The Day After

Imagine a normal town, in middle America, comprised of farmers, doctors, hitchhikers, and other normal occupations. Now imagine that same town, turned into a wasteland after a barrage of Soviet nuclear missiles. This is the plot of arguably the most influential Cold War film ever made, The Day After.

The idea The Day After was initially created ABC's Motion Picture Director, Brandon Stoddard. He was inspired by the movie and novel The China Syndrome which depicts a nuclear power plant going through a nuclear meltdown. The name The Day After was chosen because the movie did not focus on the nuclear war itself, instead, it focused on the fallout of the war and how everyday people were affected.

On November 20th, 1983 ABC broadcast the first showing of The Day After to an audience of over 100 million people. To put that in perspective, that was nearly two-thirds of the total viewing audience at the time. The film was so traumatic that ABC set up 1-800 hotlines for the sole purpose of providing counseling to those who watched the movie. The film was especially haunting because it did a lot of showing not telling in the sense that instead of having overdramatic monologues which are common in many doomsday films, The Day After showed piles of charred corpses.

The Day After's impact was not only felt by normal citizens, as a few days after viewing it, President Ronald Reagan had a speech in which he proclaimed that he too dreamed that nuclear weapons would be banished from the face of the Earth. A few years after this, Reagan made good on his speech, by signing the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which not only limited but destroyed an entire category of nuclear weapons.






Sources:
https://thebulletin.org/facing-nuclear-reality-35-years-after-the-day-after/
https://www.avclub.com/the-day-after-traumatized-a-generation-with-the-horrors-1798447330
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After#Production
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Syndrome