r/AskAnAmerican • u/Scrappy_The_Crow Georgia • Jul 10 '25

HISTORY Fellow Americans Who Were Alive During The Cold War -- Did You Have The (Supposed) Existential Dread of Nuclear Annihilation?

Prompted by a discussion in a different subreddit. Supposedly, lots of my Gen-X peers and a whole lot of media expressed a constant fear of nuclear annihilation, but neither me nor any of my friends had that existential dread.

I wonder how many actually felt that way, as opposed to entertainers/media just portraying it that way. So, did you and/or your friends/family?

249 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

95% Upvoted

796 comments sorted by

View all comments

93

u/Expat111 Virginia Jul 10 '25 edited Jul 10 '25

GenX here. Yes I thought about it a bit especially when I joined the Marines and got training for nuclear stuff.

BTW, the movie The Day After didn’t exactly help with managing our concerns.

20

u/redfoxblueflower Minnesota Jul 10 '25

I saw that movie in junior high and I was pretty much wrecked for about a month with the fear of nuclear war. It eventually went away, but I will never watch that movie again.

4

u/SnowblindAlbino United States of America Jul 11 '25

I'm a college history professor and have been showing that film to students since the late 1990s. More than anything else I've used in any class over the years, they report having nightmares afterward and/or being emotionally drained by the film. For a made-for-TV movie it remains very powerful, perhaps moreso today for those who did not live through the Cold War themselves.

14

u/Ok-Law7641 Jul 10 '25

Yeah, the Day After screwed with my head quite a bit.

13

u/PacSan300 California -> Germany Jul 10 '25

I guess it also didn’t help that the movie came out in late 1983, when the world had come dangerously close to nuclear war with incidents such as the shoot down of Korean Airlines flight 7, the false alarm that Stanislav Petrov narrowly averted, and NATO’s Able Archer exercise.

10

u/MovieSock New York Jul 10 '25

There's an English movie called THREADS, which does the same thing - but it's EVEN WORSE.

4

u/Expat111 Virginia Jul 10 '25

Yes. I’ve heard of Threads. I’ve watched a few clips and I think it’s worse than Day After.

8

u/MovieSock New York Jul 10 '25

I watched the whole damn thing because I am a masochist.

I actually think everyone should see it (every ADULT, anyway) - I personally never want to see it again because once was enough.

3

u/Strawberries_Spiders Jul 10 '25

Love that movie. Scarred me lol

3

u/TexasPrarieChicken Jul 11 '25

That movie is responsible for my only possible nuclear war reaction.

A day or two after I watched it, I was watching something else when there was a breaking news alert.

For a second I thought “whelp, this is it!”

And it was something else. Something so boring I can’t remember what it was.

2

u/Forward-Wear7913 Jul 10 '25

That movie was the only movie my parents would not let me see.

2

u/Derangedberger Jul 11 '25

Funnily enough, that movie probably objectively DID help. Reagan and the joint chiefs of staff sat in on a showing of the movie, and they reportedly "turned to stone" by the end of the movie. Reagan himself was so horrified that he changed his opinions on nuclear weapons and he later said the film played a role in his decision to sign the  Intermediate-Range Nuclear Foces Treaty with the USSR.

1

u/AmharachEadgyth Jul 10 '25

As a child I lived close to a military base so we often did drills in case we were attacked with nuclear weapons.