I was eleven years older than
@Ingsoc75 and I blew off watching it. I regret now I ducked out of sharing such an iconic historic bit of culture as it was happening, nor have had much chance if any at all to see it since.
I honestly can't remember how much of my not choosing to see it had to do with genuine obliviousness (I was after all struggling with very tough classes in a very tough school, but my classmates took the time), how much my general counter-popular culture haughtiness, how much left over allegiance to the Right wing I was raised in that held that mainstream media moguls were "liberal," biased against the military, unfair to the logic of more conservative positions, purveyors of cheap thrills as opposed to serious thought, etc (yep, I'm here to tell you the right wing stance against the "liberal media" goes back way before Reagan was elected; I was raised with this bias) and finally--how much to my growing embrace of liberal reality-based thought, which at the time, seemed to spell out near certain doom by nuclear annihilation sooner or later--did I really want to subject myself to a prior death in my spirt watching a grimdark, hopeless portrayal of realism about WWIII, when the real thing seemed liable to present itself inevitably any month now?
It's all very well to look back on it and declare in retrospect "no one really wanted WWIII if they could possibly avoid it." But the proof of that was in the pudding.
Say what nasty and hostile things as I will about Ronald Reagan, and I have plenty to say along those lines and will not apologize for that, one fragmentary but crucial bit of sanity and decency I will grant him--he was in fact one of those people who did not want WWIII for real.
At least, once this very same speculative TV drama framed for him exactly what a plausible mid-80s WWIII would mean for the United States, he did not!
It can be hard to judge whether prior to seeing this movie, he already was committed to avoiding WWIII if push came to shove but just had confidence he could play chicken with the Kremlin and win, and tDA merely caused him to reevaluate the stakes he was gambling with, or if in fact he really was so captive of his ideology he actually believed a war would not be so terrible if it meant the USA would finally win. The latter was the line a great many of his political fans apparently did believe, and the question was, how much did the high ranking people in his administration believe it too?
But either way, he saw the movie, and it shook him, and when his generals and other advisors could not honestly claim it was all liberal hysteria and had to admit there was a certain realism to it (if anything, I gather it
softballed the full nature of the threat--by all accounts the British film
Threads made tDA look like a Walt Disney production) he started seriously changing tack and it was just a few short years to coming within a hair of agreeing with Gorbachev to scrap the entire nuclear arsenal!
When I dislike Ronald Reagan, it is with the belief that he merely and mainly was the premier American spokesman for a powerful current of American and world history that was going to assert itself somehow or other; Reagan was mainly just the best actor to cast for the part of its face. But here might be a variable where I should thank God it was Reagan and not someone else playing the role! Someone else might have been less bad from my point of view...but then would not be playing the part well, and would probably be cast aside. I don't know who to point to to take Reagan's place in an ATL where something removed him from his OTL role, and I have to hope most alternative leaders in his place would be as reasonable (in his own Movie America mentality driven way) as he was on this point, but it could have been worse I suppose.
Even with some curmudgeon or smooth sociopath in his place, I still in retrospect estimate our chances of getting through the '80s with no big thermonuclear war as better than even.
But one of the scariest things about the nuclear balance of terror is, that the psychologically subjective is part of its basic machinery. If we have a period of time when the zeitgeist is relaxed, there probably is objectively less danger, as key decision makers on both sides are skeptical the others want to fight either and so move with caution and not too much worry they are being Pearl Harbored. But vice versa, the more crazy the other guys seem to be, the more credible it seems they really will try to pull a fast one, and the fear is that being slow to react to it means they just might get away with it--which makes their trying all the more plausible. Precautionary preparations, which also inherently erode the buffer on the basic hair-trigger of retaliation objectively, also scare former skeptics and the complacent on the other side and makes doomsayers who assert the enemy attacking is only a matter of time, and time is never on our side (for time just allows the enemy's arsenal to grow still more monstrous--never mind it does the same for ours--the point being if deterrence fails the foe has decided they don't care if more destruction falls on them) seem more horribly correct.
It is pretty hard to factor how much to weigh these psychological factors. All I know is, I was pretty well convinced at the time that war could happen any damn moment.
Not everyone I knew was, and it could be my background made me peculiarly susceptible to alarmism.
So perhaps it is fitting if the crest of the wave of this hysteria in the USA was objectively involved in changing the dynamics feeding it and breaking the wave of despondency.