Apocalypse Television:
How The Day After helped end the Cold War
Daivd Craig, Applause (Globe Peaquot), 2024. 245pp.
The title is a bit of a reach, but this film did have an
impact far beyond what any other single Cold War TV-movie achieved. The story
that unfolds here is an exciting as well as enlightening one. The best part is
the inside baseball about how such a controversial film was approved and made,
although the section on the film’s impact is also compelling. Craig is a good
writer and has researched the topic thoroughly. He says at the start he wants
to address the much larger issue of survival in a nuclear-armed world, and my
reservations about the book mainly concern the way he treats that issue.
I am reviewing the book, not the movie so I went with my memory of the
latter: I didn’t want my impressions of it to be overwritten by a rewatch long
out of context. It was certainly a good
movie. Well-acted, well-cast, it used the town of Lawrence, Kansas as the
perfect Middle American locale to study the impact of a holocaust. It was
well-paced, although I thought the time wasted on bed-hopping was pointless.
The military scenes made excellent use of stock footage and felt authentic. The
ruined post-bomb town and its shattered, dying citizenry were superbly
conveyed: no one could be unmoved.
I had an unusual perspective on the film. I was in a
silo, with the keys to a nuclear missile, the night before we saw it. The
Pentagon attitude toward nukes wasn’t cavalier as Craig portrays it. We knew
the film was authentic because we’d watched in training the most graphic
depictions of bomb test effects and horribly disfigured and dead inhabitants of
Hiroshima: The Air Force wanted us to understand what we were doing. I was certain the US would never fire first,
but I understood the filmmakers’ decision to leave it ambiguous to focus on the
human impact. In a quick survey of other retired missileers, everyone
remembered the movie. Reactions ran the gamut: “I remember thinking how much
worse reality would be;” “it made me more aware of what I was doing;” and
“Marxist propaganda.”
How creator Brandon Stoddard got the movie made is
fascinating. Initially, despite Stoddard’s track record of successful
programming, no one else at the network wanted to touch it. As he persisted,
debates included movie vs. miniseries, whether to make clear who started the
war, where to locate the film (large city or smaller town?) and how realistic
to make the postwar horrors. While Stoddard hatched the idea for the film with
the intent of showing the horrors of a nuclear war, he insisted the film was
nonpolitical with the villains being the nukes. The creative team did have antinuclear
activists, including screenwriter Ed Hume and others connected to the nuclear
freeze movement.
Craig portrays that movement as sincere, and it was, but
he also portrays it as pure. As he surely knows, it was supported clandestinely
by the USSR (although most protestors didn’t know that) and used heavily in Soviet
propaganda. The book says very little about the Soviet actions the West was
responding to or frightened by. Neither did the movement, which aimed 90
percent of its rhetoric at the US and carried out all its protesting in the
West: no one took the risk of protesting anywhere an Eastern bloc government might
arrest them. (I’m not sure Craig knows President Jimmy Carter offered Soviet
leader Leonid Brezhnev a nuclear freeze back in 1979 and was turned down flat.)
As Craig recounts, The Day After appeared during a
space of American and British films, mainly documentaries but also dramatic
films like Testament, dealing with nuclear war. On The Day After,
producer Robert Papazian led the hard work of research. The filmmakers debated
how much of the larger military and political world to depict, but they stuck
(wisely) to focusing on the victims and showed just enough of the buildup and
the war to tell their story.
The Pentagon declined cooperation since it was unclear
who started the war, but did provide some access, like a tour of a missile
control center. Young director Nicholas Meyer (whose recollections of the film,
Craig notes, often differ considerably from those of his colleagues), came on
board. There were many discussions with Broadcast Standards and Practices (“the
censors”), and the filmmakers fought hard to keep realistic burns, illness, and
death in the film. They definitely pushed the envelope. Some of the nuclear
images in the film were from Hiroshima and some from American nuclear tests. The
the mushroom of the explosion was a low-budget but effective special effect
inspired when Meyer noticed how someone’s creamer dispersed in his coffee. The
film used a reddish liquid dispersing into an aquarium and turned the film
upside down, layering in the background shot behind it.
