Hiroshima had a bomb blow up directly above it. Even with all the weapons the USSR had, the US is a big place, and places like Lawerence, Kansas probably would look more like TDA, with people suffering from radiation sickness and isolation, then RL Hiroshima.
In the end, Jason Robards goes to Kansas City, which in the movie is a direct target of the bombing, and the set does look like Hiroshima.
After all, a movie about people that were directly hit by the bomb would be pretty short and uninteresting.
I would have been 14 at the time, and I pretty much wasn’t allowed to watch it. I’d had nightmares from much more innocent movies before (Close Encounters of the Third Kind scared the poo out of me) and my parents made it clear that they would prevent me or anyone else in the family from seeing any of it.
Since this thread started up I’ve looked and found bits and pieces on YouTube… yeah, at the time, that would have been utterly terrifying for me.
Coincidentally, earlier this summer we were in Berlin and went to a museum that happened to have guided tours of an actual Cold War fallout shelter - one that is technically still functioning. We were on an English-language tour with a quite international group of tourists, and it was interesting to watch the reactions as the guide talked about what conditions would be like inside and outside in the event of a nuclear war… assuming a bomb didn’t go off inside the city, in which case it would be Game Over for everybody, of course. The adults from about 30-35 years old and up, including yours truly, nodded soberly… Yeah, I remember thinking about that. The younger adults and the teens looked increasingly horrified.
I told our boys (aged 12 and 18) afterwards that my strategy had been: if you see a mushroom cloud, run towards it.
How is it bullshit? Nuclear weapons were (and are) a real thing. The Soviet Union and the US really did have large numbers of them an threaten to use them in the event of a conventional war in Europe, and if they were used it really would have levelled places like Kansas City and people in places like Lawerence really would have had to deal with radiation poisoning.
I watched it because it was filmed in my hometown. There was a bunch of hype about it during the filming and it was cool to see how it played out in the movie. I was 15 at the time and it did scare me a little to think about a post-war world, and I decided that if that was to happen, I would not want to live in the aftermath. I still believe that.
I watched Alice instead, for almost the first time, simply so that I could walk into class next day and ask if anyone had seen Alice last night. I think maybe one person laughed, and I got a couple of disgusted looks.
This thread is nearly 18 months old, I realize. I just came across it while searching for something else.
I saw it when it first aired, and just found it sad that we had to make movies like that in the first place. (I was 19.) A cable channel re-ran it several years later, with about half an hour edited out, and it didn’t seem so scary. This was prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, etc.
Is “Threads” the movie that includes a 12- or 13-year-old girl who was born after the war, who gets raped, becomes pregnant from it, and gives birth to a horribly deformed baby?
I was 10 and it scared me pretty badly. I remember when it was over, I had to take the dog out one last time before bed. While I was outside, I compulsively looked up every few seconds to see if any missiles were coming down on us. I was anxious for the dog to do his business so I could go back inside and be near my family.
We lived in a very rural area and it was a cloudless, starry night. Even now when I see a starry night sky, I think of that movie.
Was it TDA or Testament that had the scene where the mother is bathing her child in the bathroom sink and she sees the water turning red and realizes that he’s succumbing to radiation poisoning? Because that’s about the single scene in either movie that I actually retained, just because it’s such a devastating one.
That’s the only scene I still remember. My office workmates hadn’t bothered watching it, and my sf-y friends were drawn to that scene, too. It looked beautiful, even if it was the end of civilisation! Threads was much more hard-hitting.
That was Threads, but I don’t think you see the baby. It’s the very last scene, she’s handed a swaddled form, looks at it and draws in her breathe to gasp or scream. Fade out. I did assume the baby was deformed though.
Since hardly anyone alive today has lived through a nuclear explosion, it must be very difficult to say what the aftermath of such a thing would be like. But from what I understand, the movie “The Day After” is far more realistic than most other movies.
In particular there is a kind of bittersweet movie titled Testament (1983) that takes place in a community that is a very long distance away from a nuclear explosion. I think it takes place somewhere in Northern California and there was a nuclear explosion in Southern California although I could easily be mistaken about that. That movie really angers me because it doesn’t show people what they should be shown in my opinion. It’s only my opinion. But any movie that depicts the aftermath of a nuclear war needs to grab people and scare the shit out of them and I don’t think any movie could ever do that strongly enough.
The real point I wish to make is that The Day After shows that after a nuclear bomb explodes near a city, life would become almost totally unsustainable in that area in a very short time.
However, I think the aftermath as depicted in The Day After is nowhere near as horrible as things would actually be.
The reason I say this is that the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was equivalent to 13K tons of TNT. In the next war, bombs would likely be around 20 Megtons of TNT.
That is 1,500 times the size of the Hiroshima bomb.
There are many other factors involved. It may be a much smaller bomb used in the next war. Suppose it was as small as even one Megaton. That would still be around 100 times the size of the Hiroshima bomb.
If a bomb that size is exploded in any modern North American city, life would be …
I intentionally ended this post abruptly to indicate just how abruptly life would be over for most all the residents of that city. I don’t know what, if anything, you or I could do to prevent this from happening. But it sure is worth investing a whole lot of time and energy now to prevent such a thing because there would be no recovery. No way of fixing things. No way of saving our families. Nothing to do except bend over and kiss our asses goodbye. Very sorry to present such a bleak view. But “bleak” would def be the word.