World War II with Tom Hanks (2026) s01e20 Episode Script

1
September, 1945.
Germany and Japan
have surrendered unconditionally.
The destruction and death
of the Second World War is over.
There is jubilation
around the world.
The United States
and the Soviet Union
emerged from the conflict
as the globe's
two dominant superpowers.
They fought side by side
when they shared a common enemy.
But now
that that enemy has been defeated,
an American-Soviet rivalry
appears unavoidable.
All wars changed the world,
but none of them
changed the world
like the Second World War did.
Japan's on the march.
Germany's on the march.
No-one can imagine
the nightmare
they're about to unleash.
The most destructive war
in history.
Suddenly the world
is turned upside down
and all hell is let loose.
The West is stunned
by the speed of the advance.
You get the Allies,
led by the Big Three:
Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin.
Men who are dealing with
immensely complicated questions.
It's
the biggest military operation
of human history.
- The Allies have to come together,
not just militarily,
but industrial-scale.
It's a global perspective.
They have to fight
in every climate,
from the Arctic
to the jungles of the Pacific,
to the deserts of Africa.
and the depths of the ocean.
But there was
no certainty of victory.
It was going to be
a horrific bloodbath.
We see humans
at their absolute worst,
how they treat other human beings.
And we see them
at their absolute best,
willing to give their lives
that others might live.
- World War II was a struggle
in which there could be one victor
and one vanquished.
It's official.
It's all over. It's total victory.
The day of days
for America and her allies.
Peace, it's wonderful.
The war is over.
The entire world
begins to breathe and live again.
The Allies won this war
in the cause of freedom
and the ideals of anti-fascism,
the ideals of democracy.
One of the great legacies
of the Second World War
is that a disputatious, complicated,
often wrong nation
like the United States
can, in extremis,
marshal significant force
to do the right thing.
It took us a long time.
As Churchill
is alleged to have said,
"You can always
count on the Americans
to do the right thing once we've
exhausted every other possibility."
We spent blood and treasure
to defeat fascism.
The United States
had fulfilled Roosevelt's ambitions
to be the arsenal of democracy
to orders of magnitude
no-one could have predicted.
In New York, hundreds
of thousands lined the docks
to greet America's ships
and welcome home
their sons and daughters.
President Harry Truman is honoured
with a ticker tape parade
through the city's Canyon of Heroes.
Speaking in Central Park,
the President addresses the nation.
The world cannot afford
to let the co-operative spirit
of the Allies in this war
disintegrate. The world
simply cannot allow this to happen.
In Red Square,
thousands celebrate and honour
Generalissimo Joseph Stalin.
He's dressed
in a white Marshal's summer uniform
with shoulder boards,
like a Russian Romanov emperor.
Stalin
emerges from the Second World War
with astonishing,
almost religious prestige
in the Soviet Union.
Stalin and the United States
have made an alliance
that ultimately brings Hitler
and then Japan to its knees.
The spirit of co-operation
is so high
that Dwight Eisenhower,
the Supreme Allied Commander
in Europe,
probably one of the future
staunchest anti-communists
in American history,
stands right next to Stalin.
The bloodshed and horror
of the Second World War
is unprecedented in human history.
Nearly 70 million people are killed,
the majority civilians.
An estimated 27 million Soviets.
20 million Chinese.
10 million Germans and Japanese.
One million British and Americans.
And six million Jews.
Europe is destroyed.
The Brits are bankrupt.
The Americans and the Soviets,
they're demobilising.
What's really clear
coming out of World War II
is that the U.S. has an incredibly
important role to play in the world.
She hasn't been
physically touched by the war
other than Pearl Harbor.
America is the superpower.
There's every expectation that
some kind of peaceful coexistence
will emerge.
When the Americans talk about
the way they want
the international system to be,
they talk about the United Nations.
The United Nations, in many ways,
is Franklin Roosevelt's dream
come true.
During the war, it's Roosevelt
who says we must have
this international body.
It's a very hopeful group.
Lots of ideals, the UN Charter,
all of this comes into being
in 1945.
Leaders of the United Nations,
representing all but a fraction
of the Earth's population,
lay the post-war foundations
of international security.
- Out of the fires of war,
they wanted for there to be
an organisation
where we don't have 1939 again.
The United Nations
combines two ideas:
the first is the General Assembly,
where equal states can meet
and confer and make resolutions.
There is also
the wartime military alliance
between the Soviets,
the British, France,
and the United States,
as well as China.
