In 1982, a 40-year-old insurance salesman who sold
policies to professional athletes traveled from his home
in Lawrence, Kansas, to New York City on a business
trip. Shortly before he left, Bob Swan, Jr.—the father
of two young daughters, and a man increasingly concerned
about the possibility of a nuclear war between the
United States and the Soviet Union—mentioned to his
then-wife Jane that he had had a dream about a film that
portrayed an American family and a Russian family in the
aftermath of nuclear war and “showed the total absurdity”
of such a war. While he was in New York, Swan attended a
huge march for nuclear disarmament that was
life-changing for him. “When I got back from this
amazing experience,” Swan told me when I visited him at
his home a few months ago, one of the first things his
wife said was: “They announced while you were gone,
they’re going to make that film you dreamed about. They’re
going to film it in Lawrence.”
The television movie The Day After depicted a full-scale
nuclear war and its impacts on people living in and
around Kansas City. It became something of a community
project in picturesque Lawrence, 40 miles west of Kansas
City, where much of the movie was filmed. Thousands of
local residents—including students and faculty from the
University of Kansas—were recruited as extras for the
movie; about 65 of the 80 speaking parts were cast
locally. The use of locals was intentional, because the
moviemakers wanted to show the grim consequences of a
nuclear war for real middle Americans, living in the
real middle of the country. By the time the movie ends,
almost all of the main characters are dead or dying.
ABC broadcast The Day After on November 20, 1983, with
no commercial breaks during the final hour. More than
100 million people saw it—nearly two-thirds of the total
viewing audience. It remains one of the most-watched
television programs of all time. Brandon Stoddard,
then-president of ABC’s motion picture division, called
it “the most important movie we’ve ever done.” The
Washington Post later described it as “a profound TV
moment.” It was arguably the most effective public
service announcement in history.
“For those of us who live in Lawrence, it was
personal... and it didn’t have a happy ending.”
It was also a turning point for foreign policy.
Thirty-five years ago, the United States and the Soviet
Union were in a nuclear arms race that had taken them to
the brink of war. The Day After was a piercing wakeup
shriek, not just for the general public but also for
then- President Ronald Reagan. Shortly after he saw the
film, Reagan gave a speech saying that he, too, had a
dream: that nuclear weapons would be “banished from the
face of the Earth.” A few years later, Reagan and Soviet
leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate- Range
Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, the first agreement that
provided for the elimination of an entire category of
nuclear weapons. By the late 1990s, American and Russian
leaders had created a stable, treaty-based arms-control
infrastructure and expected it to continue improving
over time.
Now, however, a long era of nuclear restraint appears to
be nearing an end. Tensions between the United States
and Russia have risen to levels not seen in decades.
Alleging treaty violations by Russia, the White House
has announced plans to withdraw from the INF Treaty.
Both countries are moving forward with the enormously
expensive refurbishment of old and development of new
nuclear weapons—a process euphemized as “nuclear
modernization.” Leaders on both sides have made
inflammatory statements, and no serious negotiations
have taken place in recent years.
There are striking parallels between the security
situations today and 35 years ago, with one major
discordance: Today, nuclear weapons are seldom a front-
urner concern, largely being forgotten, underestimated,
or ignored by the American public. The United States
desperately needs a fresh national conversation about
the born-again nuclear arms race—a conversation loud
enough to catch the attention of the White House and the
Kremlin and lead to resumed dialogue. A look back at The
Day After and the role played by ordinary citizens in a
small Midwestern city shows how the risk of nuclear war
took center stage in 1983, and what it would take for
that to happen again in 2018.
A CITY IN ASHES
Aftermath of the nuclear attack on
Lawrence depicted in The Day
After.
