You must be young. I was very young when "The Day After" came out, and that friggin' movie gave me nightmares for many, many years. Into my twenties. Every time I heard a jet, I was convinced it was an inbound ICBM. My case may be extreme, but the Cuban Missile crisis was by that time well understood, the immorality of the USG was apparent thanks to Vietnam and Nixon, and classic movies like Wargames and James Bond used the threat of nuclear war constantly. Getting nuked by Russia was a real threat for 40 years. But you realize it's out of your hands, and deal with the stuff in front of you.
(The real question is: what is the path away from nukes, entirely? It seems to me that a world in which any individual can launch nukes is a world with a very short lifetime. This gets worse the fewer human barriers there are to launch. Even if we get past this conflict, we have this fundamental problem which affects democracies and autocracies both.)
Yup, The Day After feels like willy nilly optimistic romantic comedy next to Threads, I have same feeling about extremely overrated romantic movie The Shawshank Redemption compared to much more realistic Das Experiment (judging by my military experience which was sort of prison).
(The real question is: what is the path away from nukes, entirely? It seems to me that a world in which any individual can launch nukes is a world with a very short lifetime. This gets worse the fewer human barriers there are to launch. Even if we get past this conflict, we have this fundamental problem which affects democracies and autocracies both.)