O Dia Seguinte

"The Day After" is a film of historical value. It shows a good slice of life in middle America during the Cold War. And, of course, its message about war and disaster in the nuclear age is clear. The visuals are excellent. The acting, cinematography, makeup, direction and all technical aspects of the film are very good.

It was just six years after this movie came out that the Berlin Wall came down at the start of the collapse of the Soviet Union. By 1983, when this film was made, the Soviets had greatly built up their military armament under Leonid Brezhnev. But even his reign at the head of the USSR (1964-1982) was after the worst scares and threats of nuclear war. The most dangerous time of the Cold War was from its start at the end of WWII – under Josef Stalin, through Nikita Kruschev in October, 1964. Kruschev sent Russian tanks to put down the Hungarian Revolution in November 1956. He was at the helm of the USSR during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, 1962. And it was during his rule that the Berlin Wall went up, beginning on Aug. 13, 1961.

The placing of this movie in the U.S. heartland was significant. It was here that the U.S. had two major defense systems that it hoped would be the greatest deterrents to nuclear war. The first was the Strategic Air Command (SAC) headquartered at Offutt Air Force Base south of Omaha. As the movie noted, that was about 190 miles north of Kansas City. SAC was established in 1946 and was deactivated in 1992, after the fall of the Soviet Union. SAC had several bases around the U.S. with long-range bombers equipped to deliver nuclear bombs to the USSR.

And, from 1961 until its end, SAC operated an Airborne Command Post out of Offutt. For the next 30 years, an airborne command center would be aloft over the central U.S. at all times. The first aircraft fitted and used for such duty was the EC-135. By the 1970s, the Air Force acquired B-747s for this task. The airborne command rotated so that the active command aircraft would never be caught on the ground or in the air near any U.S. site that might be a target for Soviet missiles.

The second defense system was the installation of some 1,000 Minuteman missiles. These were housed in underground silos across several states – from Montana to Missouri. "The Day After" shows this aspect very well. The Minuteman Missile program began in 1961 and has had three upgrades of replacement missiles. Many of the original sites were abandoned and turned back to landowners after strategic arms reductions. But a decade into the 21st century, the remaining U.S. missile defense force included some 450 third generation Minuteman missiles.

Besides these aspects, this film is also of interest to me for personal experiences. After attending college one year, I worked on a survey crew in the summer of 1961 to lay the cable for missile silos in southeast Nebraska. These were Atlas missile sites to protect one of the SAC bases – at Lincoln. That base, since closed, then had 120 long-range bombers. Then, by early 1962, I was a paratrooper stationed in West Germany. The U.S. and NATO were replenishing their military forces that had been allowed to decline after WWII occupation ended in 1957. The rebuilding was triggered when East Germany began putting up the Berlin Wall in 1961. At the same time, the Soviets were increasing their forces along the Czech border. In this movie, that's where the Russians invaded West Germany through the Fulda Gap. In my first months in Germany, we took part in combined military maneuvers and war games along that border. Our units had border guard duty and we laid land mines. We also had the then-secret Davy Crockett tactical nuclear weapons. The movie script has an account of three nuclear devices exploding over Russian troops that had invaded West Germany.

It may be hard for people born in the last few decades to grasp the time and circumstances of the Cold War. But, besides our experiences growing up under the very real threat of nuclear war in the 1950s and 1960s, many of us have met people who lived under Soviet oppression. Should we not trust their words and take their warnings to heart about such tyrannies?

While serving in Germany, I met another paratrooper who was from Hungary. He had been a student in Budapest during the Hungarian Revolution in the fall of 1956. He had tossed Molotov cocktails at Russian tanks, and later escaped to the West where he joined the U.S. Army. He became a friend and later flew to the U.S. to take his citizenship test, and be sworn in as an American. Calmer, wiser leaders have been the rule among the world's military powers the past few decades. But now we have smaller countries with nuclear capabilities. Pray that reason will continue to outweigh radical ideology so that we never have a nuclear disaster like that in "The Day After."

I first saw the film as a high school student attending a Department of Defense school in Germany in the early 1980's. The film was shown in school and it scared the bejeeezus out of me and many of my fellow students. We were dealing with Red Army Faction terrorism, car bombs, bomb threats at school and only a few hundred miles from the border to East Germany. The concepts were quite accurate: if the eastern bloc came over the border, then the ONLY NATO response could be to fight a delayed retreat, blowing up roads and bridges as the US and Nato forces were pushed back and most of Germany would have fallen to the Eastern Bloc before any offensive action could have been taken. The scenario leading to the nuclear attacks are quite real and plausible.