In the film, a 12-year-old farm girl named “Joleen” who
has heard an alarming report on the radio asks her
father, “There’s not going be a war, is there?” That
question was “really emotional for me,” says David
Longhurst, who was mayor of Lawrence in 1983 and is now
in his mid-70s. He had a son who was 12 at the time, and
the girl who played “Joleen” was the daughter of close
friends. The Day After had a huge impact on the American
psyche. But, Longhurst says, “for those of us who live
in Lawrence, it had an even greater impact. It was
personal ... and it didn’t have a happy ending.”
In fact, Lawrence—a small city of less than 100,000,
including about 30,000 students at the University of
Kansas, that lies between two rivers and is dotted with
leafy parks and limestone buildings—has a long history
of devastation, followed by repeated resurrection. It
was founded by anti-slavery settlers who hoped that
Kansas would enter the union as a free state. In 1856,
pro-slavery activists led by the county sheriff sacked
the town. They burned down the Free State Hotel, but a
prominent abolitionist named Col. Shalor Eldridge
rebuilt the hotel and named it after himself. The hotel,
in the midst of another renovation, is where I met
Longhurst a few months ago. A part- wner of the hotel,
he showed me its Crystal Ballroom and Big 6 Bar (which
dates back to the collegiate sports conference of the
speakeasy era).
A much bloodier raid followed in 1863, when Confederate
guerillas led by William Quantrill attacked Lawrence,
massacring more than 150 men and boys and burning down
hundreds of homes and businesses, including the Eldridge
Hotel. The town rebuilt, and since the 1860s has adopted
as its symbol a phoenix rising from the ashes. So it was
perhaps fitting that Lawrence was again reduced to ashes—on
film, at least—in 1983.
To turn Lawrence into a war zone, the film’s producers
closed sections of Massachusetts Street (downtown’s
pedestrian-friendly main street, lined with shops and
trees) more than once, blew out the windows of
storefronts, gave buildings a charred makeover, and
littered downtown with ash, debris, and burned-out
vehicles. A few blocks from downtown, the filmmakers
built a tent city to house “refugees” under a bridge on
the banks of the Kansas River, known locally as the Kaw.
Each tent housed a family and some of the possessions
they had presumably taken when they fled from devastated
homes: a doll here, a radio there.
“As
you went from tent to tent, it was like going through a
neighborhood,” recalls Jack Wright, a now-retired
theater professor at the university who became the
casting director for the film’s extras, and whose
stepdaughter—Ellen Anthony—played “Joleen” in the movie.
When I met Wright and his wife Judy (who was an extra in
the movie, and whose hint-of-Texas voice immediately
reminded me of her daughter Ellen’s) at their house in
Lawrence, we looked at magazine clippings and interviews
with Ellen that had taken place in their home 35 years
earlier.
Wright, who is 75 and still has a grade- chool-issued
civil defense helmet in his garage, continues to direct
and act in theater productions, including a one-man show
in which he plays the legendary Kansas newspaper editor
William Allen White. Before he dashed off to a rehearsal,
he told me what it was like being at the university’s
beloved Allen Fieldhouse, home of the Kansas Jayhawks,
in 1983 when the basketball court was transformed into a
“hospice” littered with cots for the victims of
radiation sickness. He remembers that director Nicholas
Meyer told the extras not to look at the camera or
anything else and reminded them that if a nuclear war
had really happened, “nobody would leave this room alive.
You’re on your last legs.” It was silent in the vast
room, and Wright says the moviemakers at that time were
still considering calling the movie Silence in Heaven.
Sometimes, after shooting a scene, the extras talked
about nuclear war and what they would lose, what it
would mean for a small city in the heart of the country.
One of the most haunting lines in the film comes when
John Lithgow, playing a university science professor who
has survived the nuclear blast, speaks into his
shortwave radio: “This is Lawrence. This is Lawrence,
Kansas. Is anybody there? Anybody at all?”
