November 20, 1983: "The Day After" Airs On ABC

November 20, 1983: The Day After airs on ABC. With over 100 million people watching, a 46 rating and a 62 share, it remains the most-watched made-for-television movie in American history.

It aired when the Cold War was at one of its chilliest points:

* One year earlier, on November 10, 1982, Leonid Brezhnev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, died. He was succeeded by Yuri Andropov, who had already been secretly running the country, and by extension its alliance of nations known as the Warsaw Pact, since 1975, when Brezhnev suffered a stroke. But now, he was dying, too, from kidney failure.

* Eight months earlier, on March 8, 1983, Ronald Reagan, President of the United States, declared in a speech before evangelical ministers -- at Walt Disney World, outside Orlando, Florida -- that the Soviet Union was "an evil empire." That got the Soviets' attention.

* Eleven weeks earlier, on September 1, 1983, the Soviet Air Force shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 over Sakhalin Island, which was disputed between the Soviet Union and Japan. They claimed they had mistaken it for a spy plane.

* Eight weeks earlier, on September 26, 1983, a Soviet early-warning system near Moscow reported the launch of 5 American missiles. The Soviets were ready to retaliate, but were talked down by Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, who convinced them that, if the Americans were going to attack, there would be a lot more than five missiles, so this was probably a false alarm. The false alarm was confirmed by ground radar, and, when the documents concerning this incident were declassified, Petrov became known as "The Man Who Saved the World."

* Two weeks earlier, on November 7, 1983, the armed forces of the nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization carried out a series of joint wargames called Able Archer 83. NATO conducted these wargames before, and the Soviets knew about them. This time, they did a few different things, and the Soviets found out about this, and got spooked. They went on high alert. When the wargames ended on November 11 -- the anniversary of the Armistice ending World War I -- and nothing had happened, the Warsaw Pact stood down.

All this time, there was the occasional mass demonstration, in America or in Europe, against nuclear proliferation. This was not helped by the events of early 1979, when the premiere of the film The China Syndrome, about a nuclear power plant melting down, was almost immediately followed by a real-life close call at the Three Mile Island plant outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

So ABC wanted to make a movie about the effects of not a nuclear accident, but a nuclear war. Plenty of films, including TV-movies, had been made about the potential for such a war, including WarGames, premiering on June 3, 1983. But ABC executives wanted to show the effects on average Americans.

For this reason, director Nicholas Meyer insisted that most of the cast be as yet unknown, although some became stars: John Lithgow, Steve Guttenberg, JoBeth Williams, Amy Madigan, John Cullum, Stephen Furst, Wayne Knight.

ABC insisted on at least one star that would be recognizable when they released the film to European theaters the next year. Meyer ran into Jason Robards on a flight, and cast him as the one star. Meyer also cast Bibi Besch, whom he'd cast as Dr. Carol Marcus in his most famous film, a year earlier: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

The location was as close to literally being Middle America as you can get: Lawrence, home of the University of Kansas, and the nearby city of Kansas City, Missouri.

A summary of the plot. The Warsaw Pact blockades West Berlin. Both sides mass troops on the border between East Germany and West Germany. The East invades, and the West uses tactical nuclear weapons to stop them. Each side attacks the other's targets in the Persian Gulf. Multiple messages are sent over the Emergency Broadcast System. Scared civilians begin hoarding key supermarket items and evacuating major cities.

The missiles are launched. The film doesn't say which side fired theirs first, the U.S. or the U.S.S.R. Detonations cause heat and shock waves that vaporize everything nearby, and also electromagnetic pulses that disable vehicles and destroy the electrical grid. The promos that ABC did for the film conclude at this point, with mushroom clouds swelling, and a male voice, that of Lithgow, over a communications system asking, "Lawrence, Kansas, is there anybody there? Anybody at all?"

With food and water in short supply, martial law is declared. It doesn't seem to matter, as those who are not too sick to do anything due to radiation poisoning get shot as they look for food. As President John F. Kennedy had warned 20 years earlier, "The living would envy the dead."

