halt production of atomic bombs] would be withheld from millions, shut off as they are by rulers who control their newspapers, their radios, their every movement.’ Though he never identifies these millions, there are enough references in the film to Russia to make it clear that he is referring to the Soviet bloc. His announcement gives a polemical edge to the role of the media in the film, which is to facilitate public information and the CD strategies being put in place. However, the prime minister's statement recognizes the existence of a different regime which would operate according to different rules. However exemplary the London evacuation might be, it can have no relevance to such a regime.

One of the strongest impressions a viewer of Seven Days takes away is that of the general calmness of the Londoners in the face of a terrible new threat. Matthew Grant has shown that evacuation was a central part of government policy in the 1948–1949 period, although in outline only. The attendant system of reception centres and railway plans was not finalized until well into the 1950s. He observes,

The answer would almost certainly have been no and accordingly in 1950 the government began putting more flesh on the evacuation skeleton.

Apart from the efficiency of resources, there was a psychological question left unanswered in these plans. The issue of whether or not the population would collapse in panic when under attack was one being discussed in civil defence at this time. In autumn 1950, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists brought out a special issue on ‘Civil Defence against Atomic Attack’, where dispersal and evacuation were repeated topics, proposed against a background of crisis. One contributor opened his essay with the grim warning that ‘the rapid cascade of recent events looms as the overture to war’; on a quieter note, the editor insisted that CD plans must ‘make provision for orderly evacuation and useful re-employment of millions made homeless or jobless by the destruction of housing units or industrial and commercial establishments’.Footnote ¹⁴ Marc Peter, the civil defence attaché to the London embassy, argued that lessons could be learnt from how the British, particularly the Londoners, coped with attack in the Second World War.Footnote ¹⁵ The general tenor of the issue was to play down fears by suggesting practical remedies, though one contributor revealed that this emphasis was a matter of policy rather than credibility. Irving L. Janis commented on a myth he had observed taking shape, similar to British government fears before 1939, that the bombing of cities would induce widespread panic. This fear is brushed aside with the comment that ‘for the purposes of civil defence planning, it is not very useful to assume that “panic” will necessarily be the most probable response’.Footnote ¹⁶

This attitude was being questioned on both sides of the Atlantic. A United Kingdom government memo of 1954 predicted panic if the atomic bomb was dropped and for an accurate impression of how people would behave recommended not official statements but H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds as the best book on the subject.Footnote ¹⁷ In the United States the novelist Philip Wylie served as a civil defence officer in the early 1950s, and in his 1954 essay ‘Panic, psychology, and the bomb’ Wylie attacks the CD strategies of the time for their denial that a nuclear attack would cause widespread panic. On the contrary, he insists, panic is already being registered indirectly through forms of suppression or displacement like the UFO craze. The evidence of Hiroshima showed survivors remembering the spectacle of the blast, the horrific sight of casualties, and their fear that another bomb might fall. Wylie continues with a 1954 statement which sheds direct light on his Cold War fiction: ‘Movies and TV have given the American public no adequate idea of the mere spectacle of the bomb, its sky-filling, multi-hued aftermath, the peculiar ruins and the cubic miles of rolling dust – not to mention a city a-fire.’Footnote ¹⁸ Wylie gave force to his warning in his novel Tomorrow! (1954), which describes the psychological reactions to the atomic bombing of two midwestern cities. When ‘Condition Red’ is announced, it produces ‘the sound of thousands upon thousands of people – men and women and children – in absolute panic, in total fear, in headless flight, being trampled, being squeezed to death, having ribs caved in and legs broken, screaming, trying to escape’.Footnote ¹⁹ It would be difficult to imagine a more graphic contrast with the orderly queues waiting patiently for the evacuation trains in Seven Days.

A precedent for conflating the nuclear age with the Second World War can be found in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, where atomic bombs have been used, one on Colchester. Despite this, the main imagery of the novel is from the Blitz and its aftermath. V-bombs are still falling. Orwell uses atom bombs to prolong the state of war indefinitely. The future thus seems to be an indefinite continuation of the war, with its scenes of bombsites, its rationing and a prolonged state of emergency. In October 1945, Orwell's article ‘You and the atomic bomb’ predicted an indefinite ‘cold war’ arising from the super-weapon.Footnote ²⁰ In his view it had made victory virtually impossible and would simply prolong a static confrontation like that depicted in his novel. Thus in Nineteen Eighty-Four atomic bombs are not so much a new actuality as a means of rationalizing a permanent posture of armed conflict.

