[calsy]

They made us watch 'The Day After' in high school. There is value in imprinting on kids the true horror and the ever present threat nuclear weapons pose. It's not a fantasy, it is real and it is the world they will inherit. It only has to happen once, there are no second chances if we get it wrong.

[red-iron-pine]

The Day After famously spooked Ronald Reagan -- a former Hollywood actor who liked to catch movies when he could -- who later screened it for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and asked them if it was really that bad.

Their answer was "nope, it'll be worse, much worse", and that pushed Reagan to reach out to the Soviets and work on de-escalation.

[mrguyorama]

Jesus, someone should have made him some movies years earlier. Why do we keep electing such losers without imagination or simple understanding of reality?

[dotsam]

For anyone wanting to see it, The Day After is on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/the-day-after-1983-full-original...

[throwanem]

I was raised the same way, and the drawback is that anything nuclear gets tarred with the same brush. We're paying for that in carbon now, as will our grandchildren's grandchildren.

[mrguyorama]

Our current carbon situation has nothing to do with the public's opinion of things, and everything to do with our elected representatives representing monied interests over our own. We understood the dangers scientifically decades ago, and even without that threat, the oil crises should have made clear how important it was to not rely on a desert shipping us black liquid. But we didn't do anything, because that would have hurt the profits of extremely wealthy companies.

Remember, oil companies have been colluding and doing anti-social things for personal gain since at least the 1870s, and they had strong tendrils in government basically ever since. Their breakup was an aberration in american policy, and just like Ma Bell decades later, allowing basically free reign to just buy each other up and re-coallesce into another behemoth means trust busting doesn't fix anything, and in fact just gives a business sector the ability to restructure their businesses in a more profitable and extractive way.

[naasking]

The recent anti-nuclear sentiment was driven more by ecoactivism, not fear of weapons. Germany is a good example of this.

[calsy]

??? We don’t fear nuclear power based on the possibility of a world destroying war. It’s feared based on the consequences of a disaster like Chernobyl or Fukashima.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Not to be pedantic, but you mean "it only has to happen twice'. The first nuclear war was 1945.

[ndsipa_pomu]

That was closer to a nuclear massacre than a war.

It still shocks me how people seem to think that killing all those civilians has any honour at all - the U.S. should have been disbarred from holding nuclear weapons after that.

Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to watching Oppenheimer.

[helsinkiandrew]

I think the poster meant a global nuclear war - where all 12000 warheads are exploded - nuclear Armageddon.