And that's the Security Council
that will be the cornerstone
to ensuring peace.
Because it's not just
winning the battle of the day,
it's trying to prevent the next one.
One of the first challenges
is to determine how Germany
will fit into the post-war world.
We can't today perhaps understand
just how threatening
and powerful Germany seemed
to the Allied leadership in 1945.
They had just fought two world wars,
the greatest enemy of which
was Germany.
Ultimately, they realised
that control of Germany
will play a huge role
in determining Europe's future.
The American view
is just like the Soviet one
at the beginning, in the sense that
we've got to divide Germany.
We've got to make sure
that it can never rise up again.
That's the first urgent thing.
The Allies split Germany
into four occupation zones.
The British, Americans, and French
will govern western Germany.
The Soviets will govern the east.
Berlin, deep within the Soviet zone,
is divided between all four nations.
The wartime Allies
have very different plans
for the new Germany.
What Stalin is doing
is taking as much of the wealth,
as much of the factories,
as much of the productive capacity
and stockpiles
from occupied Germany
back to the Soviet Union.
Stalin would say
he was only taking
what the Germans owed him
for the horrible suffering
during the war.
Conversely, the western Allies
want Germany rehabilitated.
The Western idea
is not to devastate Germany
economically through reparations,
but bring them into global markets,
connect Germany to the world,
and through that
you'll get German people
who are incentivised to do things
that are constructive.
So it's gonna need industrialists,
middle managers,
local governance.
Many of these people
would have been members
of the Nazi party.
The crimes
of the Nazi Third Reich
are so horrific
that the wartime Allies determine
there must be an attempt
to achieve justice.
Nuremberg is highly symbolic
as the spiritual heart
of Nazi Germany
and as the place
where hopefully the demons
of Nazism can be purged.
Everyone in court
stands up as the tribunal enters.
Four judges and alternate members:
French, American,
British, and Russian.
The defendants
are to plead guilty or not guilty
to the charges against them.
Rudolf Hess.
22 Nazi leaders
are put on trial.
The next defendant called
was Ribbentrop.
Robert Jackson, chief prosecutor
of the Nuremberg tribunals,
announces that history will judge
the fairness of the trial
not by the convictions
and the executions it obtains,
but by the acquittals.
But the Soviets are expecting these
to be old-fashioned show trials.
Wilhelm Keitel.
Stalin had seen
how effective show trials could be
in his own consolidation of power
in the 1930s
and was happy
to give the Germans a trial
Hermann Wilhelm Goering.
and then hang them.
12 of the defendants
receive the death sentence.
Hermann Goeing
avoids the gallows
by committing suicide.
Seven are given
lengthy prison terms.
Although the Soviets object,
three are acquitted.
From '45 onwards,
you just have
this constant growing tension
between the United States
and Britain on one hand
and the Soviet Union on the other.
Stalin has to play a careful game.
He wants to keep what he has.
But he doesn't want to directly
antagonise the United States,
because the United States
is still much more powerful
economically. It has complete
air and sea control.
And it has the atom bomb.
World War II
devastated the Soviet Union.
Joseph Stalin
must rebuild his country,
ensure its security,
and consolidate his power.
But some of Stalin's
ambitions will conflict
with the post-war plans
of his Western allies.
Stalin saw the wartime alliance
as a way to defeat Nazi Germany,
but never something
that would
permanently reshape the globe
or that would make capitalism
and communism friends.
Stalin is an ideologue.
That can never be forgotten.
He believes that communism
and capitalism are incompatible,
that they will at some point
wage a great fight
for the future, and he believes
communism will win.
Stalin
is in an extraordinary position.
There's a moment when he reviews
what they've conquered
in World War II, looks at
the map of Europe and Russia
and says "We really haven't done
badly." An understatement.
The Red Army is in Berlin
and most countries to the east:
Poland, the Baltics,
Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria.
The Soviet wave
broke right around Berlin
and they just never receded.
- Stalin has done better
than any of the greatest
Czars in Russian history:
Peter the Great,
Catherine the Great. He's created
the biggest ever Russian empire.
Stalin intends
to create a buffer against the West,
militarily and ideologically.
He would say, we have now had
two world wars
where first imperial Russia,
then the Soviet Union
were invaded through Eastern
and Central Europe. I will make sure
that they are never a threat
to us gain.
For Stalin, the key thing
for Eastern and Central Europe
is that it must be loyal
to the Soviets. It's non-negotiable,
and the recipe for doing that
is communism.
