In 1983 the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock clocked in at 3 minutes to midnight. America was in the middle of one of the most dangerous five year periods of the Cold War. Detente was dead. Able Archer exercises occurred that November. KAL-Flight 007 was shot down by the Soviets on September 1, 1983. And a newly assertive America under Reagan got busy stationing 103 Pershing II Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles in West Germany to counter hitherto deployed Soviet SS-20 Saber IRBMs. Dialogue between the two superpowers came to an icy halt.
In the middle of this complex realpolitik the Nuclear Freeze Movement in the US gained steam, throwing their support behind Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro’s nod to run against the Gipper in 1984 and the American millitary buildup continued at a frenetic pace.
Meanwhile, back on the farm, so to speak, something earth-shattering (at least to me) was fixing to be broadcast on November 20, 1983 on ABC: The Day After. An American media attempt to depict the aftermath of a full-on thermonuclear exchange between the USSR and the USA.
Jason Robards-who I always confused with George Peppard of A-Team fame—was the central character. A small town doctor out of his depth treating increasingly desperate radiation-sick patients from all over. I recall one scene, a kind of town meeting, where one woman, wearing a white dress, bled from between her legs, obviously from a critical lack of feminine hygeine producuts. And I recall someone needed to travel to the Bay Area, which once he arrived saw that it was totally obliterated.
I was horrified. My Mom was genuinely worried about me. That film represented my political baptism by fire. Henceforward, I watched the nightly national news like a child obsessed. I followed the course of the Cold War with interest and obvious worry that one Sunday morning—I don’t know why it was always a Sunday—I’d be vaporized along with my little sister and Mom. As I grew older I matured. I viewed the nightly national news with a bit more sophistication. I began reading the national news rags. Remember Time and Newsweek? I devoured them. I recall vividly Cori Aquino’s Revolution in the Philippines and Ortega’s ouster by Violetta Chamorro in Nicararagua. But I never, ever forgot the lessons of The Day After:
Risk peaks when one feels absolutely certain and safe. This is when calamity strikes.
Risk feels at its greatest after calamity passes and one feels chastened.
~attributed to Jesse Livermore
Anyone have a clue where the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock rests today?
89 seconds to midnight. Arms control be damned. ‘Murican don’t give a shit.
The entire arms control regime brought into life by Reagan and Gorbachev, extended by Bush and Baker, followed by the sage, bipartisan Nunn-Lugar Act and Clinton’s negotiating of the START Treaty have all been cast aside. First, by George W. Bush’s hamfisted and stupid abrogation of the arms control regime’s lynchpin: the 1972 ABM Treaty. Followed by Trump letting the INF lapse. And finally, this February, once again, irresponsibly letting the START Treaty lapse.
With the War in Iran not going well, China has taken to using proxies to warn Israel of the cost of using nuclear weapons against Iran:
“the moment Israel uses a nuclear warhead against any country, it will be considered the number one enemy of humanity, it will be the demise of Israel as a state, as a regime, as a country.”
Explicit but utilizing an indirect conduit, as one would expect of the Chinese.
Not to be deterred, American policy-makers lauched their own trial balloon in favor of an Israeli first-strike.
Yes, people, we’re that close.
But here’s the absolute shit-kicker, as we say down here in South Texas: the depiction of the aftermath of global thermonuclear war in The Day After is weak compared to the UK film on the same subject, dated 1984, called Threads.
American movies require a happy ending. Always. And The Day After offers up a milquetoast version of positive.
Not so Threads. And for that fact alone, Threads, horrifying in the extreme—mind you, I watched it as an adult—is the more realistic film, and its depiction of the civilization ending effects of thermonuclear warfare will leave you chilled to the bone. Threads is a much more effective admonitory tale of the very real risks we’re shopping off as I type.
GrimJim
Out of the ruins
Out from the wreckage
Can’t make the same mistake this time
We are the children
The last generation (the last generation, generation)
We are the ones they left behind
And, I wonder when we are ever gonna change, change
Living under the fear, ’til nothing else remains
We don’t need another hero
We don’t need to know the way home
All we want is life beyond Thunderdome
Looking for something, we can rely on
There’s gotta be something better out there
Ooh, love and compassion
Their day is coming (coming)
All else are castles built in the air
And, I wonder when we are ever gonna change, change
Living under the fear, ’til nothing else remains
All the children say
We don’t need another hero
We don’t need to know the way home
All we want is life beyond Thunderdome
So, what do we do with our lives
We leave only a mark
Will our story shine like a light or end in the dark?
