The class of Nuke 'Em High

As a teenager, though, I fully expected not to live out my life without seeing worldwide nuclear holocaust, though in that self-preservationist way that you forget pain and trauma, the constant low-level terror of that expectation has receded. It comes slamming back when I rewatch ‘The Day After’ and ‘Threads’ and ‘Testament’ and ‘Special Bulletin,’ the four 1983 television movies that contributed in a big way to my adolescent nuclear neuroses. I'm 14 again, and lying awake at night wondering when the bombs were gonna come. There was a fatalistic inevitability to the certainty that was numbing.

On the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, I look back at the films of the 1980s that helped make Generation X a collective psychological basket case back then.