BEYOND IMAGINING
On Columbus Day in 1983, Ronald Reagan was at Camp
David, the wooded presidential retreat in Maryland. That
morning, before he boarded a Marine helicopter to fly
back to the White House, he previewed an ABC
made-for-television movie with the tagline “Beyond
imagining.” The Day After deeply affected Reagan,
himself a product of Hollywood. He wrote in his diary:
“It is powerfully done—all $7 mil. worth. It’s very
effective & left me greatly depressed... My own reaction
was one of our having to do all we can to have a
deterrent & to see there is never a nuclear war.” In an
interview last year, Meyer said Reagan’s official
biographer told him “the only time he saw Ronald Reagan
become upset was after they screened The Day After, and
he just went into a funk.”
On November 18, 1983, two days before the film aired on
network television, Reagan wrote in his diary of “a most
sobering experience” in the Situation Room, where he
received a military briefing “on our complete plan in
the event of a nuclear attack.” In his 1990
autobiography, An American Life, Reagan recalled the
briefing: “Simply put, it was a scenario for a sequence
of events that could lead to the end of civilization as
we knew it. In several ways, the sequence of events
described in the briefing paralleled those in the ABC
movie. Yet there were still some people at the Pentagon
who claimed a nuclear war was ‘winnable.’”
In that same diary entry, Reagan noted that Secretary of
State George Shultz would go on ABC “right after it’s
[sic] big Nuclear bomb film Sunday night. We know it’s
‘anti-nuke’ propaganda but we’re going to take it over &
say it shows why we must keep on doing what we’re doing.”
Two days later, Shultz appeared before the nation and
told ABC News’ Ted Koppel that the film was “a vivid and
dramatic portrayal of the fact that nuclear war is
simply not acceptable,” saying that US nuclear policy
had been successful in preventing such a war. “The only
reason we have nuclear weapons,” Shultz said, “is to see
to it that they aren’t used.” Shultz told Koppel that
the United States had a policy not only of deterrence
but also of weapons reduction—eventually to zero. (Although
ABC and the film’s director were careful to remain
ambiguous about which side started the fictional nuclear
war, insisting that the film was “not political,” The
Day After left no doubt that deterrence had failed.)
After Shultz spoke, Koppel hosted a televised discussion
with a distinguished panel of guests, including former
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, author Elie Wiesel,
publisher William F. Buckley, Jr., astronomer Carl Sagan,
national security expert Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, and
former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Their
reactions ranged from Buckley’s denunciation of the film
as propaganda “that seeks to debilitate the United
States,” to Sagan’s comment that a real nuclear war
would be even more lethal than depicted in the film
because it would be followed by a nuclear winter.
Whatever their intentions, Reagan and Shultz made little
progress with the Soviets on nuclear weapons until
Gorbachev became General Secretary of the governing
Communist Party in March 1985. Immediately afterward,
Reagan invited him to a summit. They met in Geneva that
November; the meeting was scheduled for 15 minutes but
lasted five hours. The next year, in Reykjavik, they
came very close to agreeing to destroy all their nuclear
weapons, and the director of The Day After received a
telegram from the administration telling him, “Don’t
think your movie didn’t have any part of this, because
it did.” In 1987, the year that The Day After was first
shown on Soviet television, the two leaders reached
agreement on the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces
Treaty. By then, as many as 1 billion people may have
seen the film.
Today, commentators such as Fox News political anchor
Bret Baier and syndicated radio talk-show host Rush
Limbaugh claim to see parallels between presidents
Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, and between the
Reagan-Gorbachev summit and Trump’s historic summit with
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Like Reagan, who called
the Soviet Union an “evil empire” in a March 1983
address to the National Association of Evangelicals,
Trump initially responded to North Korea’s nuclear
program with his infamous threat of “fire and fury.”
In the United States and Russia—and now also North Korea—there
is still just one person’s finger on the “nuclear button.”
When Reagan was president, his first-term chief of staff
and other establishment Republicans reportedly feared
that Reagan might get the country into a nuclear war.
Last year, similar concerns among some of Trump’s fellow
Republicans were on public display. Bob Corker, the
Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, for example, told the New York Times that
Trump’s reckless threats could put the United States “on
the path to World War III.”
