Would there really ve a 'Day After'?

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100 million viewers in America and 15 million in Britain are estimated to have watched 'The Day After' , screened by I'l'V on Saturday night. "The film depicts a deteriorating political and military situation in Europe leading to the seizure of West Berlin by the Russians and a conventional nuclear attack on West Germany.

NATO forces use tactical nuclear weapons to hait the advancing tanks and the escalation continues to massive nuclear exchanges between the US and the USSR.

This build up is viewed from the standpoint of three families living in Kansas City or the surrounding countryside - a doctor and his wife; a black serviceman and his wife; and & farmer and his family.

Cruise and Trident are deliberately omitted as part of the film's scenario but the people who live in the countryside around Kansas literally have Minutemen ICBM silos at the bottom of their gardens.

Unwilling at first to believe that anyone could be made enought to use such weapons, they watch, horror-stricken, as all around them Minutemen missiles streak from their silos on their way to annihilate Russian cities.

The destruction caused by the incoming Soviet missiles is vivdly portrayed. Human beings are reduced to mere skeletons in a fraction of a second and buildings disintegrate as if they are made of match sticks.

In the aftermath nobody escapes as the survivors succumb to radiation sickness. The doctor - himself to become a victim of radiation - works on with increasing futility in the only remaining hospital in the area, as hundreds of people slowly deteriorate around him, losing their hair and developing the most ghastly sores as Heseltine was shaken... result of radiation. Outside, looters are executed by the authorities.

The film claims to present the facts of nuclear war and its aftermath, rather than take sides in the nuclear debate.

But when the Presdent broadcasts to the few radiated survivors in the smoking ruins of what used to be America, the news that the US didn't surrender and stood firm for freedom and democracy, the obvious implication is that the price paid is too high and 'freedom and democracy" will have no meaning after a nuclear war.

The general opinion seems to be that even so, the effects of nuclear war were greatly played down in the film. In a nuclear attack thousands of people would suffer the most horrific burns and medical services "233% would break down under the strain long before the symptoms of radiation sickness began to appear.

The scenes of ordered chaos seemed to minimise the complete breakdown of society that would actually result from nuclear holocaust.

Dennis Healey, in a discussion after the film, also pointed out that the film avoided the question of the 'nuclear winter' that scientists now believe would follow a nuclear war as dust envelopea the earth, blotting out the sun and causing temperatures to drop so low that it would be impossible to sustain human life. (Healey himself nevertheless remains completely hostile to unilateral nuclear disarmament).

A more difficult assessment to maké is what impact the film would have had on the millions of viewers not already committed to the unilateralist cause.

Peter Watkins, who made 'The War Game' for the BBC in the early '60s - a film which the BBC has refused to show right to this day - is quoted in Sunday's Observer criticising • 'The Day After' as part of "an attempt to assimilate nuclear weapons into the Western social process. The film poses the question as to how we are supposed to differentiate between this film (and its subject) and all the countless other films using the same structural and psychological methods of presentation such as Dallas, Winds of War, Kojak, etc.

Harrowing

I certainly found Watkins' own film to be a far more harrowing account, both when it was first made and on a second viewing more recently, although it now looks very dated, particularly, I should imagine, for a young audience.

The Day After, however, was made primarily for an American TV audience which is fed a staple diet of soap opera and which has never in its history had to contemplate the destruction of its own towns and cities in wartime.

By depicting, even in a limited way, the implications of nuclear war for American working people, The Day After may well have begun to raise questions in the minds of millions of Americans about US 'Defence' policy that perhaps they were not asking before.

And to judge by Michael Heseltine's decision to rush round every TV and radió studio that would accept him in the 24 hours after the showing (so long as Bruce Kent wasn't anywhere in the vicinity), the film may have had a useful impact on British audiences too. es

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HARPIS JOHN HARI