The Doomsday Scenario:

a book review

Televising the End of the World

"Tomorrow night, I’m going to curl up with my teddy bear and watch the end of the world."

Liz Cheshire, a University of Kansas student in 1983 anticipating the TV movie The Day After

Probably the image most remembered from the 1983 nuclear disaster movie The Day After is when the flash from the explosion turns people into skeletons. The film is full of such ghastly, vivid, and even Gothic scenes; a young man chases a woman having a nervous breakdown through hazy bright light and a field of dead horses whitened by the dust of nuclear fallout; a discussion about the survival skills of a cockroach discovered in an operating room is juxtaposed with the prolonged scream of a woman rising up in a hospital bed; people collapse from radiation sickness as a minister attempts to conduct services amidst the outdoor smoke and rubble.

The ultimate effect of these images was more horror film or Irwin Allen disaster movie sensational than the ominous but inspiring warning the producers claimed to have in mind. ABC had been telling viewers for months in advance that by producing The Day After they were engaged in a project intended to instruct, edify, and redeem. Somehow, they believed, by presenting a realistic spectacle of the end of the world and giving viewers some of the most violent and depressing imagery in TV history, they could convince us to save ourselves.

The network was determined that as many people see the film as possible. "It is our hope", said Brandon Stodard, president of ABC motion pictures at the time, "that The Day After will inspire the nations of this earth, their people and their leaders, to find means to avoid this fateful day". Nicholas Meyer, the film’s director stated why he thought television the preferable medium to feature film. "I did not want to preach to the converted. I wanted it to reach the guys who’s waiting for "The Flying Nun" to come on."

Fortunately for ABC, the public and the media did take the film very seriously. Experts, psychologists, and politicians expressed opinions on The Day After before it aired and this translated into an abundance of free publicity not only for the movie, but also for the network. The Day After was the first television film to vividly depict the effects of nuclear war on the environment and health of the general population, and probably the most well publicized TV Movie event in history. And now, nearly twenty years later, we are once again being forced to confront similar kinds of apocalyptic scenarios.

Almost as disturbing as the September 11th attack on the World Trade Centers was the variety of horrible outcomes that were speculated upon in its wake. Much worse than the specific terror of these competing scenarios is the terror of not knowing if and or when. Will it be my mail that is tainted with anthrax tomorrow? Are the terrorists plotting to contaminate our local reservoir in the near future? All we know is that there is a very determined and tireless enemy carefully considering the logistics of various plans that have as their goal optimal U.S. fatalities. And just as with the threat of nuclear bombs, we believe that we can protect ourselves with proactive diligence, whether it’s duck and cover or questionable bomb shelters in the 1950’s, or army surplus gas masks and anthrax shots in 2001.

But if you came of age in the early 1980’s, it’s quite possible that these morbid prospects are producing feelings of nostalgia. The ever present and imminent threat of massive destruction, especially in the form of a so-called dirty bomb (a conventional bomb utilizing nuclear waste to spread radioactive contaminants) is just a new variation on an old theme. These same kinds of fears were an essential part of the cultural fabric of the early 1980’s. Due to an almost total breakdown in diplomacy between the United States and the U.S.S.R during that time, this was a high period for anxieties about nuclear war. It was a time when we were frequently told that we had the capacity to destroy the world multiple times over. And as the arms build-up between the United States and the Soviet Union intensified, that number was always growing.

1983, in particular, was a peak in cold war hysteria. Ronald Reagan was in his third year of office, and he and recently anointed Soviet Prime Minister Yuri Andropov were by now engaged in open hostility. This was the year that Ronald Reagan called the U.S.S.R, "the focus of evil in the modern world" (our current president has also become quite fond of the word "evil") and Andropov said of the United States, "they violate elementary norms of decency". This was the year that the U.S.S.R. broke off the Geneva INF (Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces) talks on limiting missiles in Europe. It was also the year when the Kremlin refused to set a date for resuming either the Geneva START talks on reducing the numbers of long-range nuclear weapons, or the decade-long Vienna bargaining on cutting conventional forces in Europe. For the first time since the late 1960’s, the two superpowers had no arms-control talks of any kind in progress and basic diplomatic relations had become dysfunctional. Soon the U.S. was placing Pershing II missiles in West Germany and small Tomohawk cruise missiles in Britain and Italy, all of them aimed directly at the Soviet Union. At the very same time, the Soviets were placing mobile rockets in Czeckoslovakia and East Germany, targeted at U.S. Western European allies.

