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I recently read a fantastic book on Cold War brinksmanship. It was, "The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War" by Fred Kaplan, publ
by adameasterling 4y ago
I recently read a fantastic book on Cold War brinksmanship. It was, "The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War" by Fred Kaplan, published in 2020.
It's a fantastic book. I couldn't put it down. (Okay, technically, I listened to it. The audio is very good!)
Kaplan agrees that Able Archer is probably the closest we ever got to nuclear war. But, something else interesting happened at this very same time, in Autumn of '83. A made-for-TV movie was released called, "The Day After."
Kaplan argues, based on Reagan's own diaries, that it was this movie that was largely responsible for Reagan's sudden about-face in '84 and beyond. Here's what Reagan wrote the first time he watched it:
> (Monday, October 10, 1983) Columbus day. In the morning at Camp D. I ran the tape of the movie ABC is running on the air Nov. 20. It’s called “The Day After.” It has Lawrence Kansas wiped out in a nuclear war with Russia. It is powerfully done—all $7 mil. worth. It’s very effective & left me greatly depressed. So far they haven’t sold any of the 25 spot ads scheduled & I can see why. Whether it will be of help to the “anti nukes” or not, I cant say. My own reaction was one of our having to do all we can to have a deterrent & to see there is never a nuclear war. Back to W.H."
Almost immediately, Reagan cooled his bellicose rhetoric. In the next few years, he started a friendship with Gorbachev, the new Soviet premier. Together, they finally ended the arms race. We got 30+ years of not needing to worry about nuclear war, all because of a story (maybe). Stories are powerful.
- dotsam 4y agoThe film The Day After is worth watching, and it's on youtube: https://youtube.com/watch/?v=Iyy9n8r16hs https://youtube.com/watch/?v=Iyy9n8r16hs Threads (1984), the UK counterpart, is memorable, very bleak, and also worth watching: https://archive.org/details/threads_202007 https://archive.org/details/threads_202007
- UncleSlacky 4y agoThere's also "The War Game", which was deemed too shocking to broadcast for 20 years: https://archive.org/details/AV_179-THE_WAR_GAME-_THE_REALITY_OF_NUCLEAR_WAR https://archive.org/details/AV_179-THE_WAR_GAME-_THE_REALITY...
- jon-wood 4y agoThreads is a film that haunts me to this day, despite only having seen it once, in about 1998. For reasons I don’t fully understand our science teacher in secondary school was talked into showing it as an end of term film to show a class of 15/16 year olds. She refused to watch it with us, for reasons that will be pretty obvious to anyone who’s seen it. There’s a very short list of films that I think are both absolute masterpieces and something I will never watch again, and Threads sits squarely at the top of that list.
- pavlov 4y agoReagan’s diary entry shows how familiar he was with the film and TV industry. He knows what a $7M production looks like, and he’s paying close attention to the TV network’s ad sales. Another example of how important it is to choose the right medium for the audience. The same story conveyed as a novel wouldn’t have captured his immediate professional interest like the TV movie did.
- omnibrain 4y agoYes, that sentence immidiately brought me to respect Reagan a bit. I'm not from the US and born in the mid 80s, so I don't know a lot about Reagan, except that he was some sort of "proto Trump", dreaming of "Star Wars" with SDI. He may still have been a bad president, but seeing this professional interest and the conclusions reached he made him relatable for me.