In 1983, an opinion poll found that about half of
Americans thought they would die in a nuclear war.
Although nuclear weapons get a smaller share of press
attention today than in 1983, a Gallup poll conducted
earlier this year reported that Americans fear the
development of nuclear weapons by North Korea more than
any other “critical threat,” and a Washington Post-ABC
News poll found that “about half of Americans are
concerned that President Trump might launch a nuclear
attack without justification.” The Global Risks Report
2018, published in January by the World Economic Forum
and drawn from a survey of the group’s 1,000 members,
warned “the North Korea crisis has arguably brought the
world closer than it has been for decades to the
possible use of nuclear weapons” and has “created
uncertainty about the strength of the norms created by
decades of work to prevent nuclear conflict.”
RISING NUCLEAR TENSIONS: Echoes of 1983
More than 50 years after the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty declared the intention of 190 nations (including
the United States) “to achieve at the earliest possible
date the cessation of the nuclear arms race,” the United
States and Russia still have enough weapons to destroy
the world many times over—and many of them still stand
on hair- rigger alert. Just last month, Gorbachev made
an urgent plea for actions to prevent a new arms race.
In Hawaii earlier this year, at the height of tensions
between the United States and North Korea, residents
received a false ballistic-missile alert over television,
radio and cellphones. For 38 minutes, many Hawaiians
thought they were about to die. The false alarm reminded
some experts of Cold War-era false alarms, the most
dangerous of which happened late in September 1983—just
two months before The Day After aired. The Soviets’
early-warning system erroneously reported incoming
American nuclear missiles, and the gut instincts and
wise thinking of a Soviet officer, Col. Stanislav
Yevgrafovich Petrov, were all that saved the world from
catastrophe.
In early November 1983—less than two weeks before The
Day After aired, and less than a month after Reagan saw
a preview—NATO conducted a military exercise called Able
Archer, which simulated a nuclear attack and included
flights by aircraft armed with dummy nuclear warheads.
The nonprofit National Security Archive recently
published previously-secret Soviet documents showing
that “ranking members of Soviet intelligence, military,
and the Politburo, to varying degrees, were fearful of a
Western first strike in 1983 under the cover of the NATO
exercises Autumn Forge 83 and Able Archer 83.” (Autumn
Forge, an exercise that airlifted thousands of troops to
Europe under radio silence, culminated with the Able
Archer simulation.) For the first time, the Soviets put
their military on high alert at Polish and East German
bases. Like Col. Petrov, Lt. Gen. Leonard Perroots, the
deputy chief of staff for intelligence at the US Air
Force’s European headquarters, wisely chose not to
respond.
It is not inconceivable that something like the 1983
“war scare” could happen again today. In mid- November,
the Russian military jammed GPS signals during a NATO
military exercise in Norway. CNN called it “the
alliance’s largest exercise since the Cold War.”
In addition to the Able Archer simulation, November 1983
was also the month that NATO began deploying US Pershing
II missiles to West Germany. The missiles were intended
to counter Soviet medium-range missiles capable of
striking anywhere in Europe, and there were huge
protests in Germany over their deployment. It is no
coincidence that nuclear war begins in The Day After
with a gradually escalating conflict in Europe. In one
scene, viewers hear a Soviet official mention the
“coordinated movement of the Pershing II launchers.”
The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty that
Reagan and Gorbachev signed in 1987 resolved that
conflict, banning all ground- aunched and air-launched
nuclear and conventional missiles (and their launchers)
with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers, or 310 to
3,420 miles. However, Trump said in October that he
plans to withdraw from the treaty, and on December 4
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the United States
would withdraw in 60 days if Russia continues its
alleged non-compliance. Gorbachev and Shultz, in a
Washington Post op-ed published that day, warned that
“[a]bandoning the INF Treaty would be a step toward a
new arms race, undermining strategic stability and
increasing the threat of miscalculation or technical
failure leading to an immensely destructive war.”