To this film, the natural response of America's conservative media was that ABC and Meyer were traitors. But Reagan, himself a former actor, had been allowed to screen the film at the White House before its airing. In his diary, he wrote that it was "very effective and left me greatly depressed." At the end of the calendar year, Time magazine designated its Man of the Year in a split distinction to Reagan and Andropov.

Andropov died on February 9, 1984, and his successor, Konstantin Chernenko, on March 10, 1985. His successor was the much younger, much healthier Mikhail Gorbachev, and he and Reagan began meeting to reduce the possibility of a nuclear World War III.

In 1987, The Day After was shown on Soviet television for the first time. A few weeks later, Reagan and Gorbachev signed the INF Treaty, the 1st-ever agreement to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in both countries. The Warsaw Pact collapsed in 1989, and the Soviet Union itself in 1991.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 made it clear that it was now far more likely for a nuclear attack to be a "tactical" one, a "briefcase bomb" left by a terrorist. While Vladimir Putin, the current President of the Russian Federation, is evil, ambitious, and driven by religion (in his case, Russian Orthodox Catholic), he is not suicidal. He doesn't want a war with America, because he knows that, even if America loses, he cannot "win."

*

November 20, 1983 was a Sunday. There was no Sunday night broadcast for the NFL to challenge the film in the ratings. Except for the next night's Monday Night Football, also on ABC -- the New York Jets beating the New Orleans Saints, 31-28 at the Superdome in New Orleans -- all the NFL games were played on Sunday afternoon:

* The New York Giants beat the Philadelphia Eagles, 23-0 at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia.

* The Cleveland Browns beat the New England Patriots, 30-0 at Sullivan Stadium (formerly Schafer Stadium, later Foxboro Stadium) in the Boston suburb of Foxborough, Massachusetts.

* The Atlanta Falcons beat the San Francisco 49ers, 28-24 at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.

* The Chicago Bears beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, 27-0 at Tampa Stadium.

* The Miami Dolphins beat the Baltimore Colts, 37-0 at the Orange Bowl.

* The Los Angeles Raiders beat the Buffalo Bills, 27-24 at Rich Stadium (later Ralph Wilson Stadium) in the Buffalo suburb of Orchard Park, New York. The Bills came back from 21 points down to tie it, but lost, anyway.

* The Minnesota Vikings beat the Pittsburgh Steelers, 17-14 at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh.

* The Cincinnati Bengals beat the Houston Oilers, 38-10 at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati.

* The Detroit Lions beat the Green Bay Packers, 23-20 in overtime at Milwaukee County Stadium.

* The football version of the St. Louis Cardinals beat the San Diego Chargers, 44-14 at Busch Memorial Stadium in St. Louis.

* The Dallas Cowboys beat the Kansas City Chiefs, 41-21 at Texas Stadium in the Dallas suburb of Irving, Texas.

* The Denver Broncos beat the Seattle Seahawks, 38-27 at Mile High Stadium in Denver.

* The Washington Redskins beat the Los Angeles Rams, 42-20 at Anaheim Stadium in the Los Angeles suburb of Anaheim, California. (It's now named Angel Stadium.)

There was 1 game scheduled in the NBA that day. The San Diego Clippers beat the Cleveland Cavaliers, 99-97 at the San Diego Sports Arena. (It's now named the Pechanga Arena.)

And there were 4 games scheduled for the NHL:

* The New York Rangers beat the Quebec Nordiques, 6-5 at Madison Square Garden. The Rangers blew leads of 1-0 and 5-2, but Kent-Anders Eriksson scored the winner for them, just 8 seconds into overtime.

* The Philadelphia Flyers beat the Pittsburgh Penguins, 5-4 at The Spectrum in Philadelphia. Bobby Clarke scored the winner, 2:43 into overtime.

* The Minnesota North Stars beat the Chicago Black Hawks, 4-3 at the Chicago Stadium.

