As TV and radio news broadcasts allude that the Soviet Union has commenced a troop buildup in East Germany, U.S. citizens are introduced going about their lives in and around Kansas City.

Dr. Oakes (Jason Robards) is a cardiologist at Memorial General Hospital, assisted by a nurse played by JoBeth Williams. Their patients include a pregnant mother (Amy Madigan). Oakes is informed by his oldest daughter that she’s moving to Boston, while his wife recalls the Cuban Missile crisis and worries if this time, a nuclear war might actually break out. “Nah,” he tells her, “People are crazy, but not that crazy.”

We meet a farm family in Harrisonville, Missouri whose the father and mother – played by John Callum and Bibi Besch – prepare for the wedding of their impetuous daughter. Another rural family – this one twenty miles outside of Kansas City in the fictional “Sweetsage” – live next to a missile silo, whose crew includes a friendly black airman.

At the University of Kansas in Lawrence, a professor of natural science (John Lithgow) debates the escalating situation with his students as the Soviets blockade West Berlin. Another student (Steve Guttenberg) decides to hitchhike home to Joplin. News of commencing hostilities between NATO and the Warsaw Pact in West Germany create traffic jams and a panic at the supermarket.

Then, many of these characters watch in awe as multiple ICBMs are launched from their silos into the sky. The professor realizes they have thirty minutes before the Soviet counterstrike hits. The farm family in Harrisonville makes their way into an improvised fallout shelter in the basement, while Oakes is on Interstate 70 en route to Kansas City when the missiles hit. Those who survive the overwhelming holocaust are left to deal with the aftermath.

Directed by Nicholas Meyer and written by Edward Hume, The Day After was a two-hour made-for-TV movie event broadcast on ABC on November 20, 1983. It came at the height of Cold War saber rattling between the governments of Ronald Reagan and Yuri Andropov, when a military clash between the superpowers was not an unheard of possibility.

Nicholas Meyer – who had directed Time After Time and Star Trek II – had been so exasperated dealing with network censors, he quit during post-production and threatened to have his name pulled from the credits. Meyer relented, but vowed never to work in TV again.

From a production standpoint, this definitely recalls a time when movies were movies, and TV was just TV. This is evident in a reliance on stock footage in place of quality special effects, a flat musical score, awful casting in the supporting roles, and the pedestrian nature of the script.

Characters come and go, but only John Lithgow’s interested me. This professor uses his technical proficiency to re-establish a degree of order over short wave radio. Jason Robards and JoBeth Williams really aren’t given much, the farm families are silly, and then you have the hapless Steve Guttenberg wandering around. The script should have toned down its disaster movie cliché and focused on the college campus in Lawrence.

As crude as it is, The Day After is still highly effective. After the original broadcast, the network carried a live debate between William F. Buckley and Dr. Carl Sagan, in which Sagan likened the arms race to “two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five.” He also introduced the concept of nuclear winter, theorizing that once a nuclear war was over, the real nightmare would begin.

Meyer manages to capture that feeling. Whereas a feature film would have been stocked with stars and had hope, the TV film is having little of that. Women, children and pets are vaporized, the government provides little relief, and anyone still walking after the attacks soon begins to succumb to radiation poisoning. Meyer spent a year researching nuclear fallout and his bleak assessments are represented here without a Hollywood ending.

What effect The Day After had on the nuclear arms race is probably subjective (Mikhail Gorbachev allowed it to be aired in Russia in 1987), but even twenty-five years later, the surreal images of ICBMs streaking through the sky or dark red mushroom clouds impacting do stay with you after you’ve seen this.