Because 1983 was a peak in tensions between the two nuclear superpowers, it shouldn’t be surprising that it was also a peak in a kind of "nuclear realism", with both film and television attempting to graphically depict the potential threat and horrors of nuclear war. This was the year of an ABC program entitled Special Bulletin, a simulated newscast reporting on an odd assembly of homegrown terrorists (a former weapons planner for the Pentagon and some mild, made-for-TV SLA types) threatening to detonate a nuclear bomb if their demands were not met (they wanted the United States to begin dismantling a certain number of warheads as a first step towards disarmament). As implausible, cheap, and poorly executed as this particular program was, it is evidence of the edgy mood of the time that many viewers called in wanting more information about the incident. This War of the Worlds effect suggests that there were many who believed the idea of imminent nuclear holocaust was a real possibility at the time.

It was also the year of the movie Testament, a bleak but well received film portraying a small town California family’s attempt to survive the radioactive fallout from a Soviet nuclear attack. The film is absent the special effects or sensationalism of The Day After and relies on a mother’s diary entries to document the tragedy of post-apocalyptic life in a small close-knit community. Taken together, these two films evoke the edgy mood of a frightened nation.

The Day After was given a mini-series like promotion that began a month before the November 20^th presentation, and the film’s seven million dollar production cost was three times the TV movie standard of the period. But even prior to the promotional spots, controversy surrounded the film. The Reagan administration, before even having seen it, took this dramatization of nuclear disaster in Lawrence, Kansas as a challenge to their nuclear arms policies. They saw the film as an attack on the deterrence strategy of "bargaining through strength", nothing more than propaganda for nuclear freeze radicals. On the other side, the anti-nuclear forces were quite supportive of the film, and even welcomed it as a fundraising opportunity. They believed that the graphic horrors of the film were a desperately needed message that would get viewers to put more pressure on their leaders to make a genuine commitment toward nuclear disarmament. Both sides believed strongly that their nuclear arms strategy was the obviously sensible and superior one, and both sides saw the opposition as completely misguided and even sinister.

As November 20^th approached, there was a public panic amongst parents, teachers, and therapists, as a wide variety of opinions concerning children and The Day After were expressed. The National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, issued a parent advisory for the first time in its history, stating that, "parents, under no circumstances, should allow their children to watch this program alone." ABC itself consulted psychiatrists and child-development experts and reactions of sample groups of children ages 10 —16 and their parents were recorded in New Jersey and Los Angeles (no adverse side effects were reported). The network also went so far as to pass out 500,000 copies of an eight-page viewers guide to schools, libraries, churches, and community groups. And for whatever reason, there were many experts who arrived at 12 as the youngest age that a child should view the film. One psychiatrist suggested the film would best be watched in families or large groups. Even Fred Rogers got into the act when Mr. Rogers Neighborhood ran five half hour shows on the subject of children’s anxieties about nuclear war in the week prior to November 20^th. Dr. Kenneth Porter, a co-chairman of the New York chapter of Physicians for social responsibility at the time, said that if, "families sit down and talk together about the dangers depicted in this television show, we’ll be able to make it into the 21^st century."

The original cut of the film was four hours long and intended to be shown in two installments. But upon seeing this initial version, the network decided it was too intense to be divided into segments. The ABC board of directors agreed to show the film in one night, even if it meant a loss in advertising revenues. There was a lot of faith at the network in the ability of the universal theme of the film to appeal to a massive amount of viewers. They chose to air the movie during sweeps week and put it up against the first installment of a much-anticipated mini-series on JFK marking the 20^th anniversary of his assassination (strangely, The Day After honors the Kennedy anniversary in its own perverse way, by trying to shock the entire nation with graphic violent images).

Not surprisingly, ABC initially had some difficulty finding advertisers for the movie. The sponsors that did decide to take advantage of what was expected to be a very large audience (eventually estimated at 100 million viewers) included Soloflex, Slimfast, English Leather Cologne, IBM Computers, a KTEL "Dancing Madness" compilation, the Minolta talking camera, Arm & Hammer carpet deoderizer, and Orval Reddenbocker microwave popcorn. The network wisely chose not to air any advertisements at all after the bombs had fallen. It’s likely that not too many advertisers would have wanted their products associated with radiation sickness, but it’s also true that breaking up the apocalyptic second half of the film with interruptions from Orval Reddenbocker or Slimfast would have undermined ABC’s ostensibly noble purposes.

