Children Under the Mushroom  − 1 August, 2002

Again indulging my morbid side, my good friend Cale and I took advantage of my recent move to Lawrence, Kansas, by throwing a 'viewing party for two' of the film "The Day After". "The Day After", which dramatizes a fictional nuclear war's aftermath on the people of Lawrence and Kansas City, was a TV movie filmed in 1983 when Cold War rhetoric was starting to get dangerous.

Though I was too young to have seen or understood the film at that time, I do recall a few moments "under the mushroom cloud" as a younger child. My fears were mostly created more by books than by global politics, but Cale was more aware due to his being a couple years older. He and I both shared this morbid fascination and repulsion to the concept of global thermonuclear war, and we really shared it that night as we watched Kansas City get blown up on our TV screens, silently thanking the gods of fate that the Cold War is long over.

Ironically, it was in 1983 that a real Russian colonel saved all of our lives from that actual possibility. Stanislav Petrov correctly guessed that the computerized early warning systems alerting the Russians to a nuclear attack by the U.S. was faulty, and did nothing, refusing to counterattack America. He was never rewarded by his superiors for this decision, in fact he endured days of intense questioning for his having disobeyed orders to fire missiles at the U.S.

Two months after that incident, "The Day After" initially aired. Nobody over here ever heard a thing about Col. Petrov or of this incident until 1998.

Comments:

edunn (February 15, 2007. 01:13am)

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