He starts to create
a new economic centralised system
in Central and Eastern Europe:
controlled governments,
armies, secret police,
factories, agricultural systems,
with all of the decisions
effectively
for those countries' economies
being made in Moscow.
The Europe that the United States
wants to build
does not look very much
like the Europe the Soviets want.
The United States
has an enormous advantage
over the Soviet Union:
the atomic bomb.
The Soviets construct
numerous sites across the USSR
in order to accomplish
task number one.
Task number one
is to create a nuclear weapon
at breakneck speed.
No resources are too much.
The nuclear programme's
what the USSR was almost designed
to do. It's a big country
with lots of natural resources.
It can marshal and mobilise
for the nuclear project.
It's not completely
unlike the Manhattan Project,
which was also top-down,
secretive and resource-heavy.
The Soviet Union
puts the full weight
of its coercive power
behind this project.
Stalin puts
one of his most ruthless lieutenants
in charge,
the chief of his secret police.
Lavrentiy Beria is a man
of brutal ruthlessness and sadism,
one of the great monsters
of the Soviet story.
He rapes women,
he tortures victims himself.
But he's also
as efficient as a Swiss clock,
and he uses everything.
He happily turns off power
in several cities
just to power a project.
He gives scientists villas,
dachas, cars,
shooting rifles, holidays.
But at the same time,
he threatens to kill them
and their whole families
if they ever deceive him.
And he drives on the project.
It's not gonna be quick
for Stalin.
There's no way
that he can flip a switch
and acquire nuclear weapons.
But the USSR
can't sit on its laurels in 1946.
It has to be ready for new conflict.
After the turmoil
of the Second World War,
the people of Great Britain
and the United States
hope to return
to a normal, prosperous life
with peaceful coexistence
among nations
including with the Soviet Union.
For the past five years,
Stalin had been your friend.
He had been Uncle Joe.
But once again,
a familiar voice sounds a warning.
Winston Churchill's
in a pretty bad mood.
He was thrown out by the public
in a dramatic election defeat
in 1945.
His wife said
it might be a blessing in disguise.
He said, "Pretty good disguise."
He feels he won the war,
he saved Britain. And here he is
on the speaking circuit.
Winston Churchill
receives an invitation
to give a speech
at a small college
in President Truman's home state.
This is an opportunity
for Churchill
to say things he's got in his mind,
also an opportunity to spend time
with the President
of the United States of America.
He'll stand on that stage and tell
American people some home truths.
From Stettin in the Baltic
to Trieste in the Adriatic,
an iron curtain has descended
across the continent.
The famous Iron Curtain speech,
where he very clearly lays out
what is happening in Europe,
one side free, the other side not.
Behind that line,
all are subject to
a very high and in some cases
increasing measure of control
from Moscow.
Churchill sees Soviet communism,
Stalinism, as a greater threat,
really, as Nazism was
a generation before.
- This is certainly not
the liberated Europe
we fought to build up.
It's dynamite.
Because what Churchill is doing
is reframing the wartime alliance.
He's casting the Soviet empire
as a malign force in the world.
Truman, by the way,
is absolutely
on board with this speech.
But to Stalin,
this is just proof that Churchill
is a warmonger.
The alliance
that defeated Nazi fascism
is beginning to fray.
In late 1946,
the French
vote to elect a new government.
The Communist Party does well,
winning a plurality of seats
in the French legislature.
With the politics of Europe
in a state of extraordinary upheaval
because of
the catastrophe of the war,
you do have a high degree of concern
in Washington
about Western Europe
turning to communism.
There's a lot of unrest.
There are strikes
starting to take place in France.
There's a huge
pro-communist movement in Italy.
And Stalin thinks maybe he'll win
some of these countries
without having to send an army in.
To the south,
Stalin attempts to pressure Turkey
into giving him control
of the Turkish Straits,
which would allow access
to the Mediterranean
and the Middle East.
And in Greece, communist guerrillas
and government forces
are fighting an ongoing civil war.
These countries have never
been viewed as essential
to American security.
The United States does not have
a history of backing
the governments of Turkey or Greece.
The British
have been funding the Greek army
and sending weapons to Turkey.
But early in 1947
in the White House,
this document arrives, a shocker.
It's from the British government,
and it says, for a long time,
we've been supporting Greece
and Turkey, but we are broke.
This is a really important moment,
the winding down
of the British Empire.
By early 1947, they do not wish
to be a great force
in the east Mediterranean,
which they had been for a long time.