Seven Days to Noon, however, suppresses the external threat to Britain in order to focus its drama on the enemy within – Professor Willingdon. He is described as the archetypal middle-class employee, dressed in a grey suit, an old mackintosh and a grey hat. Indeed, with his bag he looks more like a doctor or office worker than a terrorist or saboteur, and this is one of the main points of the film. His apparent anonymity enables him to blend easily into the London population, a visual effect made all the easier by the film's lack of colour. Willingdon's appearance, in fact, gives no outward clue to his work. The Atomic Energy Research Establishment was set up at Harwell in 1945 but the Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Establishment was not established until 1950. We are told that Willingdon works in a secret government establishment at Wallingford, just a few miles east of Harwell. His profile follows the pattern of famous physicists like John Cockcroft and William Penney. Both studied at Cambridge before the war; both went to North America during the war, Penney to participate in the Manhattan Project. Cockcroft was a formative figure in setting up Harwell. Penney headed up the group working on designing British nuclear weapons, which would later be housed in Aldermaston. Willingdon would be associated with secrecy but the figure of the scientist had already been compromised when the physicist Alan Nunn May was arrested in 1946 for selling secrets to the KGB. In the USA the presence of Communists in the scientific community was dramatized in the 1948 film Walk a Crooked Mile.Footnote ²¹ There was an even closer topicality to the film. In February 1950 Klaus Fuchs, the head of theoretical physics at Harwell, was arrested and charged with breaking the Official Secrets Act. Seven Days was released on 30 October of that year, so it is just possible that the event influenced the depiction of the scientist.

Despite the fact that Willingdon is making the ultimate protest against government policy, a kind of one-man ban-the-bomb movement, his few dialogues with other characters are either unresolved or blocked. As soon as his letter is received, the government places messages in the newspapers inviting him to discuss his problem, but his curt answer in a second note is to state baldly, ‘There will be no discussion.’ A know-all in a pub sums up the atomic age by declaring, ‘There won't be no declaration of war this time. Someone presses a button and it's goodbye Sally.’ When he gets into a predictable argument with Willingdon, he insists that the best defence is attack (‘We can press a button first!’), at which point Willingdon realizes the futility of the conversation and exclaims in disgust, ‘You don't understand what you're saying!’ This sets a keynote for the film in that every dialogue with the professor halts without meaningful communication. The first is reported by a vicar and transmitted to Superintendent Folland when the former asks, ‘what would you do?’ The question implicates a key authority figure in the professor's dilemma.

The failure of dialogue results from the sheer force of Willingdon's religious convictions. On one level, apocalypse is given a comic treatment when a man is prevented from carrying his ‘end of the world’ placards during the evacuation. But this is only part of the story. Early in the film Willingdon quotes to himself from Revelation 6:4: ‘And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword’ (quotation in italics). The ‘great sword’ is ambiguous: is it a metaphor of his power to use the stolen bomb to stop the production of bombs, or does it represent the power which Willingdon is opposing? His jottings all refer to the rule of the unrighteous and the casting down of the city of Babylon. Willingdon quotes from Proverbs 29:2 (‘When the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn’), as if to rationalize the need for his original ideal of service to be changed into that of saving an oblivious nation from its wicked rulers. Willingdon himself finds refuge in St Stephen's Church, so does this imply that he is casting himself as a martyr sacrificing himself for the true faith, which he feels that the nuclear arms race has betrayed? Even his ultimatum has a certain ambiguity. By setting a deadline in seven days Willingdon is symbolically reversing the biblical creation narrative so that the seventh day will not be the moment of completion but of annihilation.Footnote ²² By turning to the Bible in his crisis, Willingdon was unconsciously joining those church leaders who had been speaking out against the atomic bomb since 1945.Footnote ²³

The film stresses from the very beginning that Willingdon has no political motivation or allegiance. Although his ultimatum resembles an act of deliberate sabotage, it is actually presented as a desperate form of idealism. In contrast, the year after Seven Days to Noon was released Roy Boulting codirected High Treason (1951), which was made against the background of the Korean War and fears of a Communist fifth column which surfaced when a munitions boat bound for the Far East blew up in Portsmouth dockyard. This film starts with a civil servant furtively copying a secret document, then it is gradually revealed (in all but name) that there is a Communist network in London spreading right through different levels of society. Where war functions as an analogue in Seven Days, open conflict breaks out in the later film, including a pitched battle in Battersea Power Station.Footnote ²⁴High Treason uses the same semi-documentary methods as Seven Days, but presents a radically different subject in its Communist network, which has to be rooted out from all levels of society.