Lawrence, Kansas, became an indispensable part of the
film, not only providing locations but most of the cast and its active local
peace movement even reaching out to the Soviet Union to create exchanges. The
choice to have only one name actor, Jason Robards (to whom Meyer offered the
role in a conversation on an airliner), and a few younger actors plus a cast of
unknowns and local talent turned out to be spot on. Forty percent of the
speaking roles were local. Many actors came from Kansas City. Theater troupes,
professors, etc. were solicited: University of Kansas students filled many
roles, as did a good chunk of Lawrence’s fifty thousand people. Actual
buildings were used unless they needed to be destroyed. Lawrence is in fact
near numerous Minuteman missile silos, and it had the right rural Midwestern
feel, even though Meyer and others were typical Hollywood types who wanted and
expected the locals to be simplistic and aw-shucks. Despite that, it all
gelled. Ratings were huge, and it’s not an exaggeration to say the whole
country was discussing it. Reviewers felt the result, as filmmaking as well as
an issue-raiser, was very good indeed, although Stoddard and Meyer both said
later they thought the film could have been better. The film’s signature shot, of citizens
looking up as the ICBMs arc into a beautiful blue sky, is as effective now as
it always was.
The political whirlpools and currents around the movie
began swirling long before the air date. The movie was shown to peace groups,
who did all they could to use it to promote the freeze movement. President
Ronald Reagan saw an advance cut: while the book’s implication it was the film
that ended in him enacting more “humane” policies toward the USSR is unproved,
Reagan did describe himself in his diary as “depressed.” He and his
Administration cited the film as proof of the famously hawkish Regan’s new mantra
that “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Craig writes that
ex-actor Reagan was moved by films “like no other medium.” I never knew the Administration actually
prepared a version with subtitles and sent it to the Soviets. The peace
movement and the filmmakers didn’t want the message of the
nonpolitical-but-political film co-opted, and they largely succeeded in keeping
the focus on antinuclear sentiment.
Craig makes the important point that The Day After
would have less of an impact in similar circumstances in the modern day because
it came at a time when the broadcast networks were still the most widely viewed
and influential sources of televised drama. Excellent films of the streaming
era rarely reach such a vast segment of the public.
In the mid to late 1980s, arms control policies were in
flux, as hardliners in Russia lost their grip on power and, in 1985, passed
power to the more practical Mikhail Gorbachev. Amid the continuing battle over
intermediate-range weapons in Europe, Reagan proposed the “zero option” – no
such weapons for either side. (Only later did he expand that phrase to include
all nuclear arms, a distinction the book misses.) In 1987 came the Intermediate Nuclear Forces
Treaty, which enshrined the zero option in Europe. Craig writes this treaty
“ended the arms race.” It most certainly did not, as it had no effect on the
heavier long-range strategic arms, but it was a major step in the right
direction.
Stoddard went on to make the Russian-occupation film Amerika,
which neither Craig nor I thought was all that good. He never admitted The
Day After was political, although the rest of the creative team had never
denied it was. Meyer, in later years, thought delivering the antiwar message
through this film was “the best thing I ever did.”
Thie book, like the film, has a bit more of a political
slant than the creator admits to. Only a lunatic can be in favor of nuclear
war, but Craig doesn’t allow for the sincerity of people who thought keeping
peace meant keeping a strong force and handling reduction step by step, with
caution about Soviet intentions. Still, those of us who believed in a strong
nuclear deterrent can’t claim there’s anything moral about it except the bare
fact that it’s worked.
Craig has provided us with a well-written book that
chronicles an important, though perhaps not pivotal, moment in Cold War history.
This is a rare look at how the entertainment industry – or one determined
individual, in this case – played a role in that war and the public’s
understanding of it. I have differences with the context and background Craig
provides, but that doesn’t take away from the importance of the book.
Matt Bille is a former Air Force officer, now a writer, historian, and
naturalist living in Colorado Springs. He is hte author of The First Space Race Launching the World's First Satellites (Texas A&M, 2004). He can be reached at
mattsciwriter@protonmail.com. Website: www.mattbilleauthor.com.