The United States first accused Russia of violating the
treaty in 2014, by testing a banned cruise missile, and
later claimed that Russia had deployed such a missile.
However, the United States has not yet divulged details
about the alleged violation, and there are no arms
control talks currently scheduled.
“The one meaningful thing that Trump is doing is trying
to get a dialogue going with Putin,” said former Defense
Secretary (and chair of the Bulletin‘s Board of Sponsors)
William J. Perry at the Bulletin’s annual dinner in
Chicago on November 8. But Russia’s refusal to release
Ukrainian Navy ships and sailors seized in the Kerch
Strait in late November led Trump to cancel a scheduled
meeting with Putin at the recent G20 Summit in
Argentina, where they had been expected to discuss the
fate of both the INF and another treaty for which Reagan
and Gorbachev laid the groundwork in Reykjavik: New
START, which capped the number of nuclear warheads on
deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs),
deployed submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and
deployed heavy bombers. Nuclear experts worry that Trump
will let New START expire in February 2021, if only
because it is one of President Barack Obama’s signature
achievements, at which point there would no longer be
any international agreements governing US and Russian
nuclear arsenals for the first time in almost 50 years.
A NEW ARMS RACE
In an October 2017 report, the
Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Obama
administration’s 2017 plans for nuclear forces would
cost $1.2 trillion over the 2017–2046 period.
CBO
When Obama visited the University of Kansas in 2015, he
said nothing about nuclear weapons; he spoke of
middle-class economics and basketball. Although Obama
won a Nobel Peace Prize largely for his vision of a
world free of nuclear weapons, he nevertheless
bequeathed to Trump a 30-year plan to “modernize” the US
nuclear arsenal. Based on a Congressional Budget Office
report, the Arms Control Association estimates that the
United States will spend about $1.2 trillion in
inflationadjusted dollars by 2046 on new bombs, missiles,
bombers, submarines, and related systems. The Trump
administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review calls for a
new generation of land-based ICBMs, which experts such
as Perry view as an unnecessary and risky component of a
nuclear triad that also includes sea- and air-launched
nuclear weapons.
In 1983, the McConnell Air Force Base in Kansas was home
to 18 Titan II missiles, the largest ICBM ever deployed
by the US Air Force. Reagan was proposing to install the
Peacekeeper missile, America’s most controversial ICBM,
in Titan II silos and on mobile transporters. Even
closer to Lawrence was the Whiteman Air Force Base, east
of Kansas City in Missouri, where 150 Minuteman II
missiles were deployed.
In The Day After, Minuteman missiles erupt from the
plains near farmhouses, and people who see the missile
trails above the football stadium and the South Park
gazebo in Lawrence understand that a hail of Russian
ICBMs will soon follow. There is panic in the streets.
When the Russian missiles targeted at Kansas City
detonate during the movie’s extended attack sequence,
flashing brightly and sending up mushroom clouds,
viewers see snippets of footage from actual nuclear
tests interspersed with a horrifying, rapid-fire series
of “skeletonized” people instantly killed in the midst
of everyday activities.
The United States no longer deploys ICBMs near Kansas
City. The force has shrunk by about 60 percent, to
around 400 missiles now deployed near Air Force bases in
Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming. That’s good news for
the people of Lawrence.
The bad news, however, is that the latest Nuclear
Posture Review calls for the development of new and
dangerous weapons: a new sea-launched cruise missile and
a “low-yield” nuclear warhead that could be more
“useable” than bigger bombs—and arguably more likely to
make military strategists see a nuclear war as winnable
rather than suicidal. The United States might even use
such a weapon in response to a non- uclear threat, such
as a cyberattack. And Trump seems to be as enamored of
his proposed “Space Force” as Reagan was of his “Star
Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative.
