Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War (2024) s01e03 Episode Script
Institutional Insanity
1
[explosions]
[newscaster 1] So the Russian military
is really an overmatch for the Ukrainians.
It will probably quickly dissolve
into sort of an insurgency,
like we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan.
[newscaster 2]
Sources say officials in the US
fear that Kyiv
could fall to Russia within days.
[in Ukrainian] Russia carried out
strikes on our military infrastructure
and border guards.
In many Ukrainian cities,
explosions were heard.
[helicopter blades whirring]
[reporter, in Russian] They are flying
towards the airport, bombing the airport.
You can hear that there is a battle.
[compelling music playing]
[V. Rudenko, in Ukrainian] Fastest way
to Kyiv was through Hostomel.
Uh, they opened fire
on the airport facilities.
[compelling music continues]
You can see the destroyed, burned Mriya.
Eh, the Russians
hit it
with an unguided missile.
They flew straight to the runway
and started hitting our air defense units.
[man] One, two, three, four, five, six,
seven, eight.
[helicopter blades whirring]
[Rudenko] They did not expect resistance.
We began shooting down choppers
and to destroy Russian troops.
[man] Yes! Yes!
[man shouting excitedly]
[Sergii Solodchenko] This was the first
line of defense of Kyiv.
[indistinct shouting]
For two days,
our boys did not let them land.
[tense music playing]
[Rudenko] The Russians did manage
to capture the airport.
But they lost momentum.
After we moved to a safe distance,
we used our artillery
to damage the airfield.
That way, we gained time
to move the defense forces
to block the enemy from invading Kyiv.
[tense music rising]
[Graff, in English]
Had the Russian military been able
to succeed in that moment,
it would have been able to deliver
its most elite forces
straight to the front lines of Kyiv.
So the ability of the Ukrainian military
to resist that airborne invasion
at the Hostomel Airport
is probably the turning point
of the entire war.
[indistinct]
[Kyrylo Budanov, in Ukrainian] When they
failed to parade into Kyiv, they froze.
It turned into a full-scale war.
[opening theme music playing]
[music fades]
[loud blast]
[Audra J. Wolfe] In the early years
of the Cold War,
the United States treated nuclear weapons
not only as if they were something
that could be used,
but something that could be survived.
[tense music playing]
[broadcaster] Let us face, without panic,
the reality of our times,
the fact that atom bombs
may someday be dropped on our cities.
And let us prepare for survival.
[Graff] In the 1950s,
there was an immense effort given
to perfectly planning how nuclear war
would unfold in the United States.
And the federal government
launches a whole series
of public education campaigns
to get America ready for nuclear war.
[broadcaster] You are the target of those
who would trample
the liberties of free men.
You are in the crosshairs
of the bomb sites.
An enemy is
[Wolfe] The United States was providing
messages to its citizens
that were simultaneously
terrifying and not terribly coherent.
On the one hand,
the message was that the Soviet Union
was this diabolical nation that was
hell-bent on American destruction.
That this was an existential threat.
[broadcaster] Today, every state,
every city and town,
is within striking range
of a determined enemy.
[Wolfe] On the other hand, it was telling
Americans that a nuclear holocaust
was absolutely survivable.
Something that you could probably survive
by going to a fallout shelter
in the event of a nuclear attack,
or investing in a fallout shelter
for your own backyard.
[Alex Wellerstein] They have a program
that starts up in 1950
called "Civil Defense."
The idea is, we don't want to be attacked
by these weapons, but we might.
And if we do, yeah, some people
are just gonna die straight out,
but there are gonna be people
who are at a distance from that bomb,
where what they do matters.
[broadcaster] First, you duck,
and then you cover.
[Wellerstein] Duck and Cover
is one of the first big campaigns,
training children to get under their desks
if a nuclear bomb is coming.
Not because your desk is magical.
If the bomb incinerates you and your desk,
your desk isn't gonna help.
But because there are distances
at which doing that
is gonna prevent
the ceiling collapsing on you,
and you might survive that way.
[alarm blaring]
[Kathleen Bailey] A siren went off.
We were all told to file into the hallway.
We had to get down
on our hands and knees and put
Lace our fingers behind our heads
and keep our heads
against the base of the lockers.
We remained there for so long
that I got cramped up.
And then the principal came and said,
"This is the way you must remain
if there is a nuclear war
because your parents will come here
if they can and find you."
That phrase, "if they can,"
stayed with me
as a little girl for a very long time.
Nightmares, nightmares, nightmares.
- [loud blast]
- [children screaming]
- [explosion in distance]
- [screaming]
[Lori Clune] The fear is tremendous.
Children were wearing dog tags to school.
This right here
is the metal identification tag
that we are urging every child
and teenager in America to wear
as soon as possible.
[Clune] How long did it take
those children to realize,
"Wait, this is so that my parents
can find my body later"?
And the idea
that it could happen at any moment,
that we were minutes away at any time
from a potential nuclear blast,
and the damage could be devastating.
[Wellerstein] Nuclear war
becomes the backdrop
of almost everything
that takes place in America.
There was a real sense
that communism was on the march.
That communism was succeeding
around the world.
That fear pushes government officials
to encourage, "Let's develop more bombs."
"Let's develop bigger bombs."
It encourages Truman, famously,
to approve developing the hydrogen bomb.
[tense music playing]
[broadcaster] History turns its most
ominous page far out in mid-Pacific,
where in the Enewetak Atoll,
the world's most awesome weapon
is readied for detonation.
The Army, Navy, and Air Force
work against time,
under the supervision of scientists,
who have labored for years to develop
the thermonuclear weapon.
[Graff] The shift from an atomic bomb
to thermonuclear bombs
is a move to weapons orders
of magnitude larger
than the atomic bombs dropped
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
A thermonuclear device
is not just a larger atomic bomb.
It's a fundamentally different process.
An atomic bomb relies on nuclear fission,
splitting of atoms,
whereas a hydrogen bomb,
a thermonuclear device,
relies on nuclear fusion
and sort of the combination of atoms.
