Alan Zendell, June 1, 2025

An article in today’s New York Times, grabbed my attention, as I expect it grabbed the attention of everyone who read it who is old enough to remember 1983. Alissa Wilkinson’s column, When the Whole Country Watched a Nuclear War Movie at Once, brought back the horror more than 100 million of us experienced watching an ABC movie that terrified the entire country.

The film, The Day After, and all the controversy it caused, not the least of which was over whether it should ever have been shown on television, are the subject of a new, soon to be released, documentary, Television Event. In horrifyingly realistic detail, it depicted the aftermath of a nuclear attack on Kansas City, from the point of view of the University of Kansas trauma center in Lawrence, thirty miles to the west.

Back then, horror films were defined by zombies, vampires, and crazed killers with chainsaws, but none of them came remotely close to the terror-inducing trauma of watching babies die of radiation poisoning. Wilkinson wrote that research for the upcoming documentary found that after watching The Day After, seventy percent of adult Americans believed there would be a nuclear war in the next ten years.

In 1983, I lived in the Seattle suburb of Bellevue. I was there because I thought it was a safe place to raise my family in the years after Vietnam and Watergate, but Puget Sound was suddenly elevated to nuclear target number one in the United States, when the Defense Department chose to build the base for Trident nuclear attack submarines across the Sound from Seattle. Months of protests, including people lying on railroad tracks to impede construction of the base, led to an event called “Target Seattle,” which is credited with spurring the Nuclear Freeze Movement and the Strategic Arms Limitation talks.

On October 2, 1982, 14,000 people, including me and my 14 and 12-year-old sons gathered in the Kingdome for an afternoon of anti-nuclear films, songs, and speeches. The place we’d always associated with the Mariners and Seahawks was very different that day. I’ve regretted taking my kids there ever since, though they reassure me it didn’t traumatize them. I’m not sure I believe them, though, because researchers concluded, subsequently, that a whole generation of young people lived with the expectation their parents had: they’d likely be dead before they reached adulthood. How that affected them growing up I can’t say, but I heard things like, “Why do we have to go to school when we’re going to be nuked anyway,” more times than I can count.

Being reminded of all that affected me because of what it implies about today. I frankly marvel that we’ve avoided mutual nuclear destruction for eighty years. The idea of nuclear war triggers our normal reaction to terrifying situations – denying and tucking them away where we don’t have to look at them. But the war in Ukraine and the conflict in Gaza with Iran looking on gave those fears life again. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukraine was the depository of a large fraction of its nuclear weapons. Russia wanted them back, and Ukraine agreed to give them up in exchange for a guarantee of sovereignty and independence from Moscow. In the thirty-plus years since then, however, military analysts acknowledged that many of those weapons are unaccounted for. Where are they and who has them? I’m not sure I really want to know.

Both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have used the N word as a vague threat in the war in Ukraine. That’s of great concern, as is Iran’s nuclear program. It’s difficult to know what’s really happening because of the Trump administration’s questionable relationship with truth. Trump claims he is close to a deal with Iran, but he also brags that he’s close to trade deals, without evidence of anything significant in the works. The Times also reported today that Iran has accelerated the pace of its uranium enrichment program whose only goal is the production of nuclear warheads.

The international chaos caused by Trump’s tariff war, his apparent disdain for our former allies and NATO, and the way Putin and Xi Jinping have mocked his tough-guy stance should give everyone pause. Chaos is the worst possible background for international diplomacy, and with someone like Trump involved, and the questionable nature of unqualified, extremist Cabinet officers like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, we hear people making irresponsible threats and shooting from the hip without supporting evidence every day.

We’ll probably muddle through this, but adding the idea of using nuclear weapons to the madness Trump has caused is chilling. That’s the main reason there is so much controversy over Television Event. After what I recall from 1983, I’d ask the same question people asked back then? Is reminding the country of the horror nuclear war would bring a good thing or a serious mistake?