In Woody Allen’s classic romantic comedy Manhattan, Woody’s character insists that he was part of the World War II generation. His girlfriend points out that he was eight years old during the war. “Right, I was never in the trenches,” he says. “I was caught right in the middle. It was a very tough position.”

I was reminded of this bit of repartee when considering my curious relationship with the notorious made-for-TV movie The Day After, which imagined in stark and shocking detail the effects of nuclear war on a group of middle-class Americans in Lawrence, Kansas. The movie, which starred Jason Robards, John Lithgow, JoBeth Williams, and Steve Guttenberg, turns 40 this year.

When it aired on ABC in November of 1983, The Day After commanded the viewing public’s attention like few broadcasts had since the finale of M*A*S*H. At the start of the broadcast, actor John Cullum issued a stentorian announcement about the horrifying scenes to follow, and after it was over, august voices on various sides of the nuclear question—including William F. Buckley Jr., Henry Kissinger, and Carl Sagan—went back and forth about nuclear policy. In between, more than 100 million Americans were said to have watched the broadcast.

I was not among them. You see, like Woody Allen, I was caught “right in the middle.” I had been born in March 1983, so I came of age under the radioactive cloud of The Day After but had no conscious awareness of it. For adult viewers, the movie came on the heels of a ten-month stretch during which a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union must have seemed imminent or at least plausible. In March of that year, Ronald Reagan designated the USSR an “Evil Empire” and announced the formation of the Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars” program. Reagan was shown the movie in advance of its airing. He praised it in his diary as “powerfully done” and noted that it left him “greatly depressed.”

Happily for me, you can’t worry about what you don’t know. My father had been an officer in the Air Force before embarking on a banking career, and he was not one to panic about world affairs. I cannot recall ever hearing a discussion in my household about the prospect of nuclear war. Besides, by then the temperature was cooling. In December 1987, four months before my fifth birthday, Reagan and Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and by the time I was in grade school, the Cold War itself was pretty much kaput. 

I finally saw The Day After in the early 1990s, secure in my knowledge that I was watching an historical artifact. I found it to be largely an exercise in theoretical terror. To be sure, the movie was elaborate in imagining what awaited humanity if the superpowers ever lobbed nuclear missiles at each other: mushroom clouds, fallout like confetti, survivors stricken by shock and then felled by radiation poisoning, dead cows, debris everywhere, haunting transmissions from a college professor (Lithgow) on a shortwave radio. “This is Lawrence. This is Lawrence, Kansas. Is anybody there? Anybody at all?” By the time the film is over, there doesn’t seem to be. 

All of this horror would rattle anyone, but that doesn’t make the movie any good. Saying that life after a nuclear attack would be miserable is, on its face, as meaningful as saying that death and dying are miserable. As the characters putter about the post-attack wasteland, they are no more dynamic than the cast of Waiting for Godot. Shock, illness, death—this is not a compelling story arc, especially when applied to every single character in the story. What is more, the movie was engineered to be virtually criticism-proof in a particularly shameless manner. Since we all agree nuclear war is an abomination, how could we criticize a film that shows it as such?

Watching The Day After for the first time during the early years of the Clinton administration, I remember being less afraid of what was shown than alarmed by the bald attempt to make me afraid. The filmmakers, it seemed to me, took a perverse pleasure in showing sacred American institutions enfeebled and destroyed after a nuclear war. One storyline involves a farmer and his wife (Cullum and Bibi Besch) whose daughter’s wedding is a casualty of the attack. The postwar world we encounter is one without electricity (emergency surgeries are conducted under battery-powered flashlights), minimal governmental order (a single radio broadcast is heard from the president), and none of the consolations of religion (a minister, whose words from Scripture are meant to ring hollow, leads a service conducted in the ruins of a church). 

I found contemptible the filmmakers’ use of the American composer Virgil Thomson’s score from The River, a 1938 Farm Security Administration documentary. Here was a work of genuine Americana, one that borrowed beautifully from the hymn “How Firm a Foundation,” repurposed for a film that shows the destruction of America, implicitly at the hands of those charged with leading America. Your leaders, your material comforts, even your God—none of this will help you.

