A young boy in 20th-century Los Angeles bides his time before the apocalypse by doing nothing out of the ordinary.

Two men have been locked underground somewhere in Utah, Montana, or Idaho with instructions to wait for a monitor's signal then each turn a key in a lock simultaneously to fire a "bird" at an unknown target city. They also have guns and instructions to shoot the other if the other behaves strangely.

When a former anti-war nudist files for divorce from his hippie-turned-middle-aged conservative wife, a figurative nuclear war fires up between the two suburban parents.