https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After#Effects_on_polic...
>President Ronald Reagan watched the film more than a month before its screening, on Columbus Day, October 10, 1983.[28] He wrote in his diary that the film was "very effective and left me greatly depressed,"[29][25] and that it changed his mind on the prevailing policy on a "nuclear war".[30] The film was also screened for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A government advisor who attended the screening, a friend of Meyer's, told him "If you wanted to draw blood, you did it. Those guys sat there like they were turned to stone."[citation needed] Four years later, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was signed and in Reagan's memoirs he drew a direct line from the film to the signing.
What you learn most importantly from it is, while the initial hyper-violent effects of a proper nuclear war are so much more horrendous than anything humanity can imagine based on anything ever seen prior, it's the slowly diminishing quality of life that spirals out from it that reminds you of the futility and pointlessness of it all. When, ten years later, you see life is operating at medieval (or worse) levels, it's a truly crushing feeling.
The film is available on Amazon (for purchase only), I believe. Everyone should watch it, but I cannot emphasize enough that for some people it can be a real stressor. It has no happy ending.
Priorities, eh.
Lots of people seem to be convinced that MAD is a sufficient deterrent for nuclear war. Which may be true if your safeguards are perfect and your actors are always rational. But in reality, all it takes is a mistake or a madman to set off nuclear armageddon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_rocket_incident
If America was not a military empire, we could try downsizing our nuclear forces to a so called minimal deterrent of a few hundred nukes and then negotiate with other countries to progressively downsize. We won't though because nuclear diplomacy is how we convince other countries to submit. It's not outright threats, but the quiet knowledge that we could incinerate them if we wanted. Plans were laid for doing so during the Vietnam War. To our planners, the non-offensive use of nuclear weapons is not absolute like we would like to imagine it is. America still has a first strike policy.
I think that less of an existential threat now. The works us a lot more interconnected and interdependent. What would Russia be without the west to export its oil and gas to? What would China be without foreign markets? We all need each other. Proliferation means the risk of nuclear terrorise or limited conflict us still significant, but not at the globe killing level we had 40 years ago. A limited or regional nuclear exchange would be catastrophic, but not species killing.
> The works us a lot more interconnected and interdependent. What would Russia be without the west to export its oil and gas to? What would China be without foreign markets? We all need each other.
The argument was "all it takes is a mistake or a madman." Neither cares about the fact that "we all need each other."
If you worked anywhere in tech long enough, you should be aware how much unexpected errors are indeed possible even in "old and tested" workflows.
And some madman is always somewhere where "everybody thought he's so nice."
> A limited or regional nuclear exchange would be catastrophic, but not species killing.
Note: "species" and "civilization" aren't the same.
Russia and the USA have no interest in destroying each other. All the other nuclear powers are too small fry to cause more than regional damage.
An actual nuclear war planner wrote a whole book about that:
"The Doomsday Machine Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner"
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-doomsday-machine-978160819...
P.S. USSR doesn't exist anymore.
Nuclear weapons remain the surest way to end civilization on this planet, and the chances of that happening are far higher than, for example, a meteor strike.
It's terrifying but highly informative.
https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/daniel-ellsberg-doom...
If you can find a good copy of it, watch it.
Also, many people these days act like the threat of nuclear war went away with the end of the Cold War. But the threat is still very real, and there are still thousands of nuclear weapons that the US and Russia continue to aim at each other, not to mention the rest of the world's nuclear powers, some of which have been at war with each other before and stand a good chance of going to war again.