November 20, 1983: "The Day After" Airs On ABC

November 20, 1983, 40 years ago: The Day After airs on ABC. With over 100 million people watching, a 46 rating and a 62 share, it remains the most-watched made-for-television movie in American history.

It aired when the Cold War was at one of its chilliest points:

* One year earlier, on November 10, 1982, Leonid Brezhnev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, died. He was succeeded by Yuri Andropov, who had already been secretly running the country, and by extension its alliance of nations known as the Warsaw Pact, since 1975, when Brezhnev suffered a stroke. But now, he was dying, too, from kidney failure.

* Eight months earlier, on March 8, 1983, Ronald Reagan, President of the United States, declared in a speech before evangelical ministers -- at Walt Disney World, outside Orlando, Florida -- that the Soviet Union was "an evil empire." That got the Soviets' attention.

* Eleven weeks earlier, on September 1, 1983, the Soviet Air Force shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 over Sakhalin Island, which was disputed between the Soviet Union and Japan. They claimed they had mistaken it for a spy plane.

* Eight weeks earlier, on September 26, 1983, a Soviet early-warning system near Moscow reported the launch of 5 American missiles. The Soviets were ready to retaliate, but were talked down by Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, who convinced them that, if the Americans were going to attack, there would be a lot more than five missiles, so this was probably a false alarm. The false alarm was confirmed by ground radar, and, when the documents concerning this incident were declassified, Petrov became known as "The Man Who Saved the World."

* Two weeks earlier, on November 7, 1983, the armed forces of the nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization carried out a series of joint wargames called Able Archer 83. NATO conducted these wargames before, and the Soviets knew about them. This time, they did a few different things, and the Soviets found out about this, and got spooked. They went on high alert. When the wargames ended on November 11 -- the anniversary of the Armistice ending World War I -- and nothing had happened, the Warsaw Pact stood down.

All this time, there was the occasional mass demonstration, in America or in Europe, against nuclear proliferation. This was not helped by the events of early 1979, when the premiere of the film The China Syndrome, about a nuclear power plant melting down, was almost immediately followed by a real-life close call at the Three Mile Island plant outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

So ABC wanted to make a movie about the effects of not a nuclear accident, but a nuclear war. Plenty of films, including TV-movies, had been made about the potential for such a war, including WarGames, premiering on June 3, 1983. But ABC executives wanted to show the effects on average Americans.

For this reason, director Nicholas Meyer insisted that most of the cast be as yet unknown, although some became stars: John Lithgow, Steve Guttenberg, JoBeth Williams, Amy Madigan, John Cullum, Stephen Furst, Wayne Knight.

ABC insisted on at least one star that would be recognizable when they released the film to European theaters the next year. Meyer ran into Jason Robards on a flight, and cast him as the one star. Meyer also cast Bibi Besch, whom he'd cast as Dr. Carol Marcus in his most famous film, a year earlier: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

The location was as close to literally being Middle America as you can get: Lawrence, home of the University of Kansas, and the nearby city of Kansas City, Missouri.

A summary of the plot. The Warsaw Pact blockades West Berlin. Both sides mass troops on the border between East Germany and West Germany. The East invades, and the West uses tactical nuclear weapons to stop them. Each side attacks the other's targets in the Persian Gulf. Multiple messages are sent over the Emergency Broadcast System. Scared civilians begin hoarding key supermarket items and evacuating major cities.

The missiles are launched. The film doesn't say which side fired theirs first, the U.S. or the U.S.S.R. Detonations cause heat and shock waves that vaporize everything nearby, and also electromagnetic pulses that disable vehicles and destroy the electrical grid. The promos that ABC did for the film conclude at this point, with mushroom clouds swelling, and a male voice, that of Lithgow, over a communications system asking, "Lawrence, Kansas, is there anybody there? Anybody at all?"

With food and water in short supply, martial law is declared. It doesn't seem to matter, as those who are not too sick to do anything due to radiation poisoning get shot as they look for food. As President John F. Kennedy had warned 20 years earlier, "The living would envy the dead."

To this film, the natural response of America's conservative media was that ABC and Meyer were traitors. But Reagan, himself a former actor, had been allowed to screen the film at the White House before its airing. In his diary, he wrote that it was "very effective and left me greatly depressed." At the end of the calendar year, Time magazine designated its Man of the Year in a split distinction to Reagan and Andropov.

Andropov died on February 9, 1984, and his successor, Konstantin Chernenko, on March 10, 1985. His successor was the much younger, much healthier Mikhail Gorbachev, and he and Reagan began meeting to reduce the possibility of a nuclear World War III.

In 1987, The Day After was shown on Soviet television for the first time. A few weeks later, Reagan and Gorbachev signed the INF Treaty, the 1st-ever agreement to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in both countries. The Warsaw Pact collapsed in 1989, and the Soviet Union itself in 1991.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 made it clear that it was now far more likely for a nuclear attack to be a "tactical" one, a "briefcase bomb" left by a terrorist. While Vladimir Putin, the current President of the Russian Federation, is evil, ambitious, and driven by religion (in his case, Russian Orthodox Catholic), he is not suicidal. He doesn't want a war with America, because he knows that, even if America loses, he cannot "win."