The ease with which Professor Willingdon blends into the population of London, and gestures towards disguise like shaving off his moustache, push the action towards that of a thriller and relate closely to fears both in America and in Britain of an atom bomb being smuggled into the country as early as 1945, when Robert Oppenheimer caused consternation in a Congressional hearing by declaring that an atomic device could be brought into the country in a conventional crate. The fact that Willingdon's bomb is contained within a Gladstone bag (which at the time would have been standard equipment for a family doctor) is unlikely given the state of technology at the time, but more importantly symbolizes the ease with which a device could be concealed within a city.Footnote ²⁵

This same anxiety informs Philip Wylie's The Smuggled Atom Bomb (1951), which opens in a small Florida town where the protagonist discovers that an apparently harmless lodger is actually a member of a ring of Communist saboteurs. Again the symbolism is of concealment. The first component is discovered inside a hatbox: ‘Whatever was in the box was packed in cotton. He raised the cotton and saw a very odd object of grayish-silver metal, machined and polished.’Footnote ²⁶ The incongruity of the object is clearly designed by Wylie as a political shock to the reader, delivering a warning that the atomic threat could be anywhere. The saboteurs' targets are New York and other metropolitan centres, where they assemble atomic bombs. As in Seven Days, the authorities – in this case the FBI and military intelligence – track down the conspirators. Here and in the 1953 film The 49th Man, the secret construction of an atom bomb is presented as the activity of a Communist network, whereas Seven Days repeatedly stresses the individual nature of the professor's actions.Footnote ²⁷ Wylie's thriller, however, does not follow the pattern of giving glimpses of conspirators, who accordingly seem all the more hidden. Wylie's narrative and Frederick Forsyth's The Fourth Protocol (1984) both count down to a feared end point of atomic detonation, just like Seven Days. Indeed, the cover of The Smuggled Atom Bomb asked, ‘Is the fate of America ticking away?’Footnote ²⁸

The crucial difference between these two narratives and Seven Days, however, is that they are both based (like High Treason) on the existence of a Communist network which can help place and assemble the bombs, whereas Willingdon is working alone. A further difference lies in the exploitation of secrecy by Wylie and Forsyth. In both cases the investigation takes place without the public being informed and is limited to the working of specific agencies in Wylie and the British secret service in Forsyth. The latter stretches credibility severely, however. It is inconceivable that the information would be hidden from the Americans that saboteurs were assembling a bomb on the edge of one of their bases in Britain. If anything, Forsyth shows the British public to be naively gullible since they are demonstrating against nuclear weapons at the very moment that neo-Stalinists are planning to detonate one in their midst.

Seven Days to Noon, in contrast, projects reassuringly positive images of the population and the authorities alike. Despite the film's care to show Willingdon experiencing a crisis of conscience and revulsion at his job, the ‘missing’ and then ‘wanted’ posters present him as a criminal and the cumulative effect of the analogies with the Second World War is to show him as an enemy. The visual imagery vastly overwhelms the suggestions that he is a rational if disturbed human being and simplifies the action into one of national self-preservation. As Stephen Guy has rightly noted, ‘In contrast to unstable and misguided intellectuals such as Willingdon are the established figures of British authority – the police, military leaders, the political elite – who quietly and relentlessly protect the nation from the madness of the Cold War world’.Footnote ²⁹ The film shows an ideal cooperation between the media, government, police and army. Superintendent Folland thus becomes the most important commentator on the action, combining police efficiency with a certain diagnostic skill. As soon as he senses what is happening to Willingdon, he tells his assistant, ‘repressing a fear is like trying to hold on to the lid of a boiling kettle’. Folland enacts the film's general reluctance to categorize Willingdon as criminal or madman, but that reluctance has to go by the board as the urgency to find the bomb mounts.