* And the Vancouver Canucks beat the Los Angeles Kings, 8-3 at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver.

Also on this day, Nayvadius DeMun Wilburn was born. He had a future ahead of him. As a rapper calling himself Future.

September 1, 1983: The Soviet Union Shoots Down Korean Air Lines Flight 007

The Boeing 737-230B that later served as KAL007,

at Zurich International Airport in Switzerland, 1980.

September 1, 1983: A particularly chilly moment in the Cold War. Korean Air Lines Flight 007 (or KAL007 for short), a Boeing 737-230B jet plane, having taken off from John F. Kennedy International Airport New York, and refueled in Anchorage, Alaska, is headed for the South Korean capital of Seoul.

It never gets there: It goes off course, crossing the Kamchatka Peninsula, part of the section of eastern Russia known as Siberia, which it was not authorized to do. This is noticed by the Soviet Union Air Defense Forces. It then crosses Sakhalin Island, the largest island under Soviet control. This is also unauthorized. Both crossings were almost certainly mistakes.

But tensions were already high. President Ronald Reagan had been building up America's nuclear missile presence, at home and abroad. Military exercises in the Pacific had gotten the Soviets' attention. They suspected that KAL007 might have been a spy plane. A commander ordered it shot down. A Soviet Su-15 interceptor did so. There were 269 people on board, including Representative Larry McDonald of Georgia. They all died.

The late Summer and the Autumn of 1983 was the most tense time in the Cold War since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. It also included a false alarm that nearly led the Soviets to launch nuclear missiles on September 26, the military exercise known as Able Archer 83 that fooled the Soviets into thinking NATO was preparing for a first strike in the 2nd week of November, and ABC's broadcast of the TV-movie The Day After on November 20.

Things calmed down after that. Soviet leader Yuri Andropov died in early 1984. His replacement, Konstantin Chernenko, died a year later. Reagan found it much easier to deal with the next leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. His reforms, liberation movements around Eastern Europe, and some of Reagan's policies led to the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War in 1991.

Gimpo International Airport, frequently mentioned on the TV show M*A*S*H, was replaced as Seoul's main airport in 2001, by Incheon International Airport. Korean Air Lines retired flight number 007. They now use flight numbers 82, 85 and 250 in flights between JFK and Incheon, and technology is such that they no longer need to refuel at Anchorage.

Anatoly Kornukov, the General who ordered the shootdown, was never punished. Indeed, after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, he remained a senior figure in the Russian Air Force, serving as its Commander-in-Chief from 1998 until 2002. He died in 2014.

Major Gennadiy Osipovich, the pilot who fired the air-to-air missile that brought KAL007 down, was not told that the plane was a civilian one until 13 years later. As of September 1, 2022, he is still alive.

Country singer Lee Greenwood has said that he wrote the song "God Bless the U.S.A." in response to this incident. It was used so often during the Persian Gulf War of early 1991 that it's easy to forget that it's an older song.

President Reagan announced on September 16, 1983, that the Global Positioning System (GPS) would be made available for civilian use, free of charge, once completed in order to avert similar navigational errors in the future. Perhaps that would have happened eventually, but it was a step forward in the computer revolution.

*

There were baseball games played on this Thursday:

* The New York Yankees lost to the Oakland Athletics, 2-0 at the Oakland Coliseum. Dave Righetti allowed only 2 runs and 4 hits, striking out 10, but was outpitched by Chris Codiroli. Both men pitched complete games. Bill Almon's 2-run double in the 3rd inning made the difference.

Codrioli had a no-hitter going until Don Mattingly led off the 5th inning with a single. The only other Yankee hits were singles by Roy Smalley and Willie Randolph in the 8th. Ken Griffey Sr. drew a walk in that inning, loading the bases with 2 out, but Dave Winfield grounded out to end the threat. Randolph also walked in the 1st, and Graig Nettles did so in the 4th.

* A doubleheader was split at Fenway Park in Boston. The Minnesota Twins beat the Boston Red Sox in the 1st game, 11-0. The Red Sox won the 2nd game, 9-3.

