The made for TV movie "The Day After", which originally aired on ABC on November 20, 1983, is available on YouTube. I recommend it, if you want some understanding of what a nuclear war might look like. It starred Jason Robards, John Lithgow, JoBeth Williams, Steve Guttenberg and Amy Madigan.
Being from 1983, the premise for the conflict is, of course, badly outdated now. It postulates a war between NATO forces and the Warsaw Pact countries - the Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Albania and Bulgaria, which escalates into an exchange of nuclear missile attacks, following the Soviet Union's military strike response in West Berlin to NATO's Able Archer 83 exercise... which really did take place in November of 1983. So, the movie was actually very plausible for its time. The Day After is still the highest rated made-for-television movie of all time.
Per Wikipedia:
U.S. President
Ronald Reagan watched the film more than a month before its screening on
Columbus Day, October 10, 1983.
[29] He wrote in his diary that the film was "very effective and left me greatly depressed",
[30][26] and that it changed his mind on the prevailing policy on a "nuclear war".
[31] The film was also screened for the
Joint Chiefs of Staff. A government advisor who attended the screening, a friend of Meyer's, told him: "If you wanted to draw blood, you did it. Those guys sat there like they were turned to stone."[
citation needed] In 1987, Reagan and Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev signed the
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which resulted in the banning and reducing of their nuclear arsenal. In Reagan's memoirs, he drew a direct line from the film to the signing.
[26] Reagan supposedly later sent Meyer a telegram after the summit, saying: "Don't think your movie didn't have any part of this, because it did."
[10] During an interview in 2010, Meyer said that this telegram was a myth, and that the sentiment stemmed from a friend's letter to Meyer; he suggested the story had origins in editing notes received from the
White House during the production, which "may have been a joke, but it wouldn't surprise me, him being an old Hollywood guy."
[26]
The film also had impact outside the U.S. In 1987, during the era of Gorbachev's
glasnost and
perestroika reforms, the film was shown on
Soviet television. Four years earlier, Georgia Rep.
Elliott Levitas and 91 co-sponsors introduced a resolution in the
U.S. House of Representatives "[expressing] the sense of the
Congress that the
American Broadcasting Company, the
Department of State, and the
U.S. Information Agency should work to have the television movie
The Day After aired to the Soviet public."
[32]
