40 years ago yesterday

[Francisco 2.0 32395]

A 16 year old Francisco was scared absolutely shitless:

 

 

 

Edited November 22, 2023 by Francisco 2.0

[dcbc 14496]

My elementary school sent out letters asking parents not to let us watch. 

 

Watched.

[Francisco 2.0 32395]

1 minute ago, dcbc said:

My elementary school sent out letters asking parents not to let us watch. 

 

Watched.

 

My parents, if they were aware this was going to be shown, they didn't talk about it.  I was aware, and wanted to watch it.

My dad usually would talk to mom during something that was on tv that I or my siblings wanted to watch.  Like many, we had one tv in the house, so...we all were going to watch whatever was on, or leave the room.

My parents didn't talk for the rest of the movie once the attack sequence started.  I couldn't go to sleep that night.

[dcbc 14496]

A friend of mine told me a story about him and his brother that took place in the early 80s.  His older brother came into his room in the middle of the night, shook him awake, and told him the Russians had launched a nuclear strike.  Freaked him the fuck out.

[Deej 76858]

If our school desks would protect us from a nuclear blast, why wasn't the entire country made of school desks?

[YGIFS 19452]

Or roadside picnic blankets?  

[Deej 76858]

2 minutes ago, YGIFS said:

Or roadside picnic blankets?  

 

[Parliament 14272]

Back when we were afraid of the Russians lololol.

[atomheartbevo 89758]

2 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

My parents didn't talk for the rest of the movie once the attack sequence started.  I couldn't go to sleep that night.

58 minutes ago, Parliament said:

Back when we were afraid of the Russians lololol.

The year before, I think on NBC or CBS, they did a World War 3 miniseries with David "Hutch" Soul and Cathy Lee Crosby as Army officers defending Alaska, with Rock Hudson and Brian Keith playing the American and Soviet leaders.  It was actually a fairly serious show.

And then a few years later, we got Amerika with Kris Kristofferson, Mariel Hemingway, Sam Neill, Robert Urich, and "a 17-year-old Lara Flynn Boyle in her first major role", after the Soviets had been in control (bloodless coup 10 years earlier) and I loved TV Guide's taken on it.

Trivia note: Ben Stein inspired the show with him bitching about The Day After not showing why war with the Soviets would be necessary (why we couldn't give up), and so this was thrown together to say "Here's how shitty it would be under the Soviets, so we must fight".

Red Dawn was of course released after World War III and The Day After, and Amerika 

Edited November 22, 2023 by atomheartbevo

[RPM 26328]

6 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

The year before, I think on NBC or CBS, they did a World War 3 miniseries with David "Hutch" Soul and Cathy Lee Crosby as Army officers defending Alaska, with Rock Hudson and Brian Keith playing the American and Soviet leaders.  It was actually a fairly serious show.

I remember watching that. Interlocking grid of fire from culverts saved the day. That had to be on ABC with those actors. All were on ABC series at the time.

[Francisco 2.0 32395]

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/11/the-day-after-hollywood-world-war-iii/676084/

 

Quote

We live in an anxious time. Some days, it can feel like the wheels are coming off and the planet is careening out of control. But at least it’s not 1983, the year that the Cold War seemed to be in its final trajectory toward disaster.

Forty years ago today, it was the morning after The Day After, the ABC TV movie about a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. Roughly 100 million people tuned in on Sunday night, November 20, 1983, and The Day After holds the record as the most-watched made-for-television movie in history.

 

Quote

I remember the movie, and the year, vividly. I was 22 and in graduate school at Columbia University, studying the Soviet Union. It’s hard to explain to people who worry about, say, climate change—a perfectly legitimate concern—what it was like to live with the fear not that many people could die over the course of 20 or 50 or 100 years but that the decision to end life on most of the planet in flames and agony could happen in less time than it would take you to finish reading this article.

I will not recount the movie for you; there isn’t much of a plot beyond the stories of people who survive the fictional destruction of Kansas City. There is no detailed scenario, no explanation of what started the war. (This was by design; the filmmakers wanted to avoid making any political points.) But in scenes as graphic as U.S. television would allow, Americans finally got a look at what the last moments of peace, and the first moments of hell, might look like.

