Studio 360

You commented during the hour, I think at this point, that the cold war was over. NOT so. I lived through the 50 and see it repeating itself. First in the fear and distrust encouraged by the government. Also the subtle changes from nature/the world is good to nature/the world is menacing. Now the quiet build up of arms on the NATO side is being met by a build up on the Russian side.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081105/ap_on_re_eu/eu_russia_medvedev

Like Derek John, I grew up in the 1980s when the threat of nuclear war was a terrifying prospect. While we didn't watch "The Day After," our 8th grade social studies unit on the nuclear age ran the gamut from Hiroshima to Three Mile Island to what to do in the case of nuclear warfare. The terror of that history, combined with constant threats on the news about diplomatic failures and Soviet missiles being pointed at the US, has never ceased to affect me. To this day, the language of my nightmares tends to be mushroom bombs and radiation poisoning. It amazes me that the current youth generation has no concept of the devastating power of nuclear warfare, the dangers of nuclear energy, nor the long-term consequences with which its use continues to burden us. Thanks for doing this piece - it's right for us to STILL be unsettled by this subject.

While The Day After was a fairly entertaining film, it was the UK version, Threads, that scared the bejeesus out of me. Also, the many mock films like Special Report did a job on me.

I also grew up in the 80s with the rest of Gen X fear of the bomb being dropped any moment. In the last couple of years it has been almost a let down to realize that everything I and my peers were being readied for didn't come to pass... I did see The Day After when I was in my 20a (after having seen stacks and stock of the more shlocky after the bomb films)... but another serious look at the prospect of a after the bomb US was the film Testament, which shows what happens to a family after the exchange.

According to one of his biographers, "The Day After" also made an impact on President Reagan, who tended to take television seriously. Jules Tygiel claims that RR came to tone down his nuclear saber-rattling after this, and became marginally more predisposed to lowering the nuclear threat.