1983. The Cold War rages on. INF talks, seeking to reduce deployment of longer range missiles, fail. START negotiations, another attempt at de-escalation, also fall apart. And, on November 20, Nicholas Meyer’s straight-to-television film “The Day After” premieres to an audience of 100 million on ABC. It is the most-watched TV movie in history.
Set primarily in Lawrence, Kansas, “The Day After” starts unremarkably. One family prepares for a wedding. Soldiers discuss weekend plans. A doctor must deal with his daughter’s decision to move to Boston. But in the background, tensions rise. The United States and NATO are at odds with Germany and the Soviet Union. The threat of nuclear war escalates, and midway through the movie, bombs are dropped on both sides. The film descends into panic, and the surviving characters must now reconcile with an obliterated version of the world they once knew, unrecognizable in the nuclear fallout. It ends with text that reads:
“The catastrophic events you have just witnessed are, in all likelihood, less severe than the destruction that would actually occur in the event of a full nuclear strike against the United States. It is hoped that the images of this film will inspire the nations of this earth, their peoples and leaders, to find the means to avert the fateful day.”
It was a movie that hit people hard. And it was a movie with a history.
In the scope of the Cold War, the early 1980s marked a departure from relative peace and a return to an overtly strained relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. As Erik Scott, John P. Black Professor of History at the University of Kansas, and KU’s director of the Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies, explained, it was a time that set the stage for an incendiary piece of media like “The Day After.” Some historians, he added, even call it the “New Cold War.”
“For people living at the time, it felt like a throwback to the early days of the Cold War, with heightened tensions of the 1950s and early 1960s. There was resumption of bomb drills, heightened tensions and a sense of confrontation,” Scott said.
The Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Scott describes how the Reagan administration acted aggressively against the Soviet Union, particularly in the Arms Race, proxy conflicts and the Able Archer exercises. Especially after a period of detente in the 1970s, Scott explained, people witnessed these heightened tensions, and opposed them.
“There was a really important thread of citizen diplomacy that had resumed and was quite popular in the Midwest,” Scott said, enumerating letter-writing campaigns and other moments outlined in his online academic resource titled “Cold War in the Heartland.”
The Midwest on its own had a strong and unique relationship to the Soviet Union; in 1959, Nikita Khrushchev visited rural Iowa in search of learning about American farming methods, and Soviet Newspapers “wrote glowingly of Iowa’s hospitality for their leader,” as Scott’s resource describes.
As time went on, distinct agricultural, athletic and cultural ties between the Midwest and the Soviet Union led to pushes for change in the administration’s approach to foreign policy objectives.
“There’s a sense that maybe our political leaders are losing sight of the impact that a conflict could have on everyday people,” Scott added. “[‘The Day After’] is filmed in Lawrence, Kansas … [and is] really meant to show an American audience how this conflict is not something that just concerns people in Washington or people in Moscow, but really could completely wipe out small-town America.”
“The Day After,” as Scott says, was a film that used the attitude of the time and the Midwestern setting to spur a reaction.
“I was the third or fourth director to be offered this job,” Nicholas Meyer, the director of “The Day After,” said. “One of the worst problems we face about nuclear war is that nobody wants to think about it. [I was] lying on my psychoanalyst’s couch … trying to talk myself out of doing this movie. I had all kinds of rationalizations for adding myself to the list of directors who turned this project down. And my shrink opened his mouth and said, ‘Well, I think this is where we found out who you really are.’ That was checkmate for me.”
The fact that it was a television movie also gave it an immediate and broad reach, though the format came with its drawbacks. Meyer says that ABC’s original plan was for the film to be split in two and shown over multiple nights, with extensive advertising adding up to an hour total of watch time.
“I read the script and it was two nights, and my comment was, ‘This script feels a little padded. I don’t think people are going to tune into night two of Armageddon,’” Meyer said.
According to Meyer, the producers only agreed to cutting the film down to one night because all the advertisers had been scared off by the subject matter. And a one-night movie it was — a singular, unprecedentedly large event that would leave a lasting impression.
“The Cold War was a mass media event,” Scott said. “It coincided with the proliferation and development of mass media systems. [‘The Day After’] is targeted at American exceptionalism, and while also celebrating the uniqueness of small-town America, [it shows that], yes, this war will also wipe us off the map.”
Indeed, “The Day After” spurred a reckoning with its viewers nationwide. The public reaction to the movie was immediate, fearful and strong. In a 1983 New York Times review, columnist Robert D. McFadden described how “at the South Presbyterian Church in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. … some sobbed quietly afterward.” He went on to say how in Lawrence, Kansas, “100 people gathered … for a town meeting organized by a disarmament group. Meanwhile, a dozen people held a counter-demonstration.”