The first workable thermonuclear device
comes in the closing days
of the Truman Administration,
and it's tested
in what was known as the "Mike Test."
We have minutes to go before the first
flier's Mike shot of Operation Ivy.
If everything goes according to plan,
we'll soon see the largest explosion
ever set off on the face of the Earth.
[announcer] It is now
30 seconds to zero time.
Put on goggles or turn away.
Do not remove goggles or face burst
until ten seconds after the first light.
[loud blast echoing]
[Gregg Herken] The Mike Test
was a very successful test.
It was even more powerful
than it was expected to be.
It was ten and a half million tons
equivalent of TNT.
[pilot] Two-six, approaching ground zero.
Elugelab is completely gone.
Nothing there but water.
[broadcaster] The outlined island
in the center is former Elugelab,
"the zero island."
Sections of the islands on either side
have been chopped off.
The crater is roughly a mile in diameter.
In profile, the crater gradually
slopes down to a maximum depth
of some 175 feet,
or equivalent to the height
of a 17-story building.
Compared to the skyline of New York,
this means that with
the Empire State Building as zero point,
the fireball alone would engulf about
one-quarter of the island of Manhattan.
[Graff] The event
horrified and shocked everyone
who witnessed it or read about it.
And you have a much more
public debate about it,
including real horror
by some of the people
who had been part
of the Manhattan Project.
For years, Oppenheimer believed
that the American people needed to know
that there was a nuclear arms race.
[Oppenheimer] The decision
to seek or not to seek
international control of atomic energy,
the decision to try to make
or not to make the hydrogen bomb,
these are rooted
in complex technical things.
But they touch the very basis
of our morality.
It is grave danger for us
that these decisions are taken
on the basis of facts held secret.
[Herken] He wanted
to inform the American people
of how destructive these weapons were.
[Graff] Albert Einstein himself wrote,
"General annihilation beckons."
[unsettling music playing]
[Tom Z. Collina] These were the kind
of weapons that were so destructive
that presidents realized that if we ever
got involved in a nuclear war,
it would be the end
of civilization, right?
There would be nothing left.
[crowd cheering]
[festive band music playing]
[David Holloway] Eisenhower,
after he was elected,
was informed about the first
hydrogen bomb test.
He was just shaken.
[brooding music playing]
[Eisenhower] How far have we come
in man's long pilgrimage,
from darkness toward the light?
Are we nearing the light?
A day of freedom
and of peace for all mankind?
Or are the shadows of another night
closing in upon us?
Science seems ready to confer upon us
as its final gift,
the power to erase human life
from this planet.
[Holloway] The Soviet leaders also were
shocked when they read about this test.
And Lavrentiy Beria,
who was in charge of the whole
police and intelligence apparatus,
pulls together scientists who have already
been working on the hydrogen bomb,
and prepares a memo for Stalin saying,
"This will be very expensive,
but our enemies are developing it,
so we have to develop it too."
[tense music playing]
[Holloway] In 1953, the Soviet Union
tested the so-called layer cake design,
which had a yield of about 400 kilotons.
This situation then opens things up
to a kind of war of nerves.
[broadcaster] 1954, and the US
prepared to set off a nuclear explosion
that would dwarf the atomic blasts
at Hiroshima and Nagasaki
to the category of small firecrackers.
The newest and most powerful
atomic weapon yet tested
was to be detonated in the South Pacific
in the midst of the Marshall Islands.
[Serhii Plokhy]
The Castle Bravo test was done
in the Pacific testing grounds
at Bikini Atoll.
That was the location where
one of the first American atomic bombs
were tested back in the late 1940s.
There were people
on the other atolls in the Pacific.
So they were completely unaware,
unprepared to deal
with the explosion of the hydrogen bombs.
The Castle Bravo test becomes the scariest
moment yet of the nuclear age.
We didn't really understand
how thermonuclear bombs worked,
and the scientists
and the military leaders
who were present that day
were horrified by what they saw
because what they saw was a bomb
that went off several times larger
and more powerful
than anything that they had imagined.
[dramatic music playing]
[Herken] The Bravo test was meant
to be seven megatons,
but it turned out it was 15 megatons.
[Graff] It turns out to be
three times larger
than anything we had imagined.
Fifteen megatons of explosive power.
A four-mile-wide fireball
that evaporates
almost everything in its path.
[rumbling]
[loud blast]
[dramatic music playing]
[music fades]
[seagulls squawking]
[Plokhy] The atolls and islands
populated by the natives
were affected by the radiation.
[distant blast]
[Plokhy] Many of them could see
the mushroom of that explosion going up.
They were talking about the sun
actually coming from the west
instead of coming from the east.
[Neisen Laukon] I grew up on the island.
I remember people were
really, really sick all the time.
Babies were born, and no shell
to the back of their head, you know?
You could see their brain.
[mournful music playing]
[Plokhy] The area around Bikini Atoll,
the so-called security area and zone,
was cleared from all the ships.
Or at least they tried to do that.
But one of the Japanese trailers,
Lucky Dragon,
ended up in the area of the explosion.
[distant rumble]
[Terumi Tanaka, in Japanese]
The destructive power of the hydrogen bomb
was so powerful that it far exceeded
the estimates of Americans who tested it.
So even though the ship
was outside the security zone,
there was a lot of radioactive fallout.
We called it the death ash.
[device crackling]
[Plokhy, in English]
It was an international scandal.
[unsettling music playing]
Japan, the only country
hit by nuclear weapons,
becomes one of the first casualties
of this new weapon too.
The fisherman's dying wish is,
"Let me be the last person
killed by this awful weapon."
We didn't really know
how to use nuclear bombs.
This was a new technology,
and the military needed to learn
how to fight with it.
And the way that they learned
was by firing off
a lot of nuclear bombs all over the world
[wind whistling]
[Graff]including
domestic nuclear testing
in the desert above Las Vegas.
[blast]
[Graff] This is probably
the high watermark
of the nation's public
nuclear war planning.