Give it all or nothing
We don’t need another hero (hero, hero)
We don’t need to know the way home
All we want is life beyond Thunderdome
All the children say
We don’t need another hero (we don’t need another hero)
We don’t need to know the way home, ooh
All we want is life beyond Thunderdome
— Tina Turner, We Don’t Need Another Hero
Feral Finster
The Epstein Class, the people who make the decisions, could not care less.
As far as they are concerned, everyone not part of their circle are livestock at best.
Mark Level
Finster– valid points. China and the rest of us need to make clear to these Monsters (not people) that they can be treated as livestock as well.
Genocide is hard work, they haven’t even murdered all the Gazan Palestinians yet (there were 2.3 million on Oct. 8, 2023), the # surviving is almost certainly below 2 million now.
I’m so old that I recall when “The Day After” was on TV. The main point of TDA, Life after will be worse for the survivors than for the dead. They cannot commit planetary genocide and survive and prosper themselves, particularly not in the region where the hard core of them are currently.
If they drop A-Bombs who will stop mass escalation? Will the Russians or the Chinese stand by and let their Civilizations be annihilated and NOT respond? China has at least 600 nuclear weapons, the Zionist Entity at best 1/3 of that.
The Death Cult do see the rest of us as cattle. They do value their own, and their children’s lives (to a point) however.
spud
as long as russia keeps saying since 1999, something bad is gonna happen if you keep crossing our red lines, and the latest outrage of seizing a russian ship 27 years later by a 2nd tier power france, after hundreds of warnings going unheeded with no response, the line will get ever closer to Moscow and Beijing.
the Iranian leadership understands this now.
Carborundum
I remember those days. People used to read newspapers instead of huffing influencer fumes on social media. That part, at least, was better.
Dedpenguin
Testament (1983)
I remember being horrified by the day after when it came out. I didn’t see threads or testament until years later and thought they were both more powerful films. Testament somehow by being a more intimate story packed the biggest, bleakest punch for me.
Sean Paul Kelley
@Dedpenguin: I am unfamiliar with Testament. I will. look it up. Thank you!
mago
Tangential yet pertinent, just today I was remembering a Lake Tahoe summer when nuclear testing was still happening in Nevada. Such tests were not announced, but you could tell. The sky turned gray and there was a pregnant heavy feel to the air. More ominous the birds stopped singing. It was spooky as hell.
And now? Looks like Major Kong is going to get his way, riding the big one to oblivion.
Stephen Johnson
BBC’s The Wargame from a hell of a long time ago was pretty good , too, done in a documentary format (the same for Culloden).
sbt42
Just an FYI, both “Testament” and “Threads” are available for viewing at no cost (all you need is a US public library card) on the kanopy dot com website.
Hope everyone is faring all right. These are interesting times, indeed.
Feral Finster
Spud is correct. Sociopaths always have an advantage over non-sociopaths, because there is literally nothing a sociopath won’t do for power, the things that hold a normie back.
Once you understand that we are ruled over by sociopaths, everything they do makes perfect sense from that perspective.
spud
Feral Finster:
correct. the Iranians are showing russia and china, how its done.
mago
Pigs grow fat feeding from the troughs of nuclear puke
This little piggy went to market this little piggy cried war war war all the way home
Puke it up little piggies puke it up until the cows come home and we’re all dead and gone and nothing’s left but nuclear puke nuclear puke nuclear puke for you and me
Purple Library Guy
Did anyone else see “Last Call: A Postnuclear Cabaret” on CBC? Originally a play, it was adapted for TV. Some really dark humour. There were only two characters; one was dying of radiation poisoning, the other had been blinded because he was looking the wrong way at the wrong time. Shortly after the blast, the two of them wander into a CBC studio and find a camera still running, and do an impromptu broadcast, right down to figuring out how to queue the commercials . . . which gave the whole thing a particularly spooky vibe, because even the commercial breaks felt like you were still in the world of the show, as it were. I remember at the beginning, it’s pretty dark and you see these guys approaching, only they’re sideways . . . then the guy picks up the camera and puts it upright. And he decides to start entertaining whoever might still be out there watching. I remember one joke about a rich guy in BC who’d like bought a valley in the mountains, where he had security, machine shops . . . he was just totally ready for the bomb to drop. Unfortunately for him, on the day he was in Burnaby for a dentist appointment. The joking, dying guy is ultra-cynical and has a gun and gradually starts threatening to kill the blind guy out of basically despair.