The Defense Department claims it needs new weapons to
respond to new threats from Russia, where Putin in 2016
vowed to modernize its own nuclear weapons to “reliably
penetrate any existing and prospective missile defense
systems.” More recently, Putin has bragged about
deploying hypersonic missiles capable of traveling at
many times the speed of sound “in coming months,” and
developing both a global-range, nuclear-powered cruise
missile and an underwater nuclear drone.
The Russians say they have been forced into these
actions by the eastward expansion of NATO and the
installation of missile defense systems in Europe.
Russia is also developing the world’s biggest missile—so
big it could theoretically fly over the South Pole and
avoid US missile defenses.
The rash of new threats makes some experts wonder
whether the United States and Russia are serious about
resolving their differences over the INF Treaty and
other matters—or just looking for excuses to lunge into
a new arms race. “The opponents of arms control have won,”
says Steven E. Miller, director of the International
Security Program at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science
and International Affairs (and a member of the
Bulletin’s Science and Security Board).
“By the end of the 1990s, we had a nuclear order that
was internationally regulated and jointly managed. Right
now, we're literally on the edge of having nothing left
with regard to nuclear restraint. The case for arms
control has to be fought all over again.”
HOW ACTIVISTS HIJACKED A MOVIE
Louise Hanson, who is now 78 years old, has been pushing
for arms control for most of her adult life. She and her
79-year-old husband Allan, a now-retired professor of
anthropology at the University of Kansas, remember being
terrified newlyweds listening to news of the 1962 Cuban
Missile Crisis on their car radio at night in Chicago.
After they moved to Lawrence, they became leaders in the
Lawrence Coalition for Peace and Justice, a group that
formed in the 1970s and by 1983 was focused on nuclear
weapons. Louise once wrote to her senator, Bob Dole, on
1,000consecutive days, each time giving him a new reason
to halt the nuclear arms race. Today, the Hansons—quick-witted,
gracious, and younger-looking than their years—live in a
tasteful downtown loft one block from the
disaster-struck street that appeared in The Day After.
When
the movie came to town, the Coalition recognized it as a
golden opportunity. Allan and Louise—she played a
“suffering victim” as an extra and elicited a scream
from her high-school daughter when she came home in her
movie makeup—helped create a local campaign around the
movie called “Let Lawrence Live.” They got some
unexpected help from a brash, young media strategist
named Josh Baran, whose only previous experience was
working for the Nuclear Freeze campaign in California.
With a budget of only about $50,000 from the Rockefeller
Family Fund, Baran and Mark Graham (now director of the
Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive) helped make The
Day After a national sensation.
Baran and The Day After director Nicholas Meyer had
friends in common in California, and one of them made
introductions. Baran went to Meyer’s house, saw the film
(which was still a work in progress), and took home a
copy. When I interviewed Baran by phone last month, he
said Meyer told him to “do what you want with it, and
don’t tell me.” What Baran did was to create a major
publicity campaign for an ABC movie ... without ABC’s
knowledge or consent. Nowadays this would be called
“hijack marketing”: taking advantage of someone else’s
event to generate publicity for your own cause. But in
1983, “no one had ever done it,” claims Baran, who now
heads Baran Strategies in New York City. “It was a very
far out-of-the-box strategy.”
Baran traveled around the country, stimulating interest
in the forthcoming film among activists and reporters
and planning activities around it. “It took off like
gangbusters,” he recalls. “About halfway through, I told
ABC what I was doing, and they freaked out.” But there
was little the network could do about all the free
publicity they were getting from Baran.
He attributes the success of the movie to several
factors that would be difficult to replicate today. One
was that there were only three television networks in
1983, so programs reached a much broader audience. “I
would not have wanted to make this as a feature film,”
Meyer told the New York Times a week before the film
aired. “I did not want to preach to the converted. I
wanted to reach the guy who’s waiting for The Flying Nun
to come on.”
Retired theater professor Jack Wright doubts that such a
movie could appear today on television. “I think we’re
so politically ostracized now that I don’t know that we
could ever have another event like we had in The Day
After,” he says. “The groups now are so politicized that
they would stop it.”