There were documents and plans
showing how every aspect
of the US government
could lead a nuclear war-damaged country.
[somber music playing]
[Daniel Ellsberg] I arrive at Rand
as a consultant,
having gotten out of the Marines.
I was assigned to a study group
working on a problem then
of deterring a Russian surprise attack
that would disarm us basically,
and let them, in effect, rule the world.
It seemed morally almost obligatory
to try to develop an ability
to retaliate in kind.
This was a very smart bunch.
Including my mentor at Rand,
Albert Wohlstetter,
and my friend Herman Kahn.
The smartest group of people
I ever did associate with.
It turns out, by the way,
intelligence is not a very good
guarantee of wisdom.
Deterrence is the art of producing
in the mind of the enemy
the fear to attack.
[Ellsberg] In the movie Dr. Strangelove,
many of the words
are taken from Herman Kahn,
the leader
inventor of the doomsday machine,
on his book on thermonuclear war.
The doomsday machine is terrifying.
[chuckles] It's simple to understand.
And completely credible and convincing.
Gee, I wish we had one of them
doomsday machines, Stainesey.
[interviewer] What did you think of
Dr. Strangelove when you saw that movie?
See, that was a documentary.
Everything in Dr. Strangelove
could have happened.
[clears throat]
Mr. President
[clicks tongue]
about, uh, 35 minutes ago,
General Jack Ripper,
the commanding general
of, um, Burpelson Air Force Base,
issued an order
to the 34 B-52s of his wing,
which were airborne at the time,
as part of a special exercise
we were holding called Operation Dropkick.
Now, it appears that the order
called for the planes
to attack their targets inside Russia.
[clamoring]
[Turgidson] The planes are fully armed
with nuclear weapons
with an average load of, um,
40 megatons each.
[Ellsberg] The notion that only
the president had the authority
to launch those weapons was a myth.
- [interviewer] That's not true? So
- It has never been true.
Many other people can launch this.
Not only the Joint Chiefs.
There have always been arrangements
for lower-level people,
if they believe that a war is going on,
or if communications are cut off,
to launch those weapons.
Then why haven't you radioed the planes
countermanding the go code?
Well, I'm afraid we're unable
to communicate with any of the aircraft.
[Ellsberg] When Buck Turgidson,
the head of the Air Force in the movie,
says to the president,
"The planes are sent off
and can't be recalled."
"They might as well go now.
They're on their way."
That was an Air Force attitude,
pretty much.
I don't think too many people realize
that Eisenhower had said
there's to be no planning
for limited war with the Soviets.
At Rand, I was given full access
to the war plans.
I was one of a handful of civilians
who did see these plans,
and they were strange and horrible.
Uh, terrible plans.
They seemed like the worst plans
that had ever existed.
Eisenhower felt any fighting with Soviets,
even if it starts small,
is going to escalate very quickly
to a larger war.
And under Eisenhower,
that meant full-scale nuclear war.
We anticipated a world
of peace and cooperation.
The calculated pressures
of aggressive communism
have forced us instead
to live in a world of turmoil.
[Ellsberg] The plan was to hit
every city in Russia and China
with thermonuclear weapons.
H-bombs.
[loud blast]
[foreboding music playing]
[Ellsberg] So I thought
that it would put them off-balance
to know how many people
altogether would be killed by this.
So I drafted a question, one among many,
to be given to the Joint Chiefs
by the Secretary of Defense.
"If you carried out your plans,
how many people would be killed
in Russia and China alone?"
I really thought
they wouldn't have an answer.
But they did have an answer,
and it was top secret.
"For the president's eyes only."
And it's a graph with,
on the horizontal axis, "time" in months,
and then millions of dead
on the vertical axis.
The line began at 275 million people.
And it rose, as fallout killed
people over the next six months,
to 325 million people.
This was Russia and China alone.
So I sent another question
that I'd drafted.
"How many all together?"
And that just took them a week to answer,
but this time in the form of a table.
Another hundred million
in the satellites of East Europe, Poland,
and Hungary, Romania.
In West Europe, another hundred million
depending on which way the wind blew.
And a third hundred million
in areas contiguous to the Soviet Union
like Afghanistan, Japan, and India.
So the total,
in addition to the 325 million
in Russia and China,
was 600 million.
A hundred Holocausts.
[tense music rising]
Now, the population
of the world at that time
was 3,600,000,000.
That's one-fifth
of the world's population.
It struck me as
the most evil and insane plan
that had ever existed
in the history of humanity.
[tense music continues]
[Ellsberg] This is institutional insanity.
[music fades]
[inaudible]
[Scott Anderson] When Eisenhower came in,
he initiated this policy.
The "New Look" policy.
"New Look" was, for the first time,
the Americans reserve the right
to use massive retaliation
if it felt that its vital
national security interests
were under threat anywhere in the world.
And the Soviets immediately
turned around and said the same thing.
So it froze the battlefield,
certainly in Europe.
And it opened up the entire
rest of the world as the new battlefield,
as the playground of the two powers.
Can't do anything in Europe, so you have
to make mischief everywhere else.
So that's when you see this explosion
around the world of covert operations
and these massive intelligence
and defense conglomerates
that both the superpowers have.
The amazing thing
is that prior to World War II,
the United States never had a permanent
foreign intelligence agency at all.
[ominous music playing]
[Tim Weiner] You can trace
the roots of the CIA
to a mansion in Berlin
in the summer of 1945.
The war in Europe is over. Hitler is dead.
Berlin is in ruins.
But in a well-pointed mansion
in the center of the city are two men.
One is Allen Dulles,
and the other is his favorite lieutenant,
Richard Helms.
They were both products of the OSS,
the Office of Strategic Services.
[Anderson] It was really the British,
the MI6,
who kind of created the OSS,
the Office of Strategic Services.
So it was very much
modeled on the British model.
[Weiner] Allen Dulles,
he was into sabotage,
covert operations,
paramilitary operations.
