This TV movie from the 1980s helped change the course of the Cold War. Here’s how ‘The Day After’ got made
Editor’s Note: The CNN Original Series “Secrets & Spies: A Nuclear Game” examines the tenuous global geopolitics during the Cold War through the lens of two notorious double agents: Oleg Gordievsky and Aldrich Ames. The four-part series is airing Sundays at 10 pm ET/PT on CNN.
In November 1983, the US, Soviet Union and the rest of the world were teetering closer than ever on the edge of nuclear war. A NATO military exercise had spooked the Soviets, who thought the exercise was merely a cover for a real nuclear strike on the USSR, prompting them to ready their own nuclear forces.
Who knew, then, that an ABC movie-of-the-week would play a significant role in potentially preventing nuclear war?
“The Day After,” a two-hour epic following a few weeks in the lives of small-town Midwesterners before and after a nuclear strike, was one of the most controversial and most-watched TV movies when it aired on November 20, 1983.
In its first hour, the people of Lawrence, Kansas, go about their lives as the threat of nuclear war looms. But when the nuke finally comes to Kansas, the devastation is immediate: Acres of crops are singed and poisoned, homes are leveled, a fifth-grade class is vaporized at school.