Of course, an actual nuclear war would be authentically apocalyptic, but anyone would have known that without seeing it dramatized on their TV set. Why, then, make such a movie? In their fixation with presenting the end of the world in such frightful, alarming detail, the filmmakers seemed to be saying: Unless the superpowers adopt whatever the liberal policy prescriptions then were—at the time, anti-nuclear organizations were an influential force in American life, capable of summoning more than a million protestors to a disarmament march in Central Park just a year earlier—this is what awaits you.

William F. Buckley Jr. was right, in the post-broadcast debate: “The whole point of this movie is to launch an enterprise that seeks to debilitate the United States,” Buckley said then. “The guy who wrote it says, ‘I would like to see people starting to question the value of defending this country with a nuclear arsenal.’ That is his motive, and people who have seen the film who have sought to debilitate American defenses have gathered around it.” Disarm, or else. 

None of what the film showed happened, or even came close to happening. The 1980s rolled along, and it came to be defined by Tom Wolfe’s Masters of the Universe, Melanie Griffith’s Working Girl, and Indiana Jones, not a nuclear winter. This is not an incidental matter. If a movie only exists to warn of something grave, but that “something” never occurs, it is fair to call into question its intrinsic value. 

Furthermore, even if we concede that the movie jolted Reagan—he writes, in his autobiography, that seeing the movie was one of the events that “made me more aware than ever of the urgent need for a defense against nuclear missiles”—it is a stretch to credit it with changing the course of history. Does anyone really believe that if ABC had aired something else that night in the autumn of 1983, Reagan and Gorbachev would not have seen a way forward to peace? That the Cold War would not have ended? That the Soviet Union would have remained in existence? If pop culture had such power, why was Norman Mailer unable to halt the Vietnam War or Michael Moore powerless to stop our misadventures in the Middle East?

I had largely forgotten about The Day After until the coronavirus pandemic, which, three years ago, stoked a similar set of fears in Americans. Both times, our commissars were telling us: The world as we know it could end, and if we don’t heed their counsel, everything we value will be gone in an instant. Yet The Day After was a movie shown on a single night, and while it obviously left an impression on those who watched, it was probably forgotten by most within a week or a month. 

By contrast, the pandemic—and the media that supported it—went on and on. Every day on the news was the equivalent of a dozen Day Afters. Instead of the threat of fallout in the air, we were told to fear virus droplets, and the old Cold War artifact of the fallout shelter was revived in the form of stay-at-home orders. The consequences of refusing to abide by pandemic mandates were presented as gravely as the consequences of a nuclear exchange. 

It turned out that, as surely in 2020 as in 1983, Americans had the capacity to be panicked by the things they saw on TV. The cottage industry of movies intended to make nuclear war seem imminent or inevitable—among them Stanley Kramer’s 1959 urtext, On the Beach; the 1983 feature film Testament; the 1984 BBC miniseries Threads; even a 1987 Superman sequel in which Christopher Reeve heaves nukes into outer space—looks today like a grift. Ironically, the current Russia-Ukraine conflict, with its remote but not unfathomable risk of going nuclear, has not exercised the modern left. The pandemic racket, too, is on the wane; those who cling to their masks appear as out of touch as old lefties who still listen to Pete Seeger.

Perhaps those of us with the good fortune to have missed The Day After when it first aired have a certain advantage over those old enough to have allowed themselves to become filled with fear. Maybe we will be better equipped than most to ascertain that the next panic, no matter what form it takes, is likely not as bad or as civilization-threatening as we will be told. 

Seen today, The Day After reveals itself not to be a cry for humanity, a plea for peace, or—goodness knows—a history-altering work of art, but a piece of hysteria. It’s like Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds radio broadcast, but without Welles’s artistry or inventiveness. The modern world may always be on the brink, but “keep calm and carry on” is a surer mantra than “duck and cover.”