He was interested in the more,
shall we say,
dangerous aspects of the job.
Helms was uniquely fascinated
by espionage.
He believed that the business
of intelligence
was gathering intelligence by spying.
[Anderson] Berlin, at that point,
the former capital of Nazi Germany,
is rapidly becoming ground zero
of certainly what the Soviets
are seeing as the contest with the West.
I was transferred to Berlin
because we had in Berlin two stations.
[Anderson] The Soviets probably had
hundreds of operatives in Berlin
in late 1945.
Peter Sichel had a few dozen
answering to him,
and he had just turned 23 years old.
[Sichel] The Soviets had put
enormous resources
into their intelligence services.
And they had continuity
going back to the '20s and '30s,
when they were implanting people
into universities, into society.
[tense music playing]
[Milton Bearden] The way
the Soviet Union ran,
there was three legs to that stool.
The party, the army, and the KGB.
There's nothing like that in America.
[Nina Khrushcheva] Dzerzhinsky,
founder of what we now know is the KGB.
Security forces in Russia have always been
the second nature to the state.
Dzerzhinsky just took over that system
and created his own security apparatus,
which got more and more repressive
when Stalin got into power early on.
[music fades]
[inaudible]
[Weiner] Harry Truman
thought there was no need
for a peacetime intelligence service
in the United States.
Our problems were over.
But a few of its officers,
like Allen Dulles, like Richard Helms,
fought with their allies in the Army,
the US Army, to keep it alive.
In 1947,
the National Security Act created,
in a very short six-page order,
the Central Intelligence Agency.
[Stephen Kinzer] In that act,
there's something unique, very important,
that went on to have
a shattering impact at the CIA.
In the old system,
particularly in Britain,
there was always an absolute firewall
between the people who analyzed situations
and decided what might be done
or shouldn't have to be done,
and then on the other side,
the covert operatives.
In the National Security Act,
both of these functions were combined
into one agency, the CIA.
So it was gonna be the agency
that advised the president
on what the world looked like,
and then decided
whether a covert action was necessary,
and then carried it out.
That naturally gave the incentive
to present the world
as if covert action
was necessary everywhere.
[Weiner] By 1949,
the CIA's recruiting foreign agents
throughout Germany and beyond,
to conduct paramilitary operations
against the nations of Central Europe
where Stalin has installed
his puppet governments,
to parachute behind the Iron Curtain
and subvert the Soviet state.
The first of these operations,
in the fall of 1949,
were Ukrainians who had gotten
out of Ukraine after Stalin took it over,
found their way to Germany.
The CIA trains these Ukrainian exiles
in Germany for a month or two or three.
"Here's how you jump out of an airplane
with a parachute and a gun."
"Hit the ground and roll if you can."
"Here's how you set up
a clandestine radio
to communicate with us."
"Here's $50,000 worth of local currency
to buy yourself access."
"And you're to establish
a clandestine base
inside of Soviet-controlled Ukraine,
and we'll tell you what to do
when you get there."
[Anderson] Peter Sichel's kind of
in a supervisory role in all this.
[Sichel] Ukraine was never
totally controlled by the Soviets.
There was always pockets of resistance.
They created so-called
"Ukrainian resistance cells."
We would supply them
with arms, money, whatever.
These operations which the CIA conducted
with every fiber of its being
from 1949 to 1953,
were suicide missions.
Uncounted thousands
of recruited foreign agents died.
And one reason they were suicide missions
is that the CIA had been
penetrated by a Soviet spy.
And that spy was the head
of British intelligence in Washington,
Kim Philby.
He is the liaison
between the British intelligence services
and the CIA.
Philby was read
into what the CIA was doing
in its paramilitary missions,
and immediately conveys this information
back to Moscow Central,
thus ensuring that the missions
would end in disaster.
I was asked to resign
from the foreign office
because of an imprudent association.
[reporter] What about these alleged
communist associations?
Can you say anything about them?
The last time I spoke to a communist,
knowing him to be a communist,
was sometime in 1934.
[interviewer] So what happened
to all the people, the arms, and money
that the United States flew into Ukraine
in order to support those groups?
Basically ended up in Soviet hands.
And the people were shot,
or sent to Siberia, or whatever.
[Anderson] Each succeeding operation
into Poland, Romania,
they're all disasters.
People just disappear.
[somber music playing]
[Sichel] When it became so obvious
that it was a lesson they never learned,
I decided I didn't want
to be associated with people
who were so cavalier with human lives.
End of story.
I felt that an agency
that had so little regard for human life,
was not for me.
I approved of what they did,
but not where they did it
and how they did it.
[Weiner] The CIA was operating
so far out of its depths
that you can safely say
almost nothing the agency did worked.
Not in gathering intelligence,
not in running secret operations,
paramilitary missions.
It was a failure.
But 1953 was a new era for the CIA.
[Kinzer] Under the Truman Administration,
the CIA did carry out covert operations,
but always stopped short
of overthrowing governments.
When the Eisenhower Administration
took office, the gloves came off.
Allen Dulles became director of the CIA,
and his older brother John Foster Dulles
became Secretary of State.
This was the first time two siblings,
two brothers,
controlled the overt and the covert sides
of American foreign policy.
The Dulles brothers saw communism
behind every nationalist movement
in the world.
America was going to be
this beacon of democracy.
We were going to spread
democracy around the world.
It didn't matter how corrupt,
or how vicious,
or how brutal the regime was.
If you were anti-communist,
you were fine by us.
I often joke that if the Dulleses wanted
to throw their grandmother under the bus,
they would say they needed to do it
to save America
from international communism.
[Kinzer] One factor
that shaped the Dulles brothers
was a lifetime of dedication
to protecting the interests
of multinational corporations.
What this meant
was that they had a deep interest
in preserving the world economic system.
This system was based above all
on an understanding
that developed countries
that consume resources
need to be able to control the countries
where those resources are produced.
[dramatic music playing]
[Kinzer] The first two targets
for the Dulles brothers
as leaders who needed to be overthrown,
were two leaders against
whom they already had grudges.