* The Philadelphia Phillies beat the San Francisco Giants, 4-2 at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia.

* The St. Louis Cardinals beat the Atlanta Braves, 8-3 at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.

* The Montreal Expos beat the Los Angeles Dodgers, 8-3 at the Olympic Stadium in Montreal.

* The Toronto Blue Jays beat the Baltimore Orioles, 5-3 at Exhibition Stadium in Toronto.

* The Chicago Cubs beat the Cincinnati Reds, 3-1 at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati.

* The Detroit Tigers beat the Texas Rangers, 5-0 at Tiger Stadium.

* The Chicago White Sox beat the Kansas City Royals, 12-0 at Comiskey Park in Chicago.

* The Houston Astros beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 3-0 at the Astrodome.

* In the American League, the California Angels, the Cleveland Indians, the Milwaukee Brewers and the Seattle Mariners were not scheduled.

* In the National League, the New York Mets and the San Diego Padres were not scheduled.

Also on this day, Spanish soccer star José Antonio Reyes was born. 

March 8, 1983: President Ronald Reagan's Evil Empire Speech

March 8, 1983: Ten years after a different Republican President, Richard Nixon, went to Orlando, Florida and told the media, "I am not a crook," President Ronald Reagan goes to the same city, and is believed by many more.

Reagan, the 1st divorced man, and the 1st divorced-and-remarried man, to become President, and a man who already had a terrible record concerning the poor and race relations, was speaking before the National Association of Evangelicals. Of course, their record wasn't exactly Christian, either.

This was a low point in Reagan's Presidency. In August 1981, he signed his tax cut into law. This sent unemployment soaring from 7 percent to 11 percent in a little more than a year. The economy was still in recession. The American manufacturing sector had been severely damaged. And his policy of belligerence toward the Soviet Union -- who had recently replaced the long-ailing, leader-in-name-only Leonid Brezhnev with the much more energetic Yuri Andropov -- was making the Cold War worse.

Reagan needed an audience that was solidly in his corner. And he needed a speech they would love.

He could have spoken to the NAE about his opposition to abortion. He could have spoken to them about his support for reinstating teacher-led prayer in public schools (which is unconstitutional). He could have spoken to them about using federal government money to help religious private schools (which is also unconstitutional).

Instead, he wanted to talk about the Cold War, and the battle against what had long been known as "godless Communism." And those phony Christians ate it up.

He started by buttering them up, saying, "I can’t tell you how you have warmed my heart with your welcome. I’m delighted to be here today. Those of you in the National Association of Evangelicals are known for your spiritual and humanitarian work." He moved on to decrying secularism at home.

He went on to tell a truth: "There is sin and evil in the world, and we’re enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might." Then he told a bald-faced lie: "There is no room for racism, anti-Semitism, or other forms of ethnic and racial hatred in this country." He was in the South, and had pandered to the South for years. He knew goddamned well that one major room for racism in this country was the Oval Office.

He moved on to attacking the Soviets: "As good Marxist-Leninists, the Soviet leaders have openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is that which will further their cause, which is world revolution." And how was that different from the conservative movement, trying to tear down liberalism all over the world, from Britain's national health service to the officially secular government of Turkey to the liberalism that took hold in Japan after World War II?

He talked about the dangers of a nuclear freeze. That is, America stopping its production of nuclear weapons. He was sure the Soviets would only say they were doing the same, but would keep on making them.

And then he delivered the two words by which the speech would be remembered: "So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely, uh, declaring yourselves above it all, and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding, and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil."

He closed by quoting Thomas Paine: "Yes, change your world. One of our founding fathers, Thomas Paine, said, 'We have it within our power to begin the world over again.' We can do it, doing together what no one church could do by itself. God bless you, and thank you very much."

Huge applause in the room. Like Reagan himself, they were idiots. Thomas Paine was a proud atheist.