It becomes clear to Truman
and the American State Department
that this issue in Greece and Turkey
is a threat to national security.
They believe that if Greece
and Turkey become Stalinised,
these are dominoes,
and the rest of Western Europe
could possibly fall.
And the British
say to the Americans,
if you wanna make sure
these places remain pro-Western,
you as the United States
will have to use military force.
Now, that is a real
put up or shut up moment for Truman.
Truman is a very practical,
plainspoken, linear thinker.
He doesn't come into office
with some big vision
of what the world should be.
He picks up the mantle of FDR
and tries to build
a post-war order
according to what he thought
FDR would have done. But really,
from the moment of meeting Stalin
at Potsdam,
he starts
to formulate his own views.
And now Truman recognises
that this is a turning point.
In this post-war world, what happens
on another side of the globe
can be critical
to America's national security.
After deliberating
with his diplomatic
and military advisors,
President Truman addresses
a joint session of Congress.
I believe that it must be
the policy of the United States
to support free peoples who are
resisting attempted subjugation
by armed minorities
or by outside pressure.
We must assist free peoples
to work out their own destinies
in their own way.
The United States
is shifting away from isolationism.
The Truman Doctrine
is now U.S. policy.
The Truman Doctrine
is the culmination,
going all the way back
to Woodrow Wilson,
of setting out American ideals,
American principles,
but this time backing them
with more power, more force,
because Truman's vision
is that the U.S. will support
any country
resisting communist aggression.
Any country.
- It is difficult to overstate
what a dramatic departure
the Truman Doctrine is for the U.S.
In 1941, the United States
had to be dragged into war.
But what Truman is saying is now,
we're ready to take the fight
wherever democracy requires us.
We must take
immediate and resolute action.
Truman asks Congress,
and he receives $400 million
of military aid
for Greece and Turkey.
It's only the beginning.
This is a radical shift, not only
in the way that America had thought
about its place in the world,
but in where Truman's own line was.
It's actually putting American power
behind a global ideological contest
with the Soviet Union.
As the American-Soviet
alliance fades,
a contest between superpowers
emerges.
Europe is in the grip of one of
the coldest winters in memory.
People have little to eat,
and struggle to stay warm.
They begin to despair
at the slow pace
of post-war recovery.
Western governments
have not been able
to rebuild their economies.
Agriculture has been destroyed.
Transportation and manufacturing
have been destroyed.
And there's
an enormous refugee crisis
that is ongoing.
During the war, there was
the deliberate forced movement
of populations. So there are
millions and millions of refugees
on the roads, in camps, in towns,
cities and villages not their own.
Truman and his advisors
fear that Europe
is on the verge of collapse.
General George Marshall,
one of the chief architects
of American victory
in World War II,
believes the whole world
hangs in the balance.
What Truman and George Marshall,
his Secretary of State, realise
is you need to
rebuild the European economy.
It has to be not just
the militarised Truman Doctrine,
but there needs to be
a way of getting money
to support Western European
or capitalist states.
The Marshall Plan
is a $13.3 billion, essentially,
handout to foreign governments
to help these countries
rebuild themselves, westernise,
and stabilise politically.
And it would be
keeping people alive
in places where starvation
was an actual real thing.
So it's done for altruistic
reasons, but also geopolitical ones.
President Truman
and George Marshall
believe that the best guarantee
against communism
are well-fed bellies,
good schools, orderly societies,
the kind of things that can only
happen in a prosperous economy.
Stalin
recognises how Marshall's plan
threatens his objectives.
To him, it's another trick.
It's another American way
to try to undermine the Soviet Union
and pull Europe
into the American orbit.
It's presented
as Stalin's typical paranoia.
Actually, he's got every reason
to distrust the West.
He was right.
- Today, our aid
to the free nations of Europe
is helping them
to resist dictatorship.
Stalin understands
that Western goods
with Western money
would lead to Western values
of liberal democracy,
of open society,
and also would spread
the attractions of capitalism.
And it would
undermine Stalin's own rule.
For him, the Marshall Plan
must be stomped out.
Stalin directs the countries
under his command
to reject the American offer.
Very clearly,
Stalin has drawn a line
and said, this is my turf,
this is your turf, and that's that.
Stalin expects
to maintain complete control
of the East European countries
liberated from Germany
by the Red Army.
But one nation will test him.
Czechoslovakia is deeply connected
to the Western European economy.
The Czechs have advanced industry.
They could become wealthy
with access to Western capital
via the Marshall Plan.