It was Mosaddegh in Iran
and Árbenz in Guatemala.
[Weiner] And this led to two of the CIA's
most famous and infamous operations
of the early 1950s,
which was to overthrow
the duly elected governments
of Guatemala and Iran.
[broadcaster] The world's largest
oil refinery at Abadan, Iran,
becomes the center
of a major international crisis,
as Iran's parliament votes unanimously
to nationalize her vast oil fields.
[Kinzer] The Iranian government
had nationalized its oil resources.
[Anderson] The British had a stranglehold
over Iranian oil going back to 1914.
The British are pretty broke
at this point.
They go and sit
with John Foster Dulles and go,
"Yeah, we think Mosaddegh's a communist."
[laughs] "And will you help us
overthrow him?"
[Weiner] And the British and the Americans
conceived an operation
to get rid of Mosaddegh.
[suspenseful music playing]
[distant call to prayer]
[Weiner] So there were two elements
to the CIA's plan,
a chaotic plan that worked.
And one was money for bribing people,
and the other was propaganda.
HORRIFIC SPECTER OF BULLYING
AND COMMUNISM HAUNTS IRAN
[Kinzer] They had most of the newspapers
in Tehran
printing articles denouncing Mosaddegh.
[indistinct chatter]
[Abrahamian] This type
of what is now called fake news
was very much used by the CIA
to basically flood the Iranian media.
[Weiner] Then the CIA hired thugs
who posed as members
of the very small Communist Party of Iran,
who attacked mullahs, defiled a mosque.
The operation basically failed.
And then at the last minute,
through a comical
and Byzantine series of events,
there was just enough money,
propaganda, and treachery
flowing through the streets of Tehran
to allow a small corps
of rebellious officers
who had been paid by the CIA
to roll a tank up
to Prime Minister Mosaddegh's house,
blow a hole in it,
and convince him it would probably
be best if he left office.
[clamoring]
This opened the way
for the reinstallation of a Shah of Iran.
[broadcaster] Army officers reveal
Mosaddegh has surrendered.
His reign as virtual
dictator of Iran is ended.
Now crowds shout pro-shah slogans
and carry pictures of a troubled ruler
of a troubled nation.
[Weiner] The shah
ran a viciously repressive,
but pro-American government.
[Abrahamian] After the coup in Iran,
what you had was a consortium
between Iran and Western oil companies
obeying American companies,
a British company, and a French company.
They ran the oil industry.
If you read the documents,
there is really no real concern
about a serious communist takeover.
But it was a convenient argument to use
in the American public
that they were saving the country
from communism.
[enthralling music playing]
[Anderson] The following year,
almost the same thing happens in Guatemala
with Jacobo Árbenz.
I'm Chiquita Banana
And I've come to say ♪
Bananas have to ripen
In a certain way ♪
United Fruit has been running Guatemala
as a virtual slave plantation for decades.
People are paid virtually nothing,
and Árbenz is talking about nationalizing.
[enthralling music continues]
[Kinzer] The government of Jacobo Árbenz
had won congressional approval
for a large land reform that required
the United Fruit Company
to sell its unused land
to the Guatemalan government,
which would then cut up that land
and give it away
to starving peasant families.
United Fruit convinces John Foster Dulles
that Árbenz is communist.
So again, the Americans
back this coup against Árbenz.
[Weiner] This man wasn't a communist.
He proposed to expropriate
some fallow land
that United Fruit Company owned,
and to distribute it to peasants.
[Kinzer] The CIA recruited
a cashiered colonel named Castillo Armas,
and anointed him as "the liberator."
Then the CIA swept into action.
They saturated Guatemalan airwaves
with pre-recorded phony broadcasts.
[man in Spanish] Listen to us
and you will know the reality
of Guatemala's political moment
and the irrefutable progress
of the great liberation movement.
[Kinzer, in English]
In which, it seemed like
a big civil war
was unfolding in Guatemala.
Meanwhile, CIA planes were dropping bombs
that were then coordinated
with these radio broadcasts.
- LONG LIVE CASTILLO ARMAS
- COMMUNISTS, LEAVE ESQUIPULAS
[Kinzer] There wasn't any real fighting,
but finally it became clear
to the generals
that they had to overthrow Árbenz.
That brought Castillo Armas into power,
the liberator
that the Americans had anointed.
He went on immediately
to ban labor unions,
close Congress
- [gunfire]
- [crowd clamoring]
impose an oppressive regime,
execute hundreds of people,
and then that led to a holocaust
in Guatemala for many years.
Back in Washington,
in the White House and the CIA,
this operation was considered
a complete success.
Spectacular.
It didn't cost much money.
Only a few hundred people were killed,
none of them were Americans.
[Anderson] To my mind, John Foster Dulles
is really one of the great villains
of the second half of the 20th century,
from the standpoint
of the American standing in the world.
He saw the world as black and white.
You either stood with America,
or were against us.
There was no neutrality.
[Allen Dulles]
Intelligence is nothing really
other than information and knowledge.
From the days of Socrates
by various methods, and even before that,
uh, mankind has been seeking knowledge
of everything that influences his own life
or the life of the nation
to which he belongs.
But the idea
that it is necessarily nefarious,
it's always engaged
in overthrowing governments, that's false.
- [typewriter keys clacking]
- [phones ringing]
[ominous music playing]
[man on radio speaking indistinctly]
[Bailey] The Cold War was a battle
for the mind and hearts of the opponent
and the opponent's people.
So the Cold War
was being fought over thought.
[Weiner] The early CIA
from the late '40s into the '60s
had hundreds of influence operations,
where they purchased the favor
of a newspaper editor in Buenos Aires,
or Tokyo, or Berlin.
There were a handful,
some say more than a handful,
of American journalists
who were paid by the CIA,
or cooperated with the CIA free of charge.
So it was nothing for Allen Dulles
to call up the publisher
of the New York Times,
and say, "You have
an annoying journalist in Guatemala
who is reporting on a CIA operation
to overthrow the government."
