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=== Effects on policymakers === [[File:Official Portrait of President Reagan 1981.jpg|thumb|220px|After seeing the film, [[Ronald Reagan]] wrote that the film had been very effective and left him depressed.]] US President [[Ronald Reagan]] watched the film more than a month before its screening on [[Columbus Day]], October 10, 1983.<ref name="Bulletin">{{Cite web|url=https://thebulletin.org/facing-nuclear-reality-35-years-after-the-day-after/|title=Facing nuclear reality, 35 years after The Day After|last=Stover|first=Dawn|website=Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists|date=December 13, 2018 |language=en-US|access-date=2019-09-10}}</ref> He wrote in his diary that the film was "very effective and left me greatly depressed"<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.reaganfoundation.org/ronald-reagan/white-house-diaries/diary-entry-10101983/|title=Diary Entry - 10/10/1983 {{!}} The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute|website=www.reaganfoundation.org|access-date=2019-09-10}}</ref><ref name=Empire/> and that it changed his mind on the prevailing policy on a "nuclear war".<ref>Reagan, ''[[An American Life]]'', 585</ref> The film was also screened for the [[Joint Chiefs of Staff]]. A government advisor who attended the screening, a friend of Meyer, told him: "If you wanted to draw blood, you did it. Those guys sat there like they were turned to stone."<ref name="Empire" /> In 1987, Reagan and [[Soviet Premier]] [[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.<ref name=Empire/> Reagan supposedly later sent Meyer a [[Electrical telegraph|telegram]] after the summit: "Don't think your movie didn't have any part of this, because it did."<ref name="fallout"/> During an interview in 2010, Meyer said that the 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."<ref name=Empire/> There is also an [[apocryphal]] story which claims that, after seeing the film, Ronald Reagan said: "That will not happen on my watch."{{citation needed|date=September 2024}} The film also had impact outside the United States. In 1987, during the era of Gorbachev's ''[[glasnost]]'' and ''[[perestroika]]'' reforms, the film was shown on [[Soviet television]]. Four years earlier, Georgia Representative [[Elliott Levitas]] and 91 co-sponsors introduced a resolution in the [[U.S. House of Representatives]] "[expressing] the sense of the [[United States Congress|Congress]] that the [[American Broadcasting Company]], the [[United States Department of State|Department of State]], and the [[U.S. Information Agency]] should work to have the television movie ''The Day After'' aired to the Soviet public."<ref name=Thomas>"thomas.loc.gov, 98th Congress (1983β1984), H.CON.RES.229"</ref>
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