The Day After
"The Day After" is a significant 1983 television film that vividly portrays the catastrophic aftermath of a nuclear war, capturing the attention of approximately 100 million viewers in the United States during a time of heightened tensions in the arms race with the Soviet Union. Unlike earlier depictions of nuclear war, which often focused on pre-war scenarios or were presented in a more clinical manner, "The Day After" presented a stark and brutal vision of destruction, particularly highlighting the impact on the community around Lawrence, Kansas. The film addressed contemporary nuclear warfare concepts, such as "launch on warning" and stage two alerts, making the themes relevant to its audience. Following its broadcast, American Broadcasting Company aired a discussion involving public figures and scientists to further explore the dangers depicted in the film. Its dramatic portrayal sparked widespread national and international dialogue about the implications of nuclear conflict, although the conversation was not solely pacifist; it also supported arguments for American military superiority. The film's influence extended beyond the U.S., being shown in over forty countries, including the Soviet Union. Ultimately, "The Day After" contributed to a larger discourse on nuclear arms reduction that would evolve in the late 1980s amid significant geopolitical changes.
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The Day After
Identification Made-for-television movie
Date Aired on November 20, 1983
The Day After graphically depicted the horrors of nuclear war and, at least implicitly, criticized the mutual assured destruction theory upon which the United States’ security policy depended in the early 1980’s. It was a widely seen and discussed example of a common subgenre in 1980’s American culture, a culture increasingly dominated by fear of nuclear holocaust.
The apocalyptic danger of nuclear war had long been a subject of films and television shows before The Day After was first broadcast to approximately 100 million American viewers in 1983. In that year, the United States was again in the midst of an arms race with the Soviet Union, increasing public anxiety and making the broadcast seem particularly relevant. Earlier treatments, moreover, had tended to be low budget (for example, the 1963 Twilight Zone episode “The Old Man in the Cave”) or had focused on the events leading up to such a war, rather than the aftermath. The major exception to this, the powerful 1959 presentation of the end of the world in On the Beach, had treated the topic almost clinically, featuring the unscathed but doomed Australians waiting for the radioactive cloud to reach and kill them too.
The Day After, by contrast, starkly depicted the ugly brutality of nuclear destruction, although it also—as its producers acknowledged—understated the case, in part by portraying the United States being hit by significantly fewer missiles than would actually occur in a Soviet first strike. Still, the film painted a grisly enough picture a third of the way into its duration, when the pastoral life around Lawrence, Kansas, was irrevocably destroyed by nuclear missiles targeting the missile silos located there. By then, the film’s producers had already taken their audience through the vocabulary of the age: “launch on warning” warfare, stage two alerts, and other prevailing concepts of nuclear warfare. Most interesting, the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) followed the film by airing a candid discussion of the dangers of the era, featuring leading public figures, scientists, and commentators. Over time, its message spread. By 1987, The Day After had been shown in more than forty countries abroad, including Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalizing Soviet Union.
Impact
The airing and subsequent widespread distribution of the film was highly successful in achieving one of its aims: It brought about widespread national and international discussion of the possible consequences of nuclear warfare. Ironically, however, that discussion was not entirely of a pacifist nature. Its scenario of Soviet aggression as the cause of nuclear annihilation also bolstered President Ronald Reagan’s argument at the time that the United States could not afford to rely on arms parity with the Soviet Union but needed demonstrable arms superiority for the mutual assured destruction (MAD) system to succeed. The arms reduction agreements and accompanying discussions by Soviet and American leaders of means of averting catastrophe that the film’s producers had deemed necessary came only later, when the Soviet Union itself began to implode peacefully near the end of the 1980’s and disintegrated into its constituent parts in the early years of the following decade.
Bibliography
Gregg, Robert W. International Relations in Film. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1998.
Jordan, Chris. Movies and the Reagan Presidency: Success and Ethics. Westport: Conn.: Praeger, 2003.
Lipschutz, Ronnie D. Cold War Fantasies: Film, Fiction, and Foreign Policy. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.
Strada, Michael, and Harold Trope. Friend or Foe? Russians in American Film and Foreign Policy. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1997.