The democratically elected
government in Prague
is led by President Edvard Benes.
Several of its ministers are members
of the Czech Communist Party.
Stalin pressures Benes
to reject American aid
and compels the Czech communists
to seize control.
Over the next few months,
local communists stir up unrest
throughout the country.
The citizens of Czechoslovakia
haven't gotten the memo
that they're the subordinates
of Soviet power.
In 1948,
there is a communist-led coup
in Prague
that topples the Benes government
and places
another East European country
firmly in Moscow's orbit.
Now, Stalin
decides to take fewer risks
in Eastern Europe, no risks at all.
He doesn't believe
that ultimately communism
will flower politically
and economically,
and that working peoples
around the world will embrace it
because it is the true,
scientific approach to civilisation.
He believes in power.
Across Eastern Europe,
he crushes any hint of liberalism,
free speech.
He doubles down
on his Soviet system.
He arrests
tens of thousands of people.
More people are sent to the Gulags
after the war
than before the war in the 1930s
during the Great Terror.
Marshall Aid
is an essential component
in the American post-war
recovery plan for Europe.
But its success widens
the increasing divide
economically and politically
between East and West.
We are now in a bipolar world.
It's a world of rivalry
like the world had never seen.
The Soviet Union has proved
again and again
that it cannot be trusted.
And it's a race.
It's a competition for pre-eminence,
and it's ultimately going to be
a competition for security.
And Berlin,
the former capital
of the Third Reich,
is at the centre of the conflict.
In the summer of 1948,
billions of Marshall Aid dollars
flow into the countries
of Western Europe.
Europe is slowly
but surely
edging back
towards economic health.
Careful planning for the use
of the $324 million allotted
has helped Western Germany
temporarily to its feet.
Great Britain
and the United States
merge their German occupation zones.
The French will soon join them.
A common currency is introduced,
the Deutschmark.
Stalin understands
that the Western powers
intend to establish a strong
and independent West Germany.
Since the end of the war,
Great Britain, France,
the United States
and the Soviet Union
have occupied Berlin. It lies
deep within
Soviet-dominated Eastern Germany.
Now, imagine for someone
as paranoid as Stalin
having these Western militaries
going back and forth
between Berlin
and the Western occupation zones.
This is a source of instability,
disruption, dangerous.
Stalin wants
to sever direct contact
between Berlin
and the western half of Germany.
He doesn't
want to invade West Berlin,
because that's an act of war,
but what he believes he can do
is he can blockade Berlin.
- At this time,
Berlin is still a pile of rubble.
it has
very little tactical significance
for the United States government.
- So it really made no sense
to keep West Berlin,
and Stalin believed that in the end
the West would blink and withdraw.
On June 24th,
the Soviets cut all road,
rail and water routes
linking West Berlin
to Western Germany.
Suddenly
the trains stopped.
Traffic between Berlin
and the Western zones was banned.
The famous autobahns were deserted,
and even canal traffic
was at a standstill.
The blockade
even cut electric power
and put out 75% of the lights.
Truman is a pragmatic person.
This could be a moment
where he says,
it's not worth saving this city,
because I don't know
what Stalin's gonna do.
I don't know how dangerous
this is gonna be. Instead, he says,
we're not going anywhere.
The U.S. and Britain realise
this is Stalin testing the wire.
It'll be Berlin first,
then it'll be elsewhere.
And the Allies choose
to make it a red line.
Keep in mind, it's 1948.
For Truman, it's an election year.
It's the first post-war election.
The firs in the nuclear age.
The first in the television age.
He's aware that all eyes are on him.
The British and Americans ask,
what can we do short of war?
And the answer is,
they can keep Berlin supplied.
Not by road, not by rail,
not by canal, but by air.
The British and the Americans
construct an air bridge
into West Berlin.
- The plan is to deliver it
on airplanes, everything
that a modern city needs to survive.
Got food, got coal, you got fuel,
you've got medical supplies.
It's a superb example
of an operation
that's pulled together very quickly.
Huge numbers of aircraft,
plans flying round the clock.
These British and American officers,
the same officers that organised
the war's triumphs of logistics.
A continuous stream
of cargo planes
land in West Berlin
every few minutes.
But to reach the city,
they must fly over hundreds of miles
of Soviet-controlled territory.
They're choosing to defy Stalin.
And if you fill the airspace
with military aircraft,
even though they're unarmed,
you have to assume
that Stalin might strike back.
You have
all this military capacity.
You have the paranoia and fear
in Washington and in Moscow.
