When I was 11 years old, I wasn’t one of the 100 million people who watched the apocalyptic movie The Day After when it aired on ABC in November of 1983. I’m pretty sure I was tuned into CBS, watching Vera the waitress get married on Alice. But the societal impact of the movie’s depiction of nuclear war and radioactive fallout in the American heartland was inescapable, not just to a child but to the White House. One month earlier, President Ronald Reagan screened an advance copy, then confessed his reaction to his diary: It has Lawrence Kansas wiped out in a nuclear war with Russia. It is powerfully done—all $7 mil. worth. It’s very effective & left me greatly depressed … Whether it will be of help to the “anti nukes” or not, I cant [sic] say. My own reaction was one of our having to do all we can to have a deterrent & to see there is never a nuclear war. Reagan’s in-house biographer, Edmund Morris, later wrote the diary entry was “the first and only admission I have been able to find in his papers[] that he was ‘greatly depressed.’” When the movie aired nationwide, ABC News immediately followed it with a roundtable discussion hosted by Ted Koppel, featuring Henry Kissinger, Elie Wiesel, Carl Sagan, William F. Buckley, Jr., Brent Scowcroft, and Robert McNamara. Koppel began with an interview of the current Secretary of State George Shultz, who sought to be reassuring: “Nuclear war is simply not acceptable, and that fact and the realization of it has been the basis for the policy of the United States for decades now—the successful policy of the United States.” But as noted by Frances FitzGerald, the historian who wrote Way Out There in the Blue about Reagan’s foreign policy, “Unfortunately, the appearance of the real-life secretary of state talking somberly about nuclear weapons gave the movie even more verisimilitude.” Perhaps fortunately. Despite Reagan’s reputation as a reckless saber-rattler and warmonger, he was serious about working with the Soviet Union to avert the threat of nuclear war. Reagan infamously derailed the hastily arranged 1986 Reykjavik summit with Mikhail Gorbachev by refusing to give up his then-implausible “Star Wars” space-based missile defense plan, but an initial agreement was made to ban intermediate-range nuclear weapons, and such a treaty was finalized the following year. The director of The Day… [TheTopNews] Read More.
3 days ago