It’s a pretty dark show. Scared the hell out of me in my teens, that’s for sure.
StewartM
But..but..but what about Israel uber Alles?
(Recalling Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, we’re on pace to make the leadership of 1914 look almost like restrained geniuses. It was later said that “Serbia wasn’t worth a holocaust”, especially from the Triple Alliance point of view, but Serbia looks a lot more important than protecting Bibi and Trump from post-office criminal prosecution, fer sure, or for ethnic cleansing of Palestinians).
TacJack
Interesting take.
Counterpoint: I, as a decorated combat military officer who opted to fall on his sword rather than be party to the crime of invading Iraq on 2/1/03, am ELATED that China’s Victor Gao sent an unveiled message to America and the Jewish State of Israel…to shit the fuck up.
For over a decade now I have repeatedly asked the ether, “When will China step up and seize the mantle of world leader from America?”
Gao’s statement on 3/20/26 that Sean noted in his post was that moment.
China made this decision, with Russia’s support, for several reasons.
First is the practical aspect. The winds blow from west to east. One nuke on Iran will inevitably fall to earth in parts of China. Multiple nukes will do incalculable harm, so China said, “Fuck that shit!”
Two, China is tired of being Micro Dick/Fat Don’s whipping boy. China IS the world’s economic powerhouse. Period. Hell, I’m a dumb old southern boy – who was educated and practiced as a statistical and reliability engineer – and I recognized in 1994 that China was cornering rare earth minerals while Merica obsessed over “financial engineering.”
Three, everyone has had it with the Jewish State of Israel and their fucking “chosen” people bullshit. I truly admire China for PROHIBITING the practice of Judaism in China. Then again, I eschew all religions. (If America ever opts for an Article Five Constitutional Convention, I propose we change the First Amendment from “…freedom of religion…” to “…freedom of and/or from religion…” because I am beyond pissed off at the pretentious piety of who has the “….best imaginary friend.” Then again, I never fought for “god and country,” telling my ex-wife that I would only fight for “love and pussy” as they were tangible.
Doomsday Clock be fucking damned too.
China has been a functioning society for 5,000 years. As such – and because they gave us the tantric arts, plus parchment, tea, and gunpowder – I trust them more than America’s current so called gubment.
spamned
I had nightmares as a child of a nuclear war-I dreamed of war planes dropping bombs on us. I had to pack a suitcase when the Cuban Missile Crisis to take to school, ‘just in case’…
As I got older I began working in anti-nuclear groups; I attribute to them my political education.
We protested at Vandenberg and we protested at Diablo Canyon. We had ‘debriefings’ and antiviolence trainings, we were medics and legal advisors.
When Diablo went online it was uh, *disappointing* ~
I have b/w photos of those demonstrations, the police lines the helicopters(their protective hardware of the time looks ‘quaint’)…the crowds the signs so many protesters getting arrested and jailed…
and now? People ask where is the left? What happened to them? Where did they go?
We tried we truly did. Our culture worships money, not life.
Feral Finster
@spud:
Iran may be showing Russia and China, but Russia and China do not appear to be paying attention to the lesson.
bruce wilder
@FF :
This probably goes without sayin’ but I will say it anyway, because makin’ it explicit may be clarifying: what a sociopath will NOT do is invest in or maintain the systems of social organization that form the foundation of political power. As Hannah Arendt pointed out, political and economic power is a property of social organization. The sociopath is a parasite using power it extracts from entropy that it itself induces. The parasite is feeding on the social organism, to extend the metaphor, weakening and disinvesting the source of power. The sociopath is the cheat that breaks the rules, breaks the integrity of the system, in order to gain access to power.
The rise to dominance of the sociopath within a system of organization is not due to some inherent advantage of sociopaths in competition with prosocial normies, but rather to the degeneracy of those processes of social reproduction, which would ordinarily police and punish pathology. The rise of sociopathy to dominance is due to the failures of the processes of a political equivalent of an immune system. The political institutions for identification and altruistic punishment of sociopaths are handicapped or disabled.