In his survey of British noir films, Robert Murphy states that they often focus on ‘men who raise a doubt whether the damage they have suffered [possibly psychological, but usually the war] has turned them into killers’.Footnote ³⁰ He cites The Small Back Room (1948), about a bomb-disposal expert who is fighting off the pain of a leg wound with incipient alcoholism, and The Clouded Yellow (1950), where Barry Jones (the actor who plays Willingdon) plays a murderer being pursued by a former secret-service agent. The one focuses its drama on the disarming of explosive devices, the other on a pursuit across northern England. Seven Days to Noon combines both these aspects within the transformation of London in the last part of the film into an eerily deserted expanse of streets and squares. Once the military start combing through the evacuated area, searchlights are used laterally, implying that the threat comes from within, not above as in the Blitz. Like the night-time exteriors in The Third Man (1949), the lighting casts surreal shadows across the cityscape, hinting visually at the enormity of the threat. Similarly, Willingdon is himself a psychological casualty of the Cold War, pushed towards breakdown by the enormity of the weapons he is helping to construct.

Seven Days to Noon, however, is never just a thriller. It moves in and out of that genre, as well as those of documentary and social drama. This generic fluidity can be seen in its use of one of the most potent images of atomic war: the target map. One such was included in Philip Wylie's Tomorrow!, presumably to bring home to his readers the immediacy of their danger. At one point in Seven Days Willingdon takes a map of London and draws a circle around Westminster to remind himself (and the audience) of the limits of the blast area of his bomb. In the Operations Room, however, the map diagram takes on a totally different symbolism. Willingdon charts the destruction which would be caused by the bomb in an outwardly moving area. The military, in contrast, use concentric rings to progressively narrow down the area within which Willingdon is hiding. The search through central London thus reverses the direction of a bomb blast in contracting Willingdon's refuges down to his last hiding place, which is finally discovered only minutes before his bomb is due to go off.

The climax to the film comes with the discovery of the professor in front of the altar of St Stephen's Church. When his daughter approaches him he falls into a frenzy, shouting again and again, ‘it's too late!’ This marks the end point of his flight from reason. Willingdon refuses a last-minute appeal from his daughter, his closest relative and the embodiment of his family's future. The device is seized by his assistant, his son-in-law to be, and is disarmed in a close shot showing the latter, a warden and an army officer grouped round what in an earlier context would be an unexploded bomb. Drumbeats over this scene recall the Morse V, which became the BBC call sign in the Second World War. As Willingdon rushes out of the church entrance he is shot down by a nervous private and sprawls across the church steps. His killing is an inevitable analogue for disarming the bomb.

The general pattern followed by mystery thrillers is that they posit a crime or some other challenge to civic order, which is investigated and neutralized. The conclusion of Frederick Forsyth's The Fourth Protocol, for instance, thwarts the plan of renegade Stalinists to detonate a bomb at a US base in England and re-establishes the political ‘normality’ of the time, namely Cold War détente. The conclusion to Seven Days appears to function similarly with the removal of the professor. However, despite the film's strenuous efforts to contain the disturbing dimension to its subject, the latter resists closure. The very last shot of the film is of the Houses of Parliament from across the Thames while the all-clear sounds. The soundtrack echoes the ending of a bombing raid; the image is associated with victory in the Second World War. It is a national image but the incorporation of American news commentary and passing references to the Russians remind the viewer that Britain is only one player on the Cold War scene. The film presents Willingdon's actions as resulting from a crisis of individual conscience, but the ethics of nuclear scientists had come into question with Klaus Fuchs's exposure.Footnote ³¹ However, his breakdown is attributed in the film to the terrible pressures of the Cold War, and so might be experienced by any individual in a position of responsibility. Later in the 1950s another solitary protest against the superpower politics of the Cold War was described in Peter George's 1958 novel Red Alert (United Kingdom title Two Hours to Doom), where a US Air Force general launches a pre-emptive strike against the Soviet Union in the name of ‘peace on Earth’.Footnote ³² Here the individual action takes place within a military context, whereas Seven Days dramatizes a national crisis so severe that the army has to be brought in, but not for defence against an external enemy. The film complicates the whole notion of enemy by stressing Willingdon's lack of interest in politics. In many ways he is the least remarkable protagonist one could imagine, but then one point which the film does not explore is the sheer disproportion between the destruction he could cause and his individual stature. In short, the atomic subject remains implicitly much larger than its representation in the film.