You have
this hall of mirrors quality.
The two countries are involved
in a kind of escalatory spiral.
Truman
now deploys dozens of B-29s
to air bases in England,
the same plane
that dropped the atomic bombs
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Nuclear weapons go
from being a secret weapon
to a public strategic weapon.
The pressure on Truman
at this point is incalculable
He knows that this move
could be provocative enough
to start World War III.
But the Americans are hoping
that this strong show of resolve
will encourage Stalin to back off.
They are gambling that Stalin
does not want World War III.
After nearly a year
of daily international tension,
Stalin halts the blockade.
Here's a glimpse
of Berlin itself
as the first trains and vehicles
got going at night.
All routes
that connect Berlin to the West
are reopened.
Restrictions within Berlin
between the Soviet zone
and American, British,
and French zones
are lifted as well.
Stalin set up a challenge
for the West.
He was probing the West.
He needed to know
how far he could go.
But in fact,
Truman rose to the challenge,
and in the end,
it was Stalin who blinked.
As relations
between the United States
and the Soviet Union
continue to deteriorate,
Western governments plan
to provide collective security
against possible Soviet aggression.
When the United States
and the Soviet Union
look like they can be
on the verge of war,
it became obvious
that the United States
couldn't continue to ad hoc this,
to lurch from crisis to crisis.
The post-war path
that FDR anticipated
was one in which the United Nations
would help adjudicate disputes
and rule the peace.
What he was not able
to fully anticipate
was that a struggle
against his former ally,
the Soviet Union, would become
the defining force of the era.
Representatives
from Europe, Canada,
and the United States
meet in Washington to discuss
the formation
of a new military alliance,
the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization, NATO.
The idea is to create
what military strategists
call deterrence.
It's an alliance
that is created to make sure
that the Russians know
that if they attack one state
in the alliance,
they could theoretically face a war
against all states in that alliance.
NATO is created
to keep the Americans in,
the Russians out,
and the Germans down.
What Harry Truman does
with the Marshall Plan,
with the Truman Doctrine, with NATO,
is establish an infrastructure
of deterrence
to try to contain
the communistic influence.
If there is anything inevitable
in the future,
it is the will
of the people of the world
for freedom and for peace.
But the world
is about to cross a threshold
from which there is no return.
In
an appropriately desolate landscape,
the Soviet Union prepares
to test its first atomic bomb.
Lavrentiy Beria,
Stalin's kind of mega-manager,
arrives to supervise in a little hut
in the middle of nowhere.
He's incredibly nervous.
If it doesn't work,
his downfall is quite likely.
He watches from a safe distance.
The test is a success.
Stalin's overjoyed
and relieved.
Now he's got an equal footing
with the West,
and they cannot push him around
any more.
- After this period
when Stalin's struggling to catch up
with America, he's back in the game.
Truman's a poker player,
and for these years after the war,
he had an ace in the hole.
He had the bomb, the Soviets didn't.
That surety was gone.
There was no turning back.
You've got two superpowers,
two nuclear powers
that are facing each other
across the world,
and all of a sudden
the world is much less stable.
An 18th or 19th century scholar
would say, oh,
you're gonna have a war
between those two powers.
Inevitable, they're the two great
superpowers. But atomic weapons
change things. If the Soviets
and the United States can't compete
in the military sense directly
because it's too dangerous,
well, then you compete indirectly.
After 1949, there'll be
one war after the other:
big wars,
small wars, guerrilla wars,
proxy wars
between the two superpowers.
But what hasn't happened
is the big one.
There has not been a World War III,
a general war involving the globe
that involves nuclear weapons.
World War II
began in a universe
that would have been recognisable
50 years before.
It ends in a world
that wouldn't have been recognisable
to anyone, because of
the splitting of the atom.
The moral
and philosophical underpinnings
that enabled the Allies
to triumph in World War II,
an appreciation for the individual,
support
for the dignity of all peoples,
a bias for democracy,
have for almost a century now
enabled us to live and thrive
in a world
where Armageddon is always at hand.
But it hasn't come,
not least
because we've done the right thing.
The Second World War
alters everything.
National, political,
even moral boundaries are redrawn.
What was inconceivable
before the war
is now part of the fabric of life.
The conflict that follows,
the Cold War,
poses even graver consequence,
because now
for the first time in human history
the world
could literally destroy itself.
One war replaced by another
and the world remains on edge.
As President Dwight D. Eisenhower
observed,
"The only way
to win the next world war
is to prevent it."