Tensions between America and the Eastern Bloc escalate into a devastating nuclear exchange.  We see the bleak results unleashed on one of our large cities and its populace. There is an extended sequence in this made for television movie, “The Day After”, detailing a very harrowing nuclear missile attack on Kansas City, USA.  It is an interesting collage of actual documentary footage detailing the effects on structures and the landscape by the detonation of atomic weapons, sound effects, and newly created film effects of buildings and bodies vaporizing in the flash heat fires which accompany nuclear blasts.  Awful.
Pretty harrowing moviefare as a man and his son wander a wasteland attempting to survive a post apocalyptic North American landscape.  The cause of the cataclysm is never fully divulged.  We do know that most plant and animal life has been wiped out and resources such as food and water are in short supply.  Based on Cormac McCarthy’s book of the same name.