Peter Watkins imagines a nuclear strike on Kent, staging it as if television news crews were already there when the missiles hit. The film follows a fictional English city through the countdown, the firestorm, and the weeks after, using shaky handheld camerawork, mock interviews with actors playing survivors and officials, and blunt narration citing real civil-defense estimates on burns, blindness, and food shortages. The BBC commissioned it for broadcast, then withdrew it in 1965, judging the firestorm and looting scenes too disturbing for television, and it reached audiences instead as a theatrical release. Despite being entirely staged, it won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Watkins builds the horror out of procedure rather than spectacle: police executing the fatally injured, children describing their ambitions in flat voiceover before the bomb falls, a vicar improvising defense of nuclear policy while a firing squad works behind him. The low budget shows in the grain of the film stock, which only sharpens the sense that this is reportage rather than fiction.