![]() ![]() An estimated 100 million Americans watched, and I still remember the hushed hallways in my high school the morning after it aired. ![]() This is the nuclear war of The Day After, the 1983 ABC television movie that depicted a catastrophic nuclear exchange. This is the unthinkable version of nuclear war that dominated millions of people’s fears during the Cold War. Would an American president really initiate a global thermonuclear exchange (which could annihilate entire American cities) to keep Paris from falling into enemy hands? It was easy to say that American forces would nuke Russian cities if the Soviets attacked Europe it would have been much less easy to do so. But this was more an advantage in theory than one that could actually be put to use. The United States, meanwhile, possessed one major advantage: superior nuclear forces. There was a real fear that if the Soviet Union decided to attack the West, it could pulverize NATO’s defenses in days, and that once it penetrated NATO’s front lines, nothing could stop it from sweeping all the way to the Atlantic coast. They had more men, more tanks, and more planes-and they were massed in proximity to NATO’s borders. The Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies possessed an overwhelming advantage in conventional weaponry. In the early days of the Cold War, NATO allies faced a daunting strategic challenge. To understand the perils of the present, it is necessary to understand the perils of the past, a distant past that few Americans remember well. Sign up for David’s newsletter, The Third Rail, here. ![]()
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