"Yank him."
The publisher did.
[music fades]
[Bailey] Controlling people's thoughts
and actions was also integral
to the Soviet Union's effort
to make US policy
either do or not do what it wished,
and used what is called "active measures."
The formal structure
of the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union
dedicated to disinformation
and active measures
was set up in the 1950s.
That's using disinformation,
using agents of influence,
forgeries, and other tools
to manipulate the way people perceived
the factual universe around them.
We know about the early examples,
principally from defectors.
When Soviets are running some clandestine
active measures operation,
like, for instance,
planting some major story
in the newspaper in France, West Germany,
United States, elsewhere, Japan,
that kind of article normally would be
written by local prominent journalist,
who will express
as if his own or her own opinion.
These kinds of things normally won't
be traceable back to the Soviet Union.
[Bailey] The objective was to cause
disruption, confusion,
and to turn each other against each other.
The Soviet Union tried
very hard in its early days
to use forgeries like government documents
that they would make up a story,
put it on letterhead,
and slip it to a journalist in hope
that it would take off like wildfire,
and sometimes it did.
ROCKEFELLER GIVES DIRECTIVES
FOR US SUPERCOLONIALISM
[Ladislav Bittman] I would say
that the major successes
were in developing countries where
governments didn't have the expertise
EISENHOWER PLAYS WITH FIRE
AMERICAN PLANES FLY OVER ARAB REPUBLIC
to analyze properly these operations.
And, for example, sometimes
very cheap forgeries are accepted
in developing countries
as a genuine proof of American conspiracy.
[festive military band music playing]
[Plokhy] In the Soviet Union,
Stalin has complete control
over the media.
[crowd cheering]
[Plokhy] It was quite easy to create
an atmosphere of the besieged fortress,
of the spies and enemies around us.
[ominous music playing]
It was impermissible,
certainly in a classroom,
or a newspaper, anything,
to cast any doubt whatsoever on Stalin.
Stalin was the uncontested ruler
of the Soviet Union until 1953,
when he died of a stroke.
This is a major turning point
of the Cold War.
[reporter] The Kremlin's cold stone walls,
the eerie face of Moscow,
a howling wind and snow
adding to the somber picture,
is the description
accompanying the announcement
that the most powerful dictator in history
has come to the inevitable end.
[Remnick] In March of 1953
when Stalin died, everybody cried.
If you're surrounded by,
and you're growing up in a school
and you're worshiping Stalin,
not like George Washington
or saying pledge allegiance to the flag,
but in a, in a semi-mystical way,
that he's like the godhead,
and that suddenly the godhead is dead,
well, it's of no surprise that you'd cry.
[somber music playing]
[Weiner] After Stalin dies,
there is a power struggle
as to who will succeed him
that is finally resolved
with the rise of a new leader
named Nikita Khrushchev.
[Remnick] In the Khrushchev era,
there was something called the Thaw.
[Khrushcheva] I was born in Moscow.
I was raised in Moscow.
I had a privileged childhood
being the great-granddaughter
of Nikita Khrushchev.
He worked as a coal miner in East Ukraine.
In the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917,
he was a very low-level
political commissar,
and began kind of rising up
in the Communist ranks.
When Stalin dies,
Khrushchev came into power.
[reporter] The peasant from Kursk finally
emerges as dictator of the Soviet Union.
[Holloway] One of the things
that the new leadership does
is introduce amnesty for many people
who have been imprisoned.
[Masha Lipman] Khrushchev could not
bring back those who had been executed,
but he released from jail,
from labor camps,
those people who had been
innocent victims of Stalin's terror.
[Khrushcheva] And Khrushchev kept saying
to all those other Stalin flunkies,
"We need to talk about the crimes
of Stalin's that we were part of."
[applause]
[Khrushcheva]
In the last session of the Congress
ON THE CULT OF PERSONALITY
AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
Khrushchev delivered
what is called the Secret Speech.
It spoke about numbers of people
that got prosecuted
during Stalin's years in office,
and how many were imprisoned,
and how many went without trial.
It spoke about the secret police.
All the things that people knew some,
but they didn't have it in numbers
and never had it in a speech
by the first Secretary of
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
So it was an amazing moment.
After the speech was delivered,
there was an absolute silence in the room.
[Anne Applebaum] People who had believed
that the stories of Stalin's excesses
were exaggerated,
people who still believed
in the ideals of the Soviet Union
or the ideals of communism,
many of them had their eyes opened
by these revelations.
[Pavel Litvinov] In that speech,
he said Stalin was really a criminal.
Stalin was God for me.
I started to lose faith in God,
in Stalin, and in communism.
[Applebaum] It wasn't an admission that
the system was fundamentally wrong.
He didn't apologize
for everything that was done,
but it did set the Soviet Union
on a different course.
[Khrushchev speaking in Russian]
[Naftali] Khrushchev was very human.
[indistinct]
[Naftali] Khrushchev was emotional.
He loved to punctuate
sentences with swear words.
Didn't matter who he was talking to.
[Remnick] There's a period
in which a generation,
then quite young,
sees the possibility
of what would be called liberal reform
in the post-Stalinist era.
They're not dissidents.
They're not willing to go to jail.
But they become journalists.
They become party officials.
Khrushchev decided to try to introduce
some critics permitted in newspapers
in the magazine Novy Mir
NOVY MIR MAGAZINE
which was very popular
political magazine.
And kind of supported
certain de-Stalinization
and liberalization of Russian life.
People under Khrushchev,
they started to perform.
There were some concerts
of classical music,
which was almost forbidden.
Books were published.
[Remnick] He allows the publication of a
young writer named Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
[Naftali] But Khrushchev
was absolutely a believer
in the possibilities of Marxist-Leninism.
[applause]
[in Russian]
You are an advocate of capitalism,
and I am an advocate of communism.
So let's compete.
[dreamy music playing]
[Naftali, in English]
Central to Khrushchev's worldview,
the Soviet Union
was superior ideologically
and inferior militarily.