As further evidence of their sincerity and the sense of obligation ABC attached to The Day After, they chose not to work with the defense department during production. This would have given them access to army equipment and helicopters, but as is standard with these types of arrangements, the army wanted script approval in exchange for their assistance. And one of the things the army wanted made clearer in the script was just which side was to blame for this nuclear disaster. To their credit, ABC resisted this and left the responsibility for the war vague in the film. They eventually rented their own helicopters and painted them to look like army helicopters. Scenes depicting technical military operations were shot hand held and have a distinct grainy documentary look to them. Because this film was intended to scare viewers into action, realism was essential.

The make-up designer, Michael Westmore, went to great lengths to insure accuracy in the depiction of radiation victims. He closely studied footage taken by the first American Army units to enter Hiroshima after the atomic bomb had been dropped there. Ultimately though, some of the more gruesome effects such as eyeballs melted out of heads were avoided. Westmore utilized his skills to approximate the burns and sores he saw in the Hiroshima footage and the actors wore wigs from which their hair fell out (3,000 Lawrence residents posed as corpses for some of the Gone With the Wind-like scenes of massive casualties).

The first half of The Day After is spent attempting to establish a kind of normalcy to give more power to the terror that is to follow. Before the devastation, the filmmakers want to show Americans exactly what it is they have to lose. The opening credits of the film are filled with long sweeping aerials of the farms and fields of rural Kansas bathed in golden sunlight. There is also a fly-over of a sports stadium and scenes of bike riding and horseshoes, all accompanied by an Americana soundtrack with swelling strings. Moments before the rockets are launched there is a montage that includes cows, a tire swing, horses in the fields and a young couple staring up at the rocket’s trajectory with a gazebo in the foreground. The almost Social Realism is reinforced often in the first half of the film, especially in the simple and decent portrayal of a farming family. A family where a young boy eagerly helps his father out with the pigs and the cows, and answers him, "yes, sir", when given instructions.

Both Testament and The Day After contain images intended to establish a pre-occupied kind of innocence. The holocaust that then follows appears as an intrusion on this, as if the politics and escalation of the global conflict have little to do with these people and their frantic but honorable everyday lives.

There’s a scene early in The Day After where we watch a group of soldiers entering a fenced off military area adjacent to a farmhouse. As the soldiers open the gate, one of them, a black soldier played by William Young, goes out of his way to smile and wave at a white woman hanging laundry on a clothesline next door. It’s an almost agit-prop moment and indicative of both The Day After and also to some extent Testament’s desire to define pluralism as one of our most cherished American values, and thus one of the most tragic casualties in the destruction of our society by nuclear bombs (later in the film, this same black soldier helps a broken down white man to shelter). This same affirmation of our diversity was also seen following September 11^th in such events as the massive gathering at Yankee stadium where representatives from all faiths made consoling speeches.

There are no black people in the small California town that is the setting for Testament, but a Japanese-American service station owner and his mentally disabled son take on a similar role (and it’s hard not to think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki because of this). In the rush at the gas station that follows the news of nuclear war, the kindly Japanese man is forced to arm himself from lawless citizens. But he doesn’t forget his beloved regular customers and they, including the main characters, are given free gas. The Day After especially, has a number of very deliberate scenes that portray easy relationships between people of different races or ethnicities.

The Day After has plenty of Americana home movie-like moments in the build-up to the disaster that are meant to communicate what exactly is at stake (Testament employs actual Super 8 footage to simulate family home movies). There’s the father watching his boy at football practice and the soldiers looking forward to fishing trips on their leaves of absence. In both The Day After and Testament there are scenes of married couples and family members whose busy lives are filled with obligations that leave them little time for each other. In Testament, a school play of The Pied Piper delivers plenty of cute moments with precious children and their adoring parents. The play also functions as a parallel narrative with the youngest boy in the family playing the part of a rat, one of the few creatures expected to survive the after-effects of nuclear bombs (the little boy however, does not). There’s the young bride in The Day After who is about to get married and leave home, riding off on a motorcycle down a dirt road with her soon to be husband in search of romantic privacy. There’s an odd scene prior to this where her bratty baby sis antagonizes her by hiding her birth control.

