# Did the day after scare you?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-the-day-after-scare-you/839820>\
**Category:** Cafe Society\
**Created:** [September 6, 2019, 11:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-the-day-after-scare-you/839820 "2019-09-06T23:45:28Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 4

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**Author:** ![nelliebly](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/nelliebly/32/5422_2.png) [@nelliebly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nelliebly)\
**Post date:** [September 8, 2019, 10:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-the-day-after-scare-you/839820/61 "2019-09-08T22:41:13Z")

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_The Day After_ was grim but not terrifying. I was afraid of nuclear holocaust my entire childhood, the result of nuns telling us Chicago would be a primary target and that we should pray The Bomb hit while we were sleeping, as well as all those duck-and-cover drills. By the 1980s, the drills were long gone, but most of us carried that fear around with us, albeit on a back burner.

Then Jonathan Schell’s superb 1982 nonfiction book, _The Fate of the Earth_ came out and not only frightened a lot of people (IT was a bestseller and had been featured in The New Yorker) but got us talking about the unthinkable. I highly recommend it.

Oddly enough, I was scared by the last scene in _Dr. Strangelove_, but that was probably because I was 10 and still clinging to the hope that the Grown-Ups In Charge were sane and knew what they were doing. Quaint notion, eh?

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