I didn't know ANYONE, back then, who became anti-war/anti-nukes/ban the bomb, pro-USSR after seeding that movie, when it came out.
“I didn’t know ANYONE, back then, who became anti-war/anti-nukes/ban the bomb, pro-USSR after seeing that movie, when it came out.”
A media slug blubbered about Reagan’s election: “I didn’t know *anyone* who voted for him.”
Guess you hung out with a better class of person, but that movie embedded in the public consciousness the idea that dummies and loonies could accidentally start a nuclear war that would destroy us all.
It embedded the notion that if anyone ever launched, everyone everywhere would inevitably use *all* their nukes in an orgy of destruction, completely without restraint.
It was the first portrayal I can remember of the military as mentally ill and stupid.
It presented the Soviet nuclear threat as immensely more dire than it really was.
It presumed the failure of mutually assured destruction, creating the illusion that Americans were totally unprotected from nuclear holocaust.
Perhaps no one you knew fell for this, but a lot of people did. Even in the 1980s I heard talk radio whining about the scenario. When a caller told them that the best minds on both sides had been working for decades on methods to prevent it, they were actually surprised to hear it.
They thought the world was just like Strangelove, and it could happen at any second.