He believed the only way to make up
for the gap between American power
and Soviet power
was to scare Americans
about the Soviet Union
and to make them think the Soviet Union
was more powerful than it actually was.
[in Russian] We said we had
a 50-megaton bomb, that's correct.
[inaudible]
[dramatic music playing]
[Naftali, in English] It's why Khrushchev
engages in a disinformation campaign
to exaggerate
the number of Soviet missiles
that can reach the United States.
[speaking in Russian]
[Naftali] Khrushchev famously said,
"We can produce missiles like sausages."
And the American elite
believed the Russians.
[inaudible]
[in Russian] But we're not going
to detonate a 100-megaton bomb
because if we detonated that bomb
where it's supposed to go,
we might as well break our own windows.
- So, therefore, it's not worth it.
- [crowd laughs and applauds]
[dramatic music continues]
[Graff, in English] The US government
begins to move away
from this idea of urban evacuations
and fallout shelters,
and into this idea
of evacuating a small number
of high-ranking government officials
out into mountain bunkers
and airborne command posts,
figuring that most of America will die,
but the American government will live.
- [loud blast]
- [poignant music playing]
[blast]
[introspective music playing]
[Ellsberg] Since the early '50s,
but especially since the mid-'60s,
there have been two
doomsday machines in the world,
the US and Soviet, or Russian,
which are each capable
of ending most human life on Earth.
A federal judge today
ordered the New York Times
to suspend temporarily
publication of a series of reports
based on a secret Pentagon study
of how the United States became involved
in the Vietnamese War.
[reporter] Daniel Ellsberg,
the man named as the source
of the Pentagon copy
that appeared in the New York Times,
turned himself in today
to federal authorities.
I can't regret having done what I knew
at the time to be what I ought to do,
my duty as a citizen.
[Ellsberg, present day]
When I released the Pentagon Papers,
I figured, "Well, I'm gonna go to prison
for the rest of my life for this."
"So, why stop at this? Let me"
"I'll figure on putting out what I think
is much more important."
All my nuclear files.
They would, I hoped,
lessen the likelihood of nuclear war.
So I copied also,
in addition to the Pentagon Papers,
everything in my top secret safe.
My notes on nuclear war plans,
in hopes of raising people's consciousness
as to the dangers we are living with.
The defense budget
should be cut more than in half,
rather than being increased right now,
but starting with the most
dangerous weapons, the ICBMs.
[introspective music playing]
[Ellsberg]
I saw a nuclear crisis coming at us.
I see very little chance now
of reducing that.
For the last several years,
I've been focusing on trying
to eliminate US land-based ICBMs,
intercontinental ballistic missiles.
These are the hair trigger
on a doomsday machine.
I do have to say now,
in this point in my life,
the chance of actually affecting things
is lower even than I thought it was.
And yet, can it be worse
than risking your life, your freedom,
for a very low chance of saving lives?
And the answer is yes.
Of course it can be worth it.
There are lessons we learned
during the Cold War
we have conveniently forgotten,
including how unstable
a crisis can become,
and how fast.
And this is what happened in 1962.
[Kornbluh] On October 14th,
the U2 plane took these pictures.
There was now clear proof
that the Russians had secretly placed
intermediate-range nuclear missiles
on the island of Cuba.
The days that followed
were the most dangerous days
the world has ever faced then and now.
[tense music builds]
[music fades]
[closing theme music playing]
[explosions]
[newscaster 1] So the Russian military
is really an overmatch for the Ukrainians.
It will probably quickly dissolve
into sort of an insurgency,
like we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan.
[newscaster 2]
Sources say officials in the US
fear that Kyiv
could fall to Russia within days.
[in Ukrainian] Russia carried out
strikes on our military infrastructure
and border guards.
In many Ukrainian cities,
explosions were heard.
[helicopter blades whirring]
[reporter, in Russian] They are flying
towards the airport, bombing the airport.
You can hear that there is a battle.
[compelling music playing]
[V. Rudenko, in Ukrainian] Fastest way
to Kyiv was through Hostomel.
Uh, they opened fire
on the airport facilities.
[compelling music continues]
You can see the destroyed, burned Mriya.
Eh, the Russians
hit it
with an unguided missile.
They flew straight to the runway
and started hitting our air defense units.
[man] One, two, three, four, five, six,
seven, eight.
[helicopter blades whirring]
[Rudenko] They did not expect resistance.
We began shooting down choppers
and to destroy Russian troops.
[man] Yes! Yes!
[man shouting excitedly]
[Sergii Solodchenko] This was the first
line of defense of Kyiv.
[indistinct shouting]
For two days,
our boys did not let them land.
[tense music playing]
[Rudenko] The Russians did manage
to capture the airport.
But they lost momentum.
After we moved to a safe distance,
we used our artillery
to damage the airfield.
That way, we gained time
to move the defense forces
to block the enemy from invading Kyiv.
[tense music rising]
[Graff, in English]
Had the Russian military been able
to succeed in that moment,
it would have been able to deliver
its most elite forces
straight to the front lines of Kyiv.
So the ability of the Ukrainian military
to resist that airborne invasion
at the Hostomel Airport
is probably the turning point
of the entire war.
[indistinct]
[Kyrylo Budanov, in Ukrainian] When they
failed to parade into Kyiv, they froze.
It turned into a full-scale war.
[opening theme music playing]
[music fades]
[loud blast]
[Audra J. Wolfe] In the early years
of the Cold War,
the United States treated nuclear weapons
not only as if they were something
that could be used,
but something that could be survived.
[tense music playing]
[broadcaster] Let us face, without panic,
the reality of our times,
the fact that atom bombs
may someday be dropped on our cities.
And let us prepare for survival.
[Graff] In the 1950s,
there was an immense effort given
to perfectly planning how nuclear war
would unfold in the United States.
And the federal government
launches a whole series
of public education campaigns
to get America ready for nuclear war.
[broadcaster] You are the target of those
who would trample
the liberties of free men.
