Last night, I watched The Day After, a made for TV movie from 1983. The story concerns the fate of several families in and around Lawrence Kansas when a NATO/Warsaw Pact confrontation escalates into nuclear war between the USSR and the USA.
The location was well chosen as Kansas City, at the time, was ringed by Minute Man missile silos and thus, was targeted by multiple direct nuclear hits.
Makeup and special effects were good for the era, specially the way realism that radiation poisoning was shown.
Jason Robards plays a surgeon at the University of Kansas whose staff tend to the injured population. They are the only surviving hospital as Kansas City was totally destroyed.
This film is worth watching now, the idiots in the White House make the spectre of nuclear war more real for me than any time in the recent past.
The Wikipedia discussion indicates it hit a cord with the TV viewers in its day, “With a 46 rating and a 62% share of the viewing audience during its initial broadcast, it was the seventh highest rated non-sports show up to that time and set a record as the highest-rated television film in history—a record it still held as recently as a 2009 report.”
You can watch it on YouTube. I checked out a copy from my local library.