In 1983, putting the movie on television ensured that it
would spark a national conversation, because it would be
seen simultaneously by millions of people. Bringing the
movie into people’s homes was “was genius really,” says
Louise Hanson, “because it made it much more intimate.”
The Day After also benefited from good timing. Jonathan
Schell’s seminal 1982 book The Fate of the Earth had
awakened readers to the unthinkable prospect of a
nuclear war that would devastate most life on the planet.
The Nuclear Freeze movement was in full swing; a
referendum in Lawrence during the November 1982 election
received support from 74 percent of voters. Nuclear war
was the number one concern preoccupying the nation. The
Lawrence Coalition for Peace and Justice was holding
events around town, like a rally at South Park where
they released “balloons not bombs.” The park appears
briefly in The Day After, with just-launched missiles
visible in the sky above the bandstand. Louise Hanson
says she can’t go by that bandstand, even to this day,
without seeing those missiles in her mind’s eye.
The film did not significantly increase public support
for nuclear arms reductions, but research suggests that
it may have made viewers more knowledgeable about
nuclear war and caused them to think about it more. For
viewers who didn’t want to think about nuclear war,
perhaps the biggest emotional punch delivered by the
movie was the scene in which a husband drags his
screaming wife —who is insisting on making the bed, in a
desperate attempt to maintain normality—to their
basement shelter.
Has it made any difference? That’s what the Hansons
wonder now, 35 years after the movie and the height of
the peace movement in Lawrence, as they play a song by a
local group for me on their living-room stereo: “Uprising,”
the anthem of the local coalition, which has a line that
Louise loves: “I feel it in my bones.” The Hansons find
it alarming that a fictional movie might have played a
key role in changing a president’s views. “We in the
peace movement have been, for decades, dangerously close
to patting ourselves on the head and being satisfied
with consciousness raising,” Louise says. “I see that as
hugely insufficient unless you can translate it into
policy.”
PEOPLE TO PEOPLE
Bob
Swan, Jr., a genial man with warm blue eyes who has
befriended many Russian athletes and met a number of
Russian dignitaries, including Mikhail Gorbachev and
Boris Yeltsin, is hopeful that citizen diplomacy can
fill some of the gaps in policy making. He sees lots of
connections between Kansas and Russia, everything from
the red winter wheat brought to Kansas by Russian
Mennonites, to the American and Soviet soldiers who met
and embraced at the Elbe River in April 1945 on their
way to jointly defeating Nazi Germany. (He proposed and
helped organize a 40th anniversary celebration of the
meetup in Torgau, Germany, for veterans of both armies.)
A few months after The Day After began filming, Swan
founded the first of several groups dedicated to
improving relations between Americans and Russians. He
called it Athletes United for Peace. The goal was to
promote athletic competition instead of nuclear
hostility. When I visited him in August, the dining-room
table in his home was covered with neatly stacked papers
and memorabilia documenting his persistent efforts
during the 1980s and ‘90s (the University of Kansas
research library has 37 boxes of material from Swan in
its archives). He thought he had “retired” from the
volunteer work that had consumed so much of his time—and
his first marriage—during those years, but now he is
thinking about a possible comeback.
Swan met his current wife, Irina Turenko, in 2002 during
one of several dozen trips he made to Russia. She was in
Russia visiting family when I met Swan at their home,
but he showed me a picture from their wedding day in
2006; he and Irina are standing between an American flag
and a Russian one. Swan had another visitor on the day I
was there: his sharp-tongued fraternity brother Mark
Scott, who speaks fluent Russian and was in Lawrence for
medical treatment. In 1982, Scott came up with the idea
to invite a delegation of Soviet athletes to participate
in the Kansas Relays, a three-day track-and-field meet
that has been held at the University of Kansas every
April since 1923.
Former mayor David Longhurst remembers attending the
1983 reception for the athletes. It was awkward. The
Kansans and the Soviets viewed each other with suspicion.
