The Day After

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We waited until the blast had passed, walked out of the shelter and then it was extremely solemn. We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, he takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that, one way or another. J. Robert Oppenheimer

The Day After is an alternative timeline in which NATO and the Warsaw Pact engage in an all-out nuclear war in 1983, killing untold millions while destroying the old-world order in the process. This timeline is inspired by a question; does history actually repeated itself, or does it simply rhyme? World War I was considered to have been the war to end all wars, and yet twenty-one years after the last guns were fired in the fields of Western Europe, a second global war was sparked upon the German invasion of Poland. While unfortunately many horrific wars have taken place since 1945, humanity has never really seen a war on the scale as World War II, in which at least eighty million people across the world were killed. It's as if our species has been scared out of its wits by the horrors of that terrible period of history, made worse by the possibility of nuclear conflict during the Cold War.

With the supposed end of the Cold War, came the end of any possibility of nuclear war (so we thought), and apparently any lessons that we've learned from World War II along with it. During the Ukrainian war of the 2020s, the west sent supplies to Ukraine so she could have the ability to defend herself. Overtime, western leaders became increasingly war hawkish, turning from simply defending Ukraine to ensuring outright Russian defeat instead of trying to encourage peace. Russia, Ukraine, and the West are seemingly ignorant to the dangers of what a prolonged war could bring. And what happens if western involvement keeps escalating? Have we forgotten the horrors of modern war?

So again, does history actually repeat itself? The war in Ukraine feels an awful lot like the interwar period, in which humanity was recovering the horrors of the Great War and vowed to never fight a similar war ever again, over to allow ourselves to be dragged into a far more horrific war. Let's say that a thermo-nuclear war were to take place in 1983 and human civilization somehow manages to survive, would we actually learn anything or would we simply make the same mistakes once more?

Background

Inspiration and Motivations for The Day After

The infamous scene from The Day After, in which a thermonuclear warhead detonates, destroying Kansas City.

The Day After is named after a 1983 television film directed by Nicholas Meyer (best known for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan) and starred Jason Robards as a doctor from Kansas City who witnesses the end of the world. The plot of the film focused on the residents of Kansas City and the nearby Kansan town of Lawrence, and takes place during a fictional Third World War, in which NATO and the Warsaw Pact fight over Germany. The conflict escalates into a nuclear war and resulted in the destruction of civilization as we know it. The film's main character is terminally ill after sustaining lethal exposure to radiation, and ends up weeping in the arms of a scatter while visiting the ruins of his home. President Reagan was left depressed by the film, but felt that it was very effective. In a disclaimer at the end of the film, the producers admit that The Day After was sanitized and acknowledged the fact that a real nuclear war would be far worse.

Nearly a year after The Day After premiered, Threads aired for the first time on British television. Threads has a similar plotline, in which the Soviet Union invades Iran following an American-backed coup. Tensions escalate when an American submarine disappears in Middle Eastern waters, and the Americans occupy southern Iran to protect the oilfields from Soviet forces. Unsurprisingly, all hell breaks lose and the Soviet-American war eventually escalates into all-out nuclear war. Threads is probably more of a depressing film than The Day After. While in The Day After, there is some semblance of government and civilization, government ceases to exist in Threads while civilization collapses. Threads also delves more into what the aftermath of a nuclear war would look like. As the nuclear winter sets in, crops are unable to grow due to the lack of sunlight, leading to famine in Britain. The British population drastically declines to between four and eleven million people, matching medieval levels. All the while, the generation born after the war are left poorly educated, speak broken English, and suffer from radiation-induced birth defects. Threads is considered to be one of the most terrifying and depressing films ever produced.

Both The Day After and Threads had a theme. This theme can be attributed to an old quote from the English writer H.G. Wells; "If we don't end war, war will end us". Unfortunately, the message of both Threads and The Day After appears to have been lost four decades after both films were produced. On 24 February 2022, after an eight-year long proxy war in the Donbass region, the Russian government declared a "special military operation" and sent troops into the Ukraine. The Kremlin claimed that it was out to "denazifiy" Ukraine and prevent NATO expansion, although most believe that the motivation behind the war is simply imperial ambitions on part of Moscow to retake territories that once belonged to both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, made more evident by an essay written by President Vladimir Putin in which he described Ukraine as an "anti-Russian project". In Putin's eyes, the actions taken by the Ukrainian government are influenced by both a Western plot against Russia and the followers of Stepan Bandera.

The Ukrainian war quickly turned into a proxy war between the east and the west. During the first year of the conflict, the west began supplying weapons to Ukraine, simply so she can defend herself against the Russians. At first, western leaders were reluctant to escalate the conflict. When President Zelensky requested that the West enact a no-fly zone over Ukraine, President Biden responded that it would bring about a Third World War. As the first year of the war progressed, the Russians were unable to take Kiev but have been able to take control over the south of Ukraine. Emboldened by their success and Russia's criminal incompetence, Ukraine desires to continue the war in the hopes of reconquering both the Crimea and the Donbass from the Russian Federation. The west also escalated in their involvement by sending brand new tanks to Ukraine for use against the Russians.

This begs the questions, how will this all end? The Russians are still helping to snag a victory from this war, having already annexing parts of southern Ukraine. Meanwhile, both Ukraine and the west are seeking to reconquer the southern territories annexed by Russia, which have been deemed illegal by both Ukraine and the west.