A healthy society has institutional means of enabling “normies” to act collectively to discipline sociopaths. There’s a cost to doing so, but a sense of righteousness can help normies feel good about paying a price to right wrongs and act politically to impose morally dictated consequences for delinquencies.
Historical experience with the vagaries of collective moral reasoning has been mixed. Distinguishing the sin of a bacon cheeseburger or blasphemy from the sins of, say, child molestation, animal cruelty or human sacrifice has been a series of struggles for enlightenment not always easily or securely won. So, yes, we fence the normies in with prescriptive norms, civility and rules of procedure not always observed in practice.
The sociopaths, in turn, undermine justice by inducing sclerosis in the rules of restraint and due process to protect vested interests, elevating hypocrisy over righteousness, and when things become unworkable, advocate for extreme penalties and arbitrary, secret state conduct as an authoritarian expediency. Those are old stories, retold every day.
The perspective I would restore: ask, where are the righteous? And, why are so many of the soi disant righteous so ridiculously impotent and ineffective?
I cannot help noting every day as we watch events unfold related to the conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran — all unnecessarily amplified into the larger scale violence of war by intransigent Western political leadership — how politically marginalized are the voices of reason and good will. And, how insulated the uniparty in the U.S. and the unpopular coalitions with a death grip on power in the E.U. and most European states are. Against these, there is a lot of cheerleading online for the openly authoritarian powers, Russia, China and Iran. This last anomaly makes me queasy.
The neocons, supported by the neoliberals, hijacked liberal righteousness and used that worthy spirit as a sock puppet to bring the world to this impasse, where the U.S. and Israel are rogue states, controlled by sociopaths, incapable of negotiated agreement and therefore incapable of building or maintaining the rules-based order they tout.
The first-order responsibility belongs on the sociopaths — the comically prominent spokesmodels of bloodthirsty expedience like Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Lindsay Graham, Ted Cruz, Madeleine Albright, Benjamin Netanyahoo, Ben Shapiro and so seemingly ad infinitum but also the deeply institutionalized power of the Deep State and MIC driving it all forward. The second-order responsibility rests on the abject failure of the institutions of democratic governance to resist and counter the neoliberal revolution. The Democrats in the U.S., Blairite Labour in the U.K., Socialists across Europe went over voluntarily to the enemy, became agents of the plutocracy they helped to nurture in common with the neoliberal right and here we are, helpless against the onslaught of the power-mad greed of those inhaling the toxic smoke from the bonfire on which they recklessly tossed the global political economy and order.
Even at this late date, the neoliberal left contends scarcely at all with the neoliberal right on economics or foreign policy. There’s a faux left pursuing censorship and repression on slightly altered terms of service, snarkily playing left on
teeveepodcasts while apologizing still for the serial abuse represented by Clinton, Obama, and the terminal emptiness of Biden and Harris, while drawing Congressional Representatives from the roster of the CIA. Enablers of sociopathy if not simply another species of sociopath.GrimJim
The problem is that the Right has conflated Difference with Sociopathy (or Blasphemy) while the Left (such as it is) has conflated Righteous Consequences for Oppression (as they have seen it only practiced by the Right and then only on undeserving folk who are Different, not Sociopaths).
The more the Right pursues its Crusade against Difference, the more the Left rejects Consequences, and the stricter the Right becomes. It is a death spiral that allows the Sociopaths on the Right to rule like mad kings…
Feral Finster
@Bruce Wilder: I am not arguing that normies also have an advantage over sociopaths. Sociopaths rarely can build lasting institutions, in part because sociopaths are loyal to nothing other than themselves.
However, “deserve” has nothing to do with it.
@TacJack: “China has been a functioning society for 5,000 years. As such – and because they gave us the tantric arts, plus parchment, tea, and gunpowder – I trust them more than America’s current so called gubment.”
Past performance is no guarantee of future results, as the financial engineers say. For most of human history, Egypt was ruled by pharoahs. No longer.
For that matter, Song Dynasty China was richer, more cultured, and more advanced in just about every way but one than the Mongols who conquered it. The Mongols, however, were more aggressive and better at organized violence.
The Mongol Yuan Dynasty fell, in part because they couldn’t make their minds up whether they were Mongols or Han Chinese.