Yes, it’s another of Mike’s World War III posts. But this time, I’m taking it back in time. Back in time to 1983, when a movie called The Day After debuted. There are at least two versions that exist. One is the broadcast version and one is the full version that shows a lot of the more graphic portions. In this article, I will be discussing things that happen in one or both versions.
I will not be providing a link to the movie because of copyright concerns. I respect the rights of copyright holders. I will therefore not link to versions that I believe to be pirated, that is to say versions that aren’t officially available and sanctioned. I can’t stop you from looking around for this movie online on your own.
As you might suspect by now, this movie is yet another movie about World War III. But given that it was released in 1983, the movie was filmed and set during the Cold War at a time when nuclear war against what was then the Soviet Union and the United States could have broken out in a matter of minutes.
The movie certainly aired during a time of high tension. At the time, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was being negotiated between the United States and the Soviet Union.
In this movie, viewed by over 90 million people on its initial broadcast on the United States’ ABC television network on November 20th, conflicts between NATO nations and the Soviet Union escalate. This is a case of fiction not being too far removed from non-fiction: at the time, our two nations had missiles with nuclear warheads pointed at each other at all times. A launch could have happened in a manner of minutes, if not seconds. That’s what probably made this movie so scary at the time.
As the movie, set and filmed in the Kansas City, Missouri area begins, news anchors report the bad news: the possibility of nuclear war is strong.
Escalations happened quickly and it doesn’t take long before the word comes down: we retaliate against the Soviets. Military personnel are shown carrying out their orders and preparing our ICBM’s for launch. The procedures were largely accurate for the time.
Quickly, the nukes launched from silos in the mid-western area of our nation. That was probably fiction. Our nukes were really stored in The Nuclear Sponge.
At one point, NATO tried to break through a barrier. This caused Moscow to be evacuated. That probably should have been a clear warning sign to our nation’s military leaders. Not that we had much of anywhere to run. At this point, Kansas City is evacuated, or at least they tried to evacuate.
The Emergency Broadcast System is activated, but coming from a broadcast engineering background, I can tell you that its usage is not accurately portrayed in this movie. I realize it is just that: a movie. There’s a lot of artistic license here.
I could go on and just drop spoilers left and right, but I’ll just cut to the chase and say that Kansas City does get nuked, and for the rest of the movie, those who survived the inital blast are shown dealing with the aftermath.
In this movie, the United States is not innocent. As a NATO nation, they participated in the events that led to the launch and that is why the Soviets launched against the USA.
The production values are cheap, even for 1983. Even so, they managed to get some recognized actors. John Lithgow, Steve Guttenberg and Dennis Lipscomb are among those actors. How they managed to attract those actors which was quite clearly a pathetically low budget is beyond me.
The one interesting thing about the movie is that it used actual residents of the area and, in a couple of scenes, actual military personnel. How they managed to pull off the latter I’ll never know. I didn’t think the military would allow its people to participate, especially given that we were in pretty deep with the Cold War.
The movie is largely accurate, showing that the area was nuked because it was home to so many ICBM’s, but again, they should have been even more accurate and set it in a place where the missiles really were and are to this day. But then again, that wouldn’t make much of a movie, would it?
When the Soviet Union’s missiles detonate, people are shown being vaporized and caught up in fireballs and so forth. Cheap production values prevail in that part of the movie, but I suppose that was to be expected with what had to be a very small budget. This movie did, after all, rely on a lot of stock footage when the destruction during the initial blasts occurred.
When this movie aired, I was a young child. I don’t remember if I was allowed to watch this movie at the time. What I do remember is hearing air raid sirens being tested every week. As I grew older, such tests were a constant reminder of how serious things were during the Cold War era.
One thing that should be mentioned here is something that most people did not know at the time: just two months prior to the broadcast debut, World War III came within a couple of minutes of really happening due to a false alarm. Ironically, it was a Soviet military commander who saved the world.
In other words, the fiction within this movie could have become factual before the movie even aired!
Anyway, this movie is pretty entertaining. I have to admit it’s fun to see American cities being nuked in a fictional context. Would any of what happened in this movie become a reality? Maybe, but if those things became real, they’d be ten times worse because of evolving technology.
I would absolutely recommend this movie!