Not surprisingly, the theme of reproduction is present in both The Day After and Testament. A young mother discovers her baby will not take her milk in Testament and in The Day After. In the confines of a bomb shelter, the young bride breaks down when she realizes that now she will never be able to have children. A teenage girl has a similar realization in Testament when her mother attempts to explain the miracle of romantic love to her and she says, "Not for me." There is also the devastated young father in Testament (played by none other than Kevin Costner) carrying his dead newborn. The message is that nuclear war exterminates totally — the present generation and future generations — and this makes these films extremely bleak and gives them a uniquely abject horror film quality.

Once the bombs fall in The Day After and radiation sickness begins to affect most of the characters, the film cannot help but become one tragic anti-climactic scene after another. The effect is obviously depressing, but also unintentionally blackly comical at times. A boy whose retina was burned by the flash, his eyes wrapped with bandages, is taken to a hospital by horse drawn wagon through a field with workers in protective suits cleaning up the dead. When the sightless boy asks a friend to describe the landscape for him he is told, "Oh, the usual stuff. Cows, telephone poles." A father tells his daughter after a few days in the bomb shelter, "Honey, we’re going to have to get used to things being a lot different"(Earlier, that same father tells his daughter upon hearing their dog barking outside the shelter, "There’s not going to be enough food and water for Rusty"). Perhaps the most extreme such moment is in Testament, when after losing her husband and burying two of her children, a woman decides that suicide is a reasonable option. She starts the family station wagon in the sealed off garage with her son in the front seat with her as the clueless mentally disabled Japanese boy between them (whose father has since died from radiation sickness) acts as if they are about to go for a pleasant drive. She is finally unable to go through with it, and this example of perseverance is the final message of Testament. The Day After also concludes on a hopeful note and it’s as if both films feel obligated to compensate for the hopeless images they have forced you sit through. As bad as it’s going to be, and as much as they want to terrify viewers, both films can’t conclude without an uplifting message on the fortitude of the American people.

ABC immediately followed The Day After with a panel headed by a young Ted Koppel to help viewers cope with what they had just witnessed. The panel included Henry Kissinger, Robert McNamara, William F. Buckley, and Carl Sagan. Secretary of State George Schutlz, there for immediate damage control, opened the discussion from a remote location sitting in an overstuffed chair in front of a fireplace. The image being conveyed by Schultz was that of a reassuring grandfather there to comfort and assure us that this was "not the future at all". Much of this discussion that followed reads like excerpts from a lost William Burroughs script.

Schultz: The only reason we have for keeping nuclear weapons is to see to it that they are not used.

Buckley: (angrily) The point of this movie is to launch an enterprise that seeks to debilitate the United States.

Kissinger: One nuclear weapon used does not necessarily mean nuclear disaster.

And for viewers who weren’t frightened enough by the film, Carl Sagan is there to comfort us that "the reality would be much worse."

It is clear from the studio audience response to this panel and media coverage on audience reactions in the days that followed that The Day After didn’t change a lot of minds. Films like The Day After and Testament had little impact on the general public or the direction of US Foreign policy. Nor do these pictures hold up well based on their cinematic merits. The Day After contains some worthwhile effects, evocative landscapes and intense imagery, but the acting has a TV movie stiffness that isn’t helped by an expository and often sentimental script. Like many films conceived with a political agenda, production values were sacrificed for the issues. And while Testament is a better-made film with superior writing and acting, both it and The Day After become very difficult films to watch once the bombs have fallen (the disaster occurs just twenty minutes into the nearly two hour long Testament, making it particularly challenging viewing). The Day After intends to frighten us with the horrible realities of nuclear war and consequently feels manipulative and leaves the viewer numb. Testament instead utilizes maudlin imagery to illustrate the gravity of mutually assured destruction; a little boy buries his teddy bear in a graveyard and tells his mother that he is going to go search for his missing father; the same mother is seen methodically wrapping the corpse of her daughter; the camera lingers on the limp and dying body of the young son of the same mother as she tries to bathe him. These images are made all the more overbearing by the insertion of Super 8 family movie footage to remind us of more precious and simpler times.

