"I spent more than half my life, when I ought to have been enjoying myself, arguing and planning and running around like a maniac, all to sell a lot of things to people I didn't know, so that I could buy a lot of things that I didn't have time to use. Sheer lunacy. And it took nothing less than an atom bomb to blow me out of it."

Following a devastating nuclear war which has seen Britain bombed back into the pre-industrial past, Stephen Dawlish and his family live a quiet rural life. Until their quiet, agrarian existence is disrupted by the appearance of three representatives of the New World Order - an American, a Russian and an Indian - who have devastating plans that will end their new peaceful way of life forever...