 

Quote

Understanding the impact of The Day After is difficult without a sense of the tense Cold War situation during the previous few years. There was an unease (or “a growing feeling of hysteria,” as Sting would sing a few years later in “Russians”) in both East and West that the gears of war were turning and locking, a doomsday ratchet tightening click by click.

 

Spoiler

The Soviet-American détente of the 1970s was brief and ended quickly. By 1980, President Jimmy Carter was facing severe criticism about national defense even within his own party. He responded by approving a number of new nuclear programs, and unveiling a new and highly aggressive nuclear strategy. The Soviets thought Carter had lost his mind, and they were actually more hopeful about working with the Republican nominee, Ronald Reagan. Soviet fears intensified when Reagan, once in office, took Carter’s decisions and put them on steroids, and in May 1981 the KGB went on alert looking for signs of impending nuclear attack from the United States. In November 1982, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev died and was replaced by the KGB boss, Yuri Andropov. The chill in relations between Washington and Moscow became a hard frost.

And then came 1983.

In early March, Reagan gave his famous speech in which he called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and accused it of being “the focus of evil in the modern world.” Only a few weeks after that, he gave a major televised address to the nation in which he announced plans for space-based missile defenses, soon mocked as “Star Wars.” Two months later, I graduated from college and headed over to the Soviet Union to study Russian for the summer. Everywhere I went, the question was the same: “Why does your president want a nuclear war?” Soviet citizens, bombarded by propaganda, were certain the end was near. So was I, but I blamed their leaders, not mine.

When I returned, I packed my car in Massachusetts and began a road trip to begin graduate school in New York City on September 1, 1983. As I drove, news reports on the radio kept alluding to a missing Korean airliner.

The jet was Korean Air Lines Flight 007. It was downed by Soviet fighter jets for trespassing in Soviet airspace, killing all 269 souls aboard. The shoot down produced an immense outpouring of rage at the Soviet Union that shocked Kremlin leaders. Soviet sources later claimed that this was the moment when Andropov gave up—forever—on any hope of better relations with the West, and as the fall weather of 1983 got colder, the Cold War got hotter.

We didn’t know it at the time, but in late September, Soviet air defenses falsely reported a U.S. nuclear attack against the Soviet Union: We’re all still alive thanks to a Soviet officer on duty that day who refused to believe the erroneous alert. On October 10, Reagan watched The Day After in a private screening and noted in his diary that it “greatly depressed” him.

On October 23, a truck bomber killed 241 U.S. military personnel in the Marine barracks in Beirut.

Two days after that, the United States invaded Grenada and deposed its Marxist-Leninist regime, an act the Soviets thought could be the prelude to overthrowing other pro-Soviet regimes—even in Europe. On November 7, the U.S. and NATO began a military communications exercise code-named Able Archer, exactly the sort of traffic and activity the Soviets were looking for. Moscow definitely noticed, but fortunately, the exercise wound down in time to prevent any further confusion.

This was the global situation when, on November 20, The Day After aired.

Three days later, on November 23, Soviet negotiators walked out of nuclear-arms talks in Geneva. War began to feel—at least to me—inevitable.

In today’s Bulwark newsletter, the writer A. B. Stoddard remembers how her father, ABC’s motion-picture president Brandon Stoddard, came up with the idea for The Day After. “He wanted Americans, not politicians, to grapple with what nuclear war would mean, and he felt ‘fear had really paralyzed people.’ So the movie was meant to force the issue.”

And so it did, perhaps not always productively. Some of the immediate commentary bordered on panic. (In New York, I recall listening to the antinuclear activist Helen Caldicott on talk radio after the broadcast, and she said nuclear war was a mathematical certainty if Reagan was reelected.) Henry Kissinger, for his part, asked if we should make policy by “scaring ourselves to death.”

Reagan, according to the scholar Beth Fischer, was in “shock and disbelief” that the Soviets really thought he was headed for war, and in late 1983 “took the reins” and began to redirect policy. He found no takers in the Kremlin for his new line until the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, and both men soon affirmed that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought—a principle that in theory still guides U.S. and Russian policy.

