Fallout from a TV Attack

By James Kelly

After all the hype, The Day After raised more questions than it answered

The week after, the people of Lawrence, Kans., bustled about their business as usual. Shoppers armed with Christmas lists invaded Weaver's department store on Massachusetts Street, while cars crawled up and down the avenue in search of the elusive parking space. Harvest season behind them, farmers mended fences and tinkered with tractors. Everywhere, however, the question was the same: What did you think of The Day After, in which the town was atomized on television screens across the nation? "It showed just how awful an attack would be. Some kids cried," said Sarah Stewart, a ninth-grader at Central Junior High School. "There were some spots that moved me, but it did not teach me much," said Dar Malott, owner of Malott's hardware store. Said Alex Hamilton, a student at Lawrence High School: "It raised a lot of questions, like what can we do to prevent this?"

Good question, indeed. The dilemma of how best to avoid such horror was discussed passionately in homes, classrooms and church basements from coast to coast last week after an astonishing 100 million Americans watched ABC's version of the nukemare.* Against the tense backdrop of U.S. missile deployments in Western Europe and the Soviet walkout at the Geneva arms talks, The Day After sharpened the debate between opponents and supporters of the Reagan Administration's weapons policies. On a wider, more superficial level, the movie brought home the terror of nuclear devastation to millions of Americans too young to remember Hiroshima, the air-raid drills of the 1950s or even the jittery days of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

More than 1,000 people crowded into Manhattan's Riverside Church to see the movie on a wide-screen TV. Some 75 students, many of them munching pizza, filled a TV room at Emory University in Atlanta. At the Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco, nuclear-freeze activists reserved a set for Spanish-speaking viewers and provided a translator. In an unnerving coincidence, a blackout darkened 3,000 homes in Gloucester, Mass., just as the mushroom cloud filled the screen. Power was restored shortly, but not before hundreds of residents felt the chill of their worst imaginings.

Supporters of a bilateral weapons freeze aggressively used the film to push their cause. Several dozen groups, including the Campaign Against Nuclear War and Physicians for Social Responsibility, sponsored TV commercials showing a U.S. and a Soviet general angrily inflating a balloon of the world until it explodes. "Take the pressure off before it's too late," intoned an announcer, whereupon a toll-free number, 800-NUCLEAR, flashed on the screen. By week's end some 50,000 people called for more information. After the film, freeze groups staged candlelight vigils, seminars and petition drives. Organizers hoped the show would inspire thousands to join FREEZE VOTER '84, a national political action committee that will be formed next week. Democratic Front Runner Walter Mondale, who, like six other of his party's eight presidential candidates, supports a freeze (exception: Reubin Askew, former Florida Governor), cited the film for illustrating "the heartache of nuclear war." California Senator Alan Cranston went even further: he organized fund raising parties tied to The Day After in 130 living rooms around the nation.

Fearful of the political fallout, the Reagan Administration launched a counteroffensive that began before the film was aired. David Gergen, White House director of communications, urged that the President appear on TV before the broadcast to undercut its impact, while Nevada Senator Paul Laxalt, chairman of the President's re-election committee, wanted him to go on the air afterward. The White House finally volunteered Secretary of State George Shultz for the discussion show moderated by ABC's Ted Koppel after the movie, even though many Administration staffers believed that his appearance would be an overreaction to what was, after all, only a television show. Admitted a White House aide: "Our gearing up contributed to the hype around the movie."

With all the hoopla, the film was anticlimactic, even naive. Those under 25 seemed more affected than their elders. Said Susan Connor, 20, a University of Virginia junior: "Most of us grew up in homes never touched by war, and this woke us up to the fact that it could happen." The national anxiety attack predicted beforehand by freeze advocates never came to pass. Phone banks set up by antinuke groups to counsel frightened viewers received relatively few calls, and the worry among educators about the effect on children seemed, in retrospect, thoroughly overblown. Indeed, the special effects struck much of the Star Wars generation as tame. Said Michael Schill, 16, a Charlotte, N.C., high school student: "There weren't a lot of people with their faces melting away."

