How a made for TV movie saved the world
The real life situation was cliche enough for a movie (I’ll talk about the movie later):
An actor who played in cowboy movies was president of the US and was insinuating that the next toughest country was evil. Both sides had the firepower to destroy the world many times over. But then a movie came out on ABC and changed everything. A movie that produced a “what if” vision so terrifying that the US government and people started to carefully think about the consequences of attempting to destroy those they called evil.
Check out Alexander Veer’s writeup about how the movie The Day After changed everything in a powerful wave of activist science fiction.