The critics say the film was not graphic enough (they prefer things like Threads) or too graphic (prefering more subtile films like Testament ). There is no need to be totally graphic and accurate in portraying the events. Yes, we know it would be worse. But the goal is not to gross everyone out. We want younger audiences to see the film too - and that would never happen with something like theads. Likewise, a mored emotional but action lacking film would not draw in the audiences. The purpose was to 'get the point accross' and I think it did that very successfully - bad acting, flubbed lines, stock footage and all. It showed enough of the circumstances surrounding the events for those who had some education in things could recognize issues and say,"Yes thats right" while not being overly graphic so that only adults could see it.

If you want to see an action movie about nuclear war or you want to see a touchy-feely emotional treatment of the losses due to war - this film is not for you. The purpose of this film is to show what nuclear war may be like (in a very superficial way) and to remind everyone that it must NEVER happen again. Back in the early 1980's with the Soviets under a rotating leadership of old hardliners and the US with Ronny talking smack - the threat was very real and the reality check this film delivers was needed. It doesn't play as well in the year 2002 - but you must remember when a film was made when you see it.

This movie can never be outdated. One of the two scariest non-horror movies I have seen (deliverance is the other), this movie portrays a realistic (if to a lesser degree) of what could happen if there ever were a nuclear attack. Gosh, did it ever scare me! It made me think, too. I still rank is as an excellent film, even though it has been so long since I saw it.

*** out of ****

I was a naval aviator deployed aboard the USS Ranger (CV-61) when I first saw this film. The show had aired back in the States some time before the film reels (this was before video tape decks were commonplace) were flown out to our Battle Group, so we knew that the telecast had had a big impact on the American public before we had the chance to view it.

That didn't matter. The film had as great, and possibly even more of, an impact on those of us out on the "tip of the spear" as it did on those back home. The military characters seen in the film were not actors -- they were contemporaries of ours, some even familiar faces -- so we felt a true connection to the story. The tension between the US and the Soviet Union was real and nobody knew better than we how nasty things could get in a short period of time. Even as we watched the film over the ship's closed circuit television system, Soviet military units were intent on locating and targeting our Battle Group. Our job, our daily routine, was part of the story, which emphasised the point that we were responsible for keeping the peace and to not allow events to escalate as we all feared could happen.

The reaction I remember most from this film was worry for family back home. -SPOILER- The one airman who left the silo area to reach his family before the missiles arrived displayed a sentiment that we all felt. No one aboard our ship would shirk his duty, but we all understood the sentiment that once duty is done, family is foremost in mind.

The argument could be made that the film was rife with error, but I maintain that it ultimately succeeded in what it was designed to do...make people seriously consider the consequences of nuclear war. That point was not lost on those of us aboard the Ranger at the time. While I watched the film again just recently (21 years after the first viewing), the lesson was still not lost. We may or may not be vulnerable to such a massive strike as what was feared back in the 1980s, but nuclear terror is still a very real possibility. It is as imperative now, as it was then, that we ensure that this type of calamity is never visited upon anyone, especially those about whom we love and care.

Yes, better special effects would make from some jaw-dropping images, but would that improve upon the film's message? In my opinion, no.

Scrolling through the comments, I was impressed with the number of people from the USA, who said that this movie really scared them, when they first saw it. In fact it is not surprising. Well, I am Russian, yet it scared me too.

But first, a little preface. I was in the second grade (appr. 1982), when I first heard about the nuclear war. We had a number of lectures on it - of course the information was adapted so that 8-9 year old kids could understand it. We were impressed, but childhood has a wonderful gift that lets you quickly forget what was bad. So during the only false alarm that was held in our school the whole lot of students and tutors were brought out into the schoolyard, and we all stood in lines and through snowballs at each other imitating air bombing, and there was a feeling of excitement everywhere. The fact is, that many of us treated the threat as something so-far-away-that-it's-not-worth-worrying-about.

The movie was shown on out TV once only (with all the necessary precautions like "don't let nervous people see it"). Well, to say that I was terrified is to say nothing. For what it did, was that it made the threat so ordinary - and so real. Though for me it happened on the other side of the planet, you could easily imagine that the same thing would happen in my own country - and no fools - it would be absolutely THE SAME.

For some period thereafter I became slightly phobic ("Ma, what's that roar over our house, it's too low for a plane heading to the nearest airport"). But now I regard it as a good experience, because it made me think. I got a clear understanding that this COULD happen. I guess there was quite a big number of people in our country with the same understanding, and together with the threatened people from other countries they prevented the whole thing from happening right then. Hope the plain old common sense will help prevent the nuclear apocalypse in future.

P.S. Recently I saw the movie one more time, and it stirred the same emotions, as it did in my childhood. A great movie, that's all I can say...