Nationwide surveys showed that the movie changed few opinions about nuclear war. In a poll made available exclusively to TIME by ABT Associates of Cambridge, Mass., viewers were questioned before and after the film. The number who thought a nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was not likely by the year 2000 actually rose slightly after the film, from 32% to 35%. At the same time, the minuscule minority who believed they could survive an atomic blast dipped from 7% to 5%. Those who felt that the U.S. was doing all it could to avoid a nuclear conflict rose from 37% to 41%, while 58%, up from 54% before the movie, approved of Washington's defense policies. Ronald Reagan was bombproof: paired against Walter Mondale, he actually did better after the film (53% to 37%) than before (49% to 38%). The President, who previewed the movie in early November and then watched it again on Sunday night, even allowed afterward that the film "was pretty well handled. It didn't say anything we didn't know, and that is that nuclear war would be horrible."

ABC proudly declared The Day After unpolitical and, as evidence, pointed out that the film deliberately left ambiguous who fired the first shot. Yet by launching its mock war, the movie in effect repudiated the theory of deterrence, the main canon of U.S. nuclear doctrine for nearly 40 years. It also took a gratuitous dig at the U.S. President who, if only because the movie takes place in the present, could be confused with Reagan. On the radio after the attack, the show's President sounded more eager to win the war than to comfort the nation.

The chief failing of The Day After was that it did not offer much in the way of substantive information. "Nothing concrete came out about what we can do about this," complained Roy Bailey, a retired college professor in Seattle. Editorialized the New York Times: "A hundred million Americans were summoned to be empathetically incinerated, and left on the true day after without a single idea to chew upon." But the film certainly whetted the public's curiosity. Some 50 million viewers, about five times the average audience for ABC's evening news show, watched the 75-minute Viewpoint panel discussion after the movie. "The film presents a very simple-minded notion of the nuclear problem," said former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, one of the six panelists. "Are we supposed to make policy by scaring ourselves to death?" Unfortunately, constrained by time and format, the panelists were scarcely able to clarify matters (see ESSAY).

Even under the best of circumstances, understanding and making nuclear policy are like stepping into a wilderness of mirrors. There is one given in the debate: nuclear weapons cannot be disinvented, so ways must be found to ensure that they are never used. Said Lieut. General Brent Scowcroft, National Security Adviser to President Gerald Ford, during the ABC discussion: "There is no simple nostrum, no simple solution." Despite his sometimes bellicose rhetoric, Ronald Reagan has relied on the same doctrine of deterrence as his predecessors. By maintaining a nuclear arsenal large enough to devastate the Soviet Union even if it attacks the U.S. first, Washington hopes to prevent nuclear war. During the past 20 years, as it built nuclear stockpiles to match those in the U.S., the Soviet Union in effect adopted the same strategy.

For deterrence to keep working, both countries must remain confident that their counterstrike force is invulnerable. Just as important, each side must believe that the other side is capable of delivering the promised retribution. Such a balance of terror, however, is inherently unstable. Pure deterrence does not exist, for it would mean that each side possessed just enough weapons to keep a nuclear war from starting but not enough to fight and win one. Neither country can be absolutely certain of that. Thus military planners in both nations have attempted to design weapons that would limit damage to their home turf in case deterrence failed. A vicious spiral is triggered: as one country attempts to protect itself, the other worries about imbalance and tries to redress it. Both nations, for example, argue that their latest weapon systems, the SS-18 and SS-19 strategic missiles in the Soviet Union and the MX in the U.S., are for purposes of deterring war, not starting one. But these new missiles look menacingly offensive in the eyes of an adversary. One superpower's parity is the other's vulnerability.

Such calculations are what fuel the arms race. Since it remains impossible for either side to knock out the other's retaliatory force, however, deterrence still works. Indeed, if nuclear weapons did not exist, the U.S. and the Soviet Union might have gone to war at least once since 1945. "Both sides are deterred from taking actions that might lead to confrontation by the knowledge of the destruction they would suffer if war got out of hand," says Barry Blechman, senior fellow at the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Sometimes they miscalculate, but they quickly scramble back."

