I was just browing Youtube for something to pass my time on Saturday and came upon a list of Cold War era movies about nuclear annihilation. Like many folks, who were born near the end of the Cold War, I've seen movies like Dr. Strangelove and Day After with the detached thought of, "they're just actors" and "Everyone is being stupid in this movie". 

Well, I noticed a movie I never heard about on the list and it caught my attention, since it was co-produced by PBS (an odd choice for an old nuclear apocalypse film). The movie was made in 1983 and is called "Testament".

No, it's not a religious meditation on nuclear warfare, but an average person's view of the nuclear apocalypse. The nukes have already been launched and the cities are already gone, the ones left in small towns and suburbs are isolated, lost, their supplies running low, and radiation poisoning is coming in. It's very haunting and brutally honest portrait from a human angle without any semblance of hope. It's bleak and unapologetic about the future. Children dying, people going insane from radiation poisoning, and suicide is common without any humor that you might see from modern apocalypse films.

If you want to watch, I'll leave a link below, but be forewarned get some kleenex tissues ready.

Here's the youtube full version of the movie, it has ads.