President Ronald Reagan was moved. He had just viewed a private screening of The Day After, a 1983 television movie chronicling the aftermath of a nuclear exchange with the USSR. Reagan reportedly1 developed such a sense of empathy with the fictional, irradiated residents of Missouri that, soon after the screening, he began nuclear disarmament talks with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
A year earlier, the film makers had read Jonathan Schell’s,
The Fate of the Earth
, a book about the consequences of nuclear war.2 Years before that, Jonathan Schell had read John Hersey’s ...