The redundancy of the obvious message — nuclear war brings unimaginable death and suffering — is not engaging, but instead hopeless and melodramatic. It is nearly impossible to make the slow and pointless death of every character in an apocalyptic landscape compelling. It’s not that the potential of nuclear disaster is necessarily a bad subject for a movie. It can be done well and one only needs to look at the 1959 tragic yet romantic Stanley Kramer film On the Beach to know this. Here, the filmmakers wisely chose to end the film before we would have to watch the characters suffer the consequences of radiation sickness.

Different factions still like to argue over whether it was the Reagan administration’s massive arms build-up, forcing the Kremlin to allocate more of their resources to defense than they could afford, or just the inevitable self-destruction of an inhumane and dysfunctional system that was the primary reason for the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. It was probably a combination of both. But both the Reagan administration and nuclear freeze advocates overestimated the power of motion picture images to impact long term political realities. Horrific and melodramatic films like The Day After and Testament are more likely to leave a viewer numb and hopeless then to move them into any kind of meaningful action. And because of the reality of September 11^th, it is unlikely — and more importantly unnecessary - that any films will be made to warn us of the potential for horror in future terrorist attacks. Also, compared to 1983, we now live in an age of numerous media outlets eager to confirm our worst fears about everything on a daily basis.

The Doomsday Scenario

The Doomsday Scenario by Douglas L. Keeney, Motorbooks International.

As evidenced by George Schultz’s performance on the Ted Koppel led panel that followed The Day After, the Reagan administration, when pressed, maintained the pretense that nuclear war was unthinkable. This was often the official cold war posture of the U.S. government; a huge nuclear arsenal was necessary to keep the peace and the idea of a post-nuclear world was too implausible to even be entertained. Neither side was going to be foolish enough to launch the first missile. But a new book just published by Motorbooks press makes it clear that the U.S. Government did have a well thought out and pragmatic plan in place by 1958 for Continuity of Government (CoG) and the rebuilding of the country following a nuclear attack. Documents show that the Reagan administration would have had similar Emergency War and CoG Plans in 1983.

The Doomsday Scenario publishes in full the Emergency Plans Book that was distributed to government and military leaders about six months after the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. In very practical and bureaucratic language, the plan estimates casualties, damages to infrastructure, and short and long-term psychological effects on the general population. The book is a fascinating study in the eerily detached language of policy makers, even when considering human losses in the millions. This may have something to do with the fact that the people who wrote it anticipated being safely ensconced in government shelters with plenty of food, water, and even recreational facilities, while the scenarios they describe are taking place.

A few pages after a chart predicts fatalities up to 25 million, the "Post Attack Analysis" section of the book opens with the following:

"Consideration of the post-attack situation must be directed to two distinct and separate phases, although at some point in time these overlap and tend to merge. The first period might be described as predominantly the survival period; the second is predominantly the construction period".

There is something creepy — and actually kind of amusing - about the leap made here from unimaginable catastrophe to rudimentary solutions and a simple definition of terms. Technical jargon is employed again when assessing the mood of the American people after suffering a massive and devastating nuclear assault:

"With human casualties exceeding material losses, ultimate recuperative potential to meet the requirements of the surviving population is high, providing the population can be adequately motivated"

So, in spite of a loss of nearly 1/5 the 1958 U.S. population, there is room for optimism. It’s just a matter of getting enough people to quit moping and instigating a positive attitude. This is especially important considering the following assumption:

"The utilized labor force is engaged in large numbers in disposing of the dead, taking care of surviving injured, decontaminating and cleaning up bombed areas . . ."

The choice of the word "engaged" is especially revealing. It conjures up images of industrious laborers forming human chains to pass along the sagging body bags. It’s typical — but nevertheless disturbing — to read bureaucratic language that utilizes clinical descriptions to mask horrifying outcomes.

Finally, near the end of the Post-Analysis Attack section, the subject of effectiveness of government in these circumstances is discussed in a panicky tone:

"Government is seriously jeopardized and central federal jurisdiction is virtually non-existent . . . the social fabric has ceased to exist in the pre-attack pattern. Confusion is wide spread in these areas and customary control and direction are non-existant"

Like many sections in The Doomsday Scenario, this passage manages to be both technical and desperate.

The Emergency Plans Book is not only a look at the Cold War mentality of the U.S. government, but also extremely relevant today in light of recent revelations on present day Continuity of Government plans. Just more evidence that no scenario is truly "unthinkable" for people in power.