“The Day After” aired on television forty years ago and sparked debate about the worst development of the Cold War
On the evening of Sunday, November 20, 1983, over 100 million people in the United States, approximately 38.5 million families, watched on the ABC channel a television movie that had been talked about for weeks: “The Day After.” He imagined the rapidly escalating tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union into World War III from the perspective of the people of two rural U.S. towns that served as launch bases for ICBMs. The debate preceding the broadcast addressed the possibility of broadcasting, the possible impact on public opinion, on the most sensitive viewers, on the 1984 presidential election and on nuclear weapons reduction policy.
The Day After was also broadcast in Europe and Italy the following year and is still considered, forty years after its release, one of the most ambitious and successful cinematic attempts to imagine the consequences of a nuclear catastrophe. Although the film already seemed technically limited in some respects, it interpreted the increasingly widespread and shared fears and concerns about the dangers of the use of atomic bombs and, according to many, stimulated a discussion that helped accelerate the processes that led to the end of the Cold war.
Set in the early 1980s, The Day After depicts the direct impact of a rapid escalation of the Cold War on the lives of a group of people in two US cities, Lawrence in Kansas and Kansas City in Missouri, where missile silos are guarded by the US Army . The rapid and catastrophic course of events is only reported by newspapers and radio and television broadcasts, which initially talk about the Soviet Union sending nuclear weapons to Europe and the build-up of troops in East Germany with the aim of intimidating the USA into withdrawing from West Berlin.
After NATO forces attempt to break a blockade of West Berlin imposed by East Germany, the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries intervene in the conflict by attacking civilian and military targets in West Germany. People begin fleeing Kansas City and other U.S. cities after initial reports of an evacuation of Moscow amid fears of a nuclear attack, as Soviet forces advance in Western Europe, responding to NATO’s use of three tactical nuclear weapons, which in turn have nuclear weapons against NATO headquarters in Brussels.
In the film, after an attack by the Soviet Air Force in England and on a base in California, the USA launches its nuclear warheads with intercontinental ballistic missiles from Lawrence. At the same time, an officer aboard a Department of Defense plane flying over Kansas receives a report that more than 300 ICBMs are arriving in the United States from the Soviet Union. The second part of the film, which does not clarify which country was the first to use ICBMs, tells the story of the people of Kansas City who survived the explosions that killed a large portion of the population.
At the end of the film, before the credits, a message says:
The catastrophic events you have witnessed are undoubtedly far less tragic than what would happen if the United States were actually involved in a nuclear war. We hope that this film will convince all nations of the world, their people and their governors to avoid this dramatic end.
In the United States, The Day After was one of the most-watched non-sports television shows of all time. Part of this success was attributed not only to the film itself, which some critics actually judged to be quite mediocre, but also to its ability to focus the attention and concern of public opinion on the possible development of nuclear war in a history of growing tensions with the Soviet Union, after a decade of more relaxed relationships.
After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the policies of Republican President Ronald Reagan, elected in 1981, led to a significant increase in military spending and an expansion of nuclear potential through the production of new ballistic missiles. Between November 2nd and 10th, 1983, one of the numerous military exercises and maneuvers called “Able Archer 83” was mistaken by the Soviet Union for a real attack attempt and almost triggered a nuclear war, as it only became clear a few months later.
The media discussion before and after the broadcast of “The Day After” focused primarily on the political significance of the film, which was interpreted by most people as a call to support disarmament policy. “Rarely in the history of television has a work of fiction achieved the urgency and scope of live coverage of a national crisis,” Washington Post television critic Tom Shales wrote two days before the film aired.
A November 18, 1983 Washington Post page with an article about “The Day After.”
The film was the brainchild of ABC Motion Picture Division President Brandon Stoddard, inspired in part by watching “The China Syndrome,” a hit 1979 film starring Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon and Michael Douglas, which told the story of an attempted cover-up recounted safety risks at a nuclear facility in the United States. At Stoddard’s request, a draft script was developed, focusing not so much on the nuclear war itself but on its aftermath, which Stoddard entrusted to veteran television writer Edward Hume, producer Robert Papazian and director Nicholas Meyer after being rejected by two different directors .
Meyer’s idea was not to make The Day After an apocalyptic genre film, both to avoid censorship and because he saw this decision as a way to make the film more impactful. For the same reason – so as not to divert public attention from the possibility of nuclear war – he asked ABC not to include any major actors or actresses. Finally, a group of actors who were best known for their supporting roles were involved, including Jason Robards, JoBeth Williams and Steve Guttenberg.
Originally intended to be a four-hour film over two evenings, the length of the film was cut by about half. The final version was the result of months of compromise between Meyer and Papazian on the one hand and the censors at ABC and the Defense Department on the other. A significant part of the tension was caused by Meyer’s decision, which was retained in the final version of the film, not to comply with the request to make it clear in the plot that the Soviet Union had fired the missiles with nuclear warheads before the United States. According to some reports, Reagan was concerned that the film would affect the success of his re-nomination as president in 1984, even going so far as to ask ABC President Leonard Goldenson to “sink the film” during a game of golf.
Fears about the film’s divisiveness also deterred several advertisers, and in the end there were only 12 minutes of advertising during the film and none after the explosion scene. Although ABC suffered losses in terms of potential advertising revenue, ABC gained significantly in popularity and appreciation. The film influenced public opinion “in ways that seem almost unimaginable in the streaming age of content abundance and associated fragmented viewing,” wrote CNN television critic Brian Lowry.
Much of the film’s audience – around 38.5 million people – continued to watch the channel to watch a subsequent debate on deterrence policy and the threat of nuclear war, moderated by television journalist Ted Koppel. Guests included the scientist and popularizer Carl Sagan, the former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the writer of Jewish origin Elie Wiesel, who survived the Shoah. In Italy, “The Day After”, after being released in cinemas on February 10, 1984, was broadcast in prime time on Rai 1 on November 16, followed by an in-depth study by Piero Angela.
One of the main advantages of the broadcast of this film, the New York Times wrote in 1983, was that it caused millions of people to ask serious questions about the arms race and its goals, regardless of political opinion. “The possibility of thermonuclear horror – horror is too poor a word, there is no word for it – is the overwhelming problem of our time.”
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