Early 80's movie The Day After

I thought it was romantic when the two teens kiss, only to remove each other’s hair.

I loved Reagan but he was getting too hawkish. You still had the paranoid leaders in the Kremlin like Andropov and Chernenko who remembered being attacked twice in 40 years resulting in Russia losing millions of people. Even Reagan said this movie sadly depressed him and lead him to back down.

i remember how serious the tv people were about it, suggesting that parents have serious talks with their kids as to whether or not they should see it. it was great marketing, and my parents played right into it, first saying we couldn't watch it and then deciding at the last minute that it would be best if we watched it. i'm sure that's exactly what the network wanted.

All i really remember is a bunch of people getting fried and jason Robards walking around with his hair falling out.

Another good nuke movie is "By Dawn's Early Light" which was made for HBO in 1990. It shows how leaders can quickly escalate due to misunderstandings.

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I loved Reagan but he was getting too hawkish. You still had the paranoid leaders in the Kremlin like Andropov and Chernenko who remembered being attacked twice in 40 years resulting in Russia losing millions of people. Even Reagan said this movie sadly depressed him and lead him to back down.

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Actually the timeline doesn’t fit your theory.

Reagan took office in 1981 the same year that this movie was commissioned. Reagan was trying to revitalize NATO in the face of Soviet expansion and aggression in Asia, Africa, South America, Central America, and the Caribbean. Europe and parts of America were demoralized and the “Peace Movement” was pushing the West in general and NATO in particular to denuclearize first as a demonstration to the communist of our good intentions. They predicted that the paranoid Russians who “had been attacked twice in forty years”, as you put it were just peaceful people who would then follow suit.

Several problems. Russia was NOT attacked in WWI. It was the first Great Nation to mobilize against another Great Nation, Austria-Hungary, and Russia first invaded Germany and Austria-Hungary! Also, Russia was not sitting peacefully by at the start of WWII. It had fought the Japanese over control of Mongolia in the late 30s. It had made an agreement to mutually invade Poland with Hitler. It had conquered the Baltic’s, and carved up Finland. Stalin was very keen on invading Germany, but the Finnish War had revealed how crappy the Red Army was after his butcheries of the officer corps. Yes they were and are paranoid about being a backwards nation compared to Western and Central Europe. But they are not and never were peaceful.

This was a leftist propaganda film, that had the nuclear war started in Europe with a NATO-Warsaw Pact war.

Reagan was not “hawkish” at all. He wanted a strong and reinvigorated Europe to prevent Soviet expansion. He wanted to stop and reverse Soviet and Cuban expansionists in Africa and America. He did not trust Communist and called them the Evil Empire, but he was prepared to negotiate verifiable peace initiatives. Remember, “Hawkish Reagan” offered to eliminate ALL nuclear weapons with the USSR, but the “Peacenik Gorbachev” refused!

I would suggest a movie called "Threads." It is a BBC television movie. It not only addresses the immediate impact of nuclear war, but also covers the next twenty years. It gives one something to think about. Available on DVD from Netflix.