In 1987, researchers at Thomas Jefferson University published a scientific study which investigated the long and short-term effects of the film on the public’s mood. Though the study found no evidence of long-term harm, and the film may not have instigated a sharp pivot in how the public on an individual level wanted to face the oncoming threat of nuclear war, “The Day After” spurred action on all ideological sides.
The film’s influence even reached the federal government. On November 3, 1983, after an early viewing of “The Day After,” director of the White House Office of Policy Information Kevin R. Hopkins wrote a memorandum to the Counselor of the President, Edwin Meese, describing the film as “well done and powerful,” and stating his opinion that, following the film, “an appropriate posture on our part is imperative … to take advantage of the film to promote our country’s national security interests.” He even wrote a sample set of remarks that he suggested President Reagan release for viewers to watch before seeing the film.
Reagan, after watching the film on October 10, wrote in his diary that the film was “very effective & left me greatly depressed.” Just two months later, during his State of the Union speech, he said in an address directly to the Soviet Union, “There is only one sane policy … a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” a stark and new shift towards overt commitment to prevention.
The film found its influence through the powerful presentation of the Midwestern experience as an example of how “regular” people will be affected by nuclear war.
“When I told my father I wanted to go to the University of Iowa, that urbane gentleman, a New York cosmopolitanite to the tips of his toes, said to me, ‘My boy, do you know what there is between New York and California? Nothing but a big hole in the ground with corn growing around the fringes,’” Meyer recalled. “For a lot of people, the coastal elites, this was flyover country. But it isn’t.”
The beauty and influence of “The Day After” lay in its depiction of the regular, and regular people’s reaction to tragedy.
“[‘The Day After’] wasn’t about politics, it wasn’t about Washington, it wasn’t about the military,” Meyer said. He reiterates that it is the regular people of Lawrence, Kansas, who helped make the film at every turn, and who bring value to it. “The Day After” is dedicated to those people, as its title card reads: “We are grateful to the people of Lawrence, Kansas for their participation and help in the making of this film.”
Current Lawrence residents remember this movie, too.
“In 2025, if you ask people about it, they're very excited to tell you about it. The impact the movie had afterward led to lots of efforts to drive citizen-to-citizen initiatives, from Lawrence bringing athletes from the Soviet Union here, to school exchanges. It's something people know about,” Scott said.
Even today, the University of Kansas is a mecca for the study of the Cold War, and of U.S-Soviet relations in general.
“One of the reasons why I'm here at Kansas [University] is there's a tradition of investing in the study of Russia and the Soviet Union. The same is true at Michigan, at Indiana University, [going] back to the Cold War. There’s so much here, and I really wanted to really look into how people relate to that past, whether they even think about it, and how so much of this is hidden in plain sight,” Scott said.
The success of “The Day After” came in a perfect storm of social upheaval and media attention that, in the face of frightening modern events, still feels relevant today. Meyer thinks of the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires.
“This was all very deja vu. I think most people, and this was also true of LA until five days ago, hope that it won’t happen. But hope is not a strategy. Luck is not a strategy,” he said.
But, as media changes, will it be possible for a film to get the same level of national attention and response as “The Day After”?
“There were three networks. That was it. NBC, CBS and ABC. And the only reason that [I have] the most watched television movie ever made is because there’s too many channels now. Attention spans are shorter and channels are more. The answer is likely no,” Meyer answered.
Scott, meanwhile, thinks that remembering the importance of “The Day After,” and the Midwest as a whole, could help counteract trends of detachment within the United States.
“There's a real need to look beyond cities that like to think of themselves as more global, and understand what's happening in the Midwest. It's in the Upper Midwest that recent presidential elections have been decided. … If you go to Kansas or Nebraska, you're going to find a long history of international engagement, going back to the Cold War and even before it. We have to move beyond really simplistic or reductionist categories of coast versus Midwest,” Scott said.
“The Day After” served a valuable purpose in taking people to the Midwest, reminding them of a shared, cross-regional, national experience of preventing nuclear war, and spurring reactions remembered even today. Whether a piece of media can ever gain the same level of influence and responsiveness as “The Day After” is unclear, but nevertheless, the film has left an indelible impression on millions of Americans, including Meyer and Scott.
“It's through these things that I think the Cold War really entered into everyday life,” Scott said. “The Cold War was something people saw on TV, [that] entered into their imagination, because of this world of images.”
“Part of who I am,” Meyer said, “is the part that spent four years in Iowa City and however many months in Lawrence, Kansas."