Longhurst didn’t speak Russian, and the visitors didn’t
speak English. “I was trying to talk to a Soviet shot
putter, and we weren’t communicating at all,” Longhurst
recalls. “I took out my wallet and showed him a picture
of my son. He took out his wallet and showed me a
picture of his kids. All of a sudden, we understood one
another. The barrier just melted.”
The
next day, at the start of the “friendship relays,”
Longhurst told the story to the crowd in his welcoming
remarks. He said it had occurred to him that it would be
wonderful if the leaders of the United States and the
Soviet Union could meet in “a place like Lawrence” and
discover how much they had in common. “The press got
hold of that and went nuts,” says Longhurst. The
headlines said he had invited the two leaders to come to
Lawrence.
Some of his constituents were so enthusiastic about the
idea that they launched a campaign to organize what
became known as the Meeting for Peace. Dole and other
politicians endorsed the initiative. Longhurst and Swan
joined a delegation of schoolchildren (including
10-year-old actress Ellen Anthony) that traveled by
train to Washington to deliver thousands of postcards to
the White House and the Soviet embassy, asking the
nations’ leaders to come to Lawrence.
It took Swan and others more than seven years to make it
happen, but the Meeting for Peace was finally held in
Lawrence and six other Kansas cities in October 1990. By
then, it had become a “people-to-people” event rather
than a summit. About 300 prestigious Soviet citizens
from a variety of regions and backgrounds—including the
son of former Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev— visited
Kansas to attend conferences and art shows, stay with
Kansas families, celebrate the 100th birthday of
Kansas-raised President Dwight D. Eisenhower (a big
proponent of people-topeople exchanges to promote
international understanding and friendship), and “bury
an era” (as a New York Times headline reported). At the
opening assembly, the Kansans and their guests applauded
wildly when it was announced that Gorbachev had been
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
After Trump’s inauguration, Swan wrote a long letter to
the president and his foreign policy team, proposing a
number of ideas for what he called “a remarkable
opportunity to improve US- ussia relations,” but he
received only a very general reply six months later.
Today, Swan remains hopeful about better relations
between the two superpowers but says “it’s got to be
from the bottom up this time, because our political
system is in such disarray.” He hopes that young people
will lead a fresh effort to improve relations between
Russia and the United States, but it saddens him that “we’vealready
done this.”
A BRIGHT TOMORROW?
In one scene in The Day After, a pregnant woman who has
taken shelter in the Lawrence hospital along with
fallout victims tells her doctor that her overdue baby
doesn’t want to be born. You’re holding back hope, he
says.
“Hope for what?” she asks. “We knew the score. We knew
all about bombs. We knew all about fallout. We knew this
could happen for 40 years. Nobody was interested.”
It won’t be long before another 40 years have passed.
Americans have not yet perished in a nuclear war or its
aftermath, but a new arms race is beginning and the
potential for an intentional or accidental nuclear war
seems to be rising. As Koppel said in his introduction
to the panel discussion that followed The Day After,
“There is some good news. If you can, take a quick look
out the window. It’s all still there.” But, he asked,
“Is the vision that we’ve just seen the future as it
will be, or only as it may be? Is there still time?”
The poet Langston Hughes, who spent most of his
childhood in Lawrence, wrote a line that the city has
adopted as its motto: “We have tomorrow bright before us
like a flame.” It was emblazoned on a banner used by
local anti-nuclear activists for their 1983 campaign.
Today, though, it will take far more than banners or a
movie to awaken a new generation to the risks of nuclear
war, catch the eye of a president, and instigate a
meaningful dialogue between the leaders of the United
States and Russia.
There is hope, though. A year ago, the New York Times
reported that people close to Trump estimate he spends
“at least four hours a day, and sometimes as much as
twice that, in front of a television.” A two-hour film
about ordinary Americans might not interest the
president, but a dramatic twominute video clip of
Washington experiencing Lawrence-style devastation might
get his attention. Especially if it aired on Fox &
Friends.