In the end, we got through 1983 mostly by dumb luck. If you’d asked me back then as a young student whether I’d be around to talk about any of this 40 years later, I would have called the chances a coin toss.

But although we might feel safer, I wonder if Americans really understand that thousands of those weapons remain on station in the United States, Russia, and other nations, ready to launch in a matter of minutes. The Day After wasn’t the scariest nuclear-war film—that honor goes to the BBC’s Threads—but perhaps more Americans should take the time to watch it. It’s not exactly a holiday movie, but it’s a good reminder at Thanksgiving that we are fortunate for the changes over the past 40 years that allow us to give thanks in our homes instead of in shelters made from the remnants of our cities and towns—and to recommit to making sure that future generations don’t have to live with that same fear.

 

[Macanudo 12999]

I was 13 years old and living 35-40 miles from downtown Houston.   I remember kids at school saying "Houston woudn't get hit.   There's no military stuff here."   Even as a 13 year old, I realized that the Ship Channel and all the refineries were prime targets.  I have thought since then that I pretty much want to be eviscerated in the initial blast than live even if I was hundreds of miles from the blasts.    

[Guest]

'V' was a lot scarier than that shit.👽

Red Dawn was the one that resonated with my friends and me.  That and War Games.  Basically we're all fucked because of nukes and commies.

The Day After was interesting, but not scary to us/ me, for some reason.  It was just fucking TV.

[Biff Tannen 45695]

I watched Red Dawn for the first time last year.  It was terrible.

[Elvis 3371]

I grew up in Abilene with Dyess Airforce Base.  We were a top-10 strike zone because of the B1 Bomber and a bunch of missile silos.  We all had a mentallity to just sit on the roof and watch the fireworks show.  

 

My father-in-law was a B1 pilot.  He ran missions half-way across the atlantic, not knowing if his payload was real or dummy loads.  He didn't know if the mission was a training or real sometimes.  Scary stuff.

[South Austin 52523]

13 hours ago, dcbc said:

A friend of mine told me a story about him and his brother that took place in the early 80s.  His older brother came into his room in the middle of the night, shook him awake, and told him the Russians had launched a nuclear strike.  Freaked him the fuck out.

Shit, wish I had thought of that.

[atomheartbevo 89758]

6 hours ago, RPM said:

I remember watching that. Interlocking grid of fire from culverts saved the day. 

 

The culverts are the only thing I remember from that movie.  I’ve even used the culvert scene to jog people’s memory of the show.  My summary of that whole thing is “soldiers in Alaska setting up metal culverts to shoot through.”

 

edit but now I wonder why the culvert thing stayed with us for 40 years.  

Edited November 22, 2023 by atomheartbevo

[YGIFS 19452]

Kind of some of these notes—-we watched it in school a few years after initial release.  So we were probably 11-12yo.  Handful of kids weren’t allowed to watch so they got study hall.  
so Mr Montgomery who was creepy as fuck to begin with screens it for us over the course of a few days.  We have to discuss it and write an essay about it.  
but he said something that stuck with me.  Even a government as dumb as ours doesn’t put all its missile silos on known military bases, subs, and bombers.  There are hundreds all around us which look like everyday places and buildings.  This was ten years before the web and thirty years before Q conspiracies.  
whenever I see this rerun, I think of how freaked out he made us.  And I think of much I still hate Russia.  

[RPM 26328]

Special Bulletin really got my attention. It was broadcast as if in real time. Had a very Orson Wells/War of the Worlds feel to it. Think it was on NBC.

 

[Guest]

2 hours ago, Biff Tannen said:

I watched Red Dawn for the first time last year.  It was terrible.

That's a feature, not a bug.

[HookEm 2467]

I think a good nuclear war movie updated to modern times would play well right now.  

[atomheartbevo 89758]

25 minutes ago, HookEm said:

I think a good nuclear war movie updated to modern times would play well right now.  

We kinda got it in the 2004 Battlestar Galactica series.