Though the events that led to the fireballing of Kansas in The Day After were reported only in TV and radio snatches, the chain evidently went like this: East German soldiers rebel, the Soviets seal off West Berlin, Washington vigorously protests, the Soviets invade West Germany, the U.S. airbursts three tactical warheads over Soviet troops, Moscow annihilates NATO headquarters, then each superpower nukes a ship. The scenario was plausible, since the U.S. has never renounced using nuclear weapons in Europe in the face of an overwhelming conventional Soviet attack. (Washington contends that its refusal to close off the option deters Moscow from mounting such an assault.) However, the two sides more probably would have scrambled back from the brink. "You can argue The Day After is unrealistic in the sense that American and Soviet leaders would have halted the escalation," says Alton Frye, director of the Washington office of the Council on Foreign Relations.

After the nukedown in Europe, the movie implies that one or both of the superpowers fired missiles on warning, without waiting for enemy warheads to hit. But launch on warning, which carries the ghastly specter of a nuclear barrage being triggered by a satellite or radar glitch, has never been U.S. policy--though Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger admits that the Soviets cannot be certain the U.S. would hold back. Even a confirmed nuclear attack does not mean that the U.S. President would respond. For one thing, it might be unclear whether the Soviets launched the warhead.

So if deterrence is to continue to work, both countries must seek stability of forces. Though a nuclear freeze sounds like the easiest way to halt the arms race, it might well prove destabilizing. Some nuclear weapons are less controllable in a freeze than others, and those that remained unfrozen might give one or the other country an edge, which in turn would dangerously upset the balance of arms. A freeze, for example, would presumably stop the B-l and stealth bomber programs, but it might not prevent the Soviets from improving their air defenses. As the U.S. ability to penetrate Soviet airspace eroded, the U.S. would grow more reliant on its land and sea missiles and thus less confident about its overall deterrent. In effect, the U.S. would be putting its eggs in two baskets instead of three. Says Blechman: "The flaw of the freeze is that it deals only with numbers."

Simply cutting back the numbers of missiles, even to equal levels for both sides, does not guarantee stability either. The wrong reductions could diminish deterrence. In shrinking its stockpiles, for instance, a superpower could wind up with a higher proportion of missiles with multiple warheads, or MIRVS, scattered in fewer silos. Then the temptation for the other side to launch a pre-emptive strike would grow because a MIRVed ICBM with ten warheads is an easier and far more inviting target than ten single-warhead missiles sprinkled about the countryside.

Some experts advocate buttressing deterrence with "confidence-building measures." The most important one: moving away from MIRVS and back to the single-warhead missile. Frye suggests that the U.S. and the Soviet Union focus on slowing the pace of technological development, since both live in fear of a breakthrough by the other. After a yearlong study, Democratic Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia and Republican Senator John Warner of Virginia recommended several steps last week to improve crisis communications between Washington and Moscow. Emergency contact between the two capitals has changed little since the 1963 installation of the hot line, a set of telex machines linking the Pentagon's National Military Command Center with the Kremlin. The Senators suggested setting up "nuclear-risk reduction centers" in both capitals. Staffing would be up to each country, but the Senators advised round-the-clock watch officers with direct hookups to their leaders.

The best way to reduce the risk of nuclear war, of course, is to improve relations between the superpowers, not just communications. In that respect. The Day After did nothing to lighten the international mood or improve the possibility of discourse. Indeed, a Soviet TV correspondent informed 100 million of his countrymen last week that the nuclear catastrophe depicted in the film had been triggered by the deployment of Pershing II and cruise missiles in Western Europe. If the film's lasting impression is one of fright, then no purpose has been served save to boost ABC's ratings. But if by looking at the unlookable, millions of Americans start thinking about the unthinkable and appreciating the complexities of coping with atomic arsenals, then the show could prove to be a public service. --By James Kelly. Reported by Tim Miller/Lawrence and Bruce W. Nelan/ Washington, with other bureaus

*The Day After was the twelfth-highest-rated U.S. television program ever. It was watched in 46% of America's TV households, and by 62% of the night's total audience. The top-rated show: the final episode of MASH, aired last February.

With reporting by Tim Miller, Bruce W. Nelan This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.