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  • Well, kids - have a taste of what it was like to be a child of the Cold War. A few months ago I watched "The Day After (1983)". Here's the sequence of the bombs going off - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iyy9n8r16hs&t=3454s

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    I think this movie needs to be re-aired by every major network * NOW * so America can be reminded. 2 generations later - people forget.

    Here's some stuff about Reagan and the movie.

    The Day After

    US President Ronald Reagan watched the film more than a month before its screening on Columbus Day, October 10, 1983. He wrote in his diary that the film was "very effective and left me greatly depressed" and that it changed his mind on the prevailing policy on a "nuclear war". The film was also screened for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A government advisor who attended the screening, a friend of Meyer, told him: "If you wanted to draw blood, you did it. Those guys sat there like they were turned to stone."

    In 1987, Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which resulted in the banning and reducing of their nuclear arsenal. In Reagan's memoirs, he drew a direct line from the film to the signing. Reagan supposedly later sent Meyer a telegram after the summit: "Don't think your movie didn't have any part of this, because it did."

    During an interview in 2010, Meyer said that the telegram was a myth and that the sentiment stemmed from a friend's letter to Meyer. He suggested the story had origins in editing notes received from the White House during the production, which "may have been a joke, but it wouldn't surprise me, him being an old Hollywood guy." There is also an apocryphal story which claims that, after seeing the film, Ronald Reagan said: "That will not happen on my watch."

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