Some people point to the Evil Empire Speech as the turnaround moment in the Reagan Presidency, when he went from an unpopular President who had recently gotten the Republican Party clobbered in the Congressional midterm elections to a wildly popular President who won 49 out of 50 States in 1984.

In fact, while the speech did help him shore up his conservative base, he remained unpopular with a majority of Americans. The economy wasn't getting appreciably better. And the Cold War was getting worse. There would be three separate incidents in 1983 that could be called close calls for a nuclear war.

On September 1, the Soviet Air Force shot down a South Korean commercial airliner that had strayed into their space, thinking it a spy plane. The other two incidents were not known to the public at the time, only revealed years later in declassified documents. In October, a mistake made by a Soviet missile-monitoring base almost resulted in the launching of missiles. And in November, the Soviets' misinterpretations of NATO's "Able Archer 83" wargames almost set things off.

At the close of 1983, Time magazine named Reagan and Andropov their Men of the Year. What only his inner circle knew was that, even as he succeeded the dead Breznhev in 1982, Andropov, too, was seriously ill, with kidney failure. On February 9, 1984, he died, and was replaced with Konstantin Chernenko. And then he died early the next year. Reagan asked, "How can I talk to the Russians, if they keep dying?"

Fortunately for Reagan, and for everyone else, the next Soviet leader wasn't an elderly Communist who remembered the original Bolshevik Revolution. It was the much younger Mikhail Gorbachev, and he and Reagan would meet in "summits" in every year of Reagan's 2nd term. And the world would be better off for it. On Reagan's 1988 visit to Moscow, he was asked if he thought the Soviet Union was still "an evil empire." He said it wasn't.

America's troubles with Russia took a break. But they couldn't stay away forever.

*

March 8, 1983 was a Tuesday. Baseball was in Spring Training. Football was out of season. There were 7 games played in the NBA that night:

* The New York Knicks beat the Seattle SuperSonics, 107-98 at Madison Square Garden.

* The Atlanta Hawks beat the Portland Trail Blazers, 110-93 at The Omni in Atlanta.

* The Detroit Pistons beat the Indiana Pacers, 107-101 at the Silverdome in the Detroit suburb of Pontiac, Michigan.

* The Dallas Mavericks beat the Phoenix Suns, 120-99 at the Reunion Arena in Dallas.

* The Cleveland Cavaliers beat the Houston Rockets, 102-99 at The Summit in Houston. (The building has been converted into an evangelical "megachurch," Dr. Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church Central Campus.) World B. Free led all scorers on the night with 37 for the Cavs.

* The Denver Nuggets beat the San Antonio Spurs, 129-118 at the McNichols Arena in Denver.

* And the Los Angeles Lakers beat the Golden State Warriors, 116-112 at the Oakland Coliseum Arena.

There were 9 games played in the NHL:

* The New York Rangers lost to the Vancouver Canucks, 7-3 at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver.

* The New York Islanders lost to the St. Louis Blues, 6-0 at the St. Louis Arena.

* The New Jersey Devils lost to the Washington Capitals, 5-4 at the Brendan Byrne Arena at the Meadowlands. So all 3 of the New York Tri-State Area's NHL teams lost.

* In the League's oldest rivalry, the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Montreal Canadiens played to a tie, 3-3 at the Montreal Forum.

* The Boston Bruins beat the Quebec Nordiques, 11-5 at Le Colisée de Québec.

* The Edmonton Oilers beat the Hartford Whalers, 9-4 at the Hartford Civic Center. (Now the PeoplesBank Arena.)

* The Chicago Black Hawks beat the Philadelphia Flyers, 4-1 at The Spectrum in Philadelphia.

* The Minnesota North Stars beat the Buffalo Sabres, 5-1 at the Metropolitan Sports Center in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota.

* The Los Angeles Kings beat the Calgary Flames, 6-4 at The Forum outside Los Angeles in Inglewood, California.

* And the Detroit Red Wings, the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Winnipeg Jets were not scheduled.