Effects on policymakers - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After#Reception
After seeing the film, Ronald Reagan wrote that the film was very effective and left him depressed.
President Ronald Reagan watched the film more than a month before its screening, on Columbus Day, October 10, 1983.[24] He wrote in his diary that the film was "very effective and left me greatly depressed,"[25][21] and that it changed his mind on the prevailing policy on a "nuclear war".[26] 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] Four years later, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was signed and in Reagan's memoirs he drew a direct line from the film to the signing.[21] 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."[8] However, in a 2010 interview, 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."[21]
The film also had impact outside the U.S. In 1987, during the era of Mikhail 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."[27]
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