You are in the crosshairs
of the bomb sites.
An enemy is
[Wolfe] The United States was providing
messages to its citizens
that were simultaneously
terrifying and not terribly coherent.
On the one hand,
the message was that the Soviet Union
was this diabolical nation that was
hell-bent on American destruction.
That this was an existential threat.
[broadcaster] Today, every state,
every city and town,
is within striking range
of a determined enemy.
[Wolfe] On the other hand, it was telling
Americans that a nuclear holocaust
was absolutely survivable.
Something that you could probably survive
by going to a fallout shelter
in the event of a nuclear attack,
or investing in a fallout shelter
for your own backyard.
[Alex Wellerstein] They have a program
that starts up in 1950
called "Civil Defense."
The idea is, we don't want to be attacked
by these weapons, but we might.
And if we do, yeah, some people
are just gonna die straight out,
but there are gonna be people
who are at a distance from that bomb,
where what they do matters.
[broadcaster] First, you duck,
and then you cover.
[Wellerstein] Duck and Cover
is one of the first big campaigns,
training children to get under their desks
if a nuclear bomb is coming.
Not because your desk is magical.
If the bomb incinerates you and your desk,
your desk isn't gonna help.
But because there are distances
at which doing that
is gonna prevent
the ceiling collapsing on you,
and you might survive that way.
[alarm blaring]
[Kathleen Bailey] A siren went off.
We were all told to file into the hallway.
We had to get down
on our hands and knees and put
Lace our fingers behind our heads
and keep our heads
against the base of the lockers.
We remained there for so long
that I got cramped up.
And then the principal came and said,
"This is the way you must remain
if there is a nuclear war
because your parents will come here
if they can and find you."
That phrase, "if they can,"
stayed with me
as a little girl for a very long time.
Nightmares, nightmares, nightmares.
- [loud blast]
- [children screaming]
- [explosion in distance]
- [screaming]
[Lori Clune] The fear is tremendous.
Children were wearing dog tags to school.
This right here
is the metal identification tag
that we are urging every child
and teenager in America to wear
as soon as possible.
[Clune] How long did it take
those children to realize,
"Wait, this is so that my parents
can find my body later"?
And the idea
that it could happen at any moment,
that we were minutes away at any time
from a potential nuclear blast,
and the damage could be devastating.
[Wellerstein] Nuclear war
becomes the backdrop
of almost everything
that takes place in America.
There was a real sense
that communism was on the march.
That communism was succeeding
around the world.
That fear pushes government officials
to encourage, "Let's develop more bombs."
"Let's develop bigger bombs."
It encourages Truman, famously,
to approve developing the hydrogen bomb.
[tense music playing]
[broadcaster] History turns its most
ominous page far out in mid-Pacific,
where in the Enewetak Atoll,
the world's most awesome weapon
is readied for detonation.
The Army, Navy, and Air Force
work against time,
under the supervision of scientists,
who have labored for years to develop
the thermonuclear weapon.
[Graff] The shift from an atomic bomb
to thermonuclear bombs
is a move to weapons orders
of magnitude larger
than the atomic bombs dropped
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
A thermonuclear device
is not just a larger atomic bomb.
It's a fundamentally different process.
An atomic bomb relies on nuclear fission,
splitting of atoms,
whereas a hydrogen bomb,
a thermonuclear device,
relies on nuclear fusion
and sort of the combination of atoms.
The first workable thermonuclear device
comes in the closing days
of the Truman Administration,
and it's tested
in what was known as the "Mike Test."
We have minutes to go before the first
flier's Mike shot of Operation Ivy.
If everything goes according to plan,
we'll soon see the largest explosion
ever set off on the face of the Earth.
[announcer] It is now
30 seconds to zero time.
Put on goggles or turn away.
Do not remove goggles or face burst
until ten seconds after the first light.
[loud blast echoing]
[Gregg Herken] The Mike Test
was a very successful test.
It was even more powerful
than it was expected to be.
It was ten and a half million tons
equivalent of TNT.
[pilot] Two-six, approaching ground zero.
Elugelab is completely gone.
Nothing there but water.
[broadcaster] The outlined island
in the center is former Elugelab,
"the zero island."
Sections of the islands on either side
have been chopped off.
The crater is roughly a mile in diameter.
In profile, the crater gradually
slopes down to a maximum depth
of some 175 feet,
or equivalent to the height
of a 17-story building.
Compared to the skyline of New York,
this means that with
the Empire State Building as zero point,
the fireball alone would engulf about
one-quarter of the island of Manhattan.
[Graff] The event
horrified and shocked everyone
who witnessed it or read about it.
And you have a much more
public debate about it,
including real horror
by some of the people
who had been part
of the Manhattan Project.
For years, Oppenheimer believed
that the American people needed to know
that there was a nuclear arms race.
[Oppenheimer] The decision
to seek or not to seek
international control of atomic energy,
the decision to try to make
or not to make the hydrogen bomb,
these are rooted
in complex technical things.
But they touch the very basis
of our morality.
It is grave danger for us
that these decisions are taken
on the basis of facts held secret.
[Herken] He wanted
to inform the American people
of how destructive these weapons were.
[Graff] Albert Einstein himself wrote,
"General annihilation beckons."
[unsettling music playing]
[Tom Z. Collina] These were the kind
of weapons that were so destructive
that presidents realized that if we ever
got involved in a nuclear war,
it would be the end
of civilization, right?
There would be nothing left.
[crowd cheering]
[festive band music playing]
[David Holloway] Eisenhower,
after he was elected,
was informed about the first
hydrogen bomb test.
He was just shaken.
[brooding music playing]
[Eisenhower] How far have we come
in man's long pilgrimage,
from darkness toward the light?
Are we nearing the light?
A day of freedom
and of peace for all mankind?
Or are the shadows of another night
closing in upon us?
Science seems ready to confer upon us
as its final gift,
the power to erase human life
from this planet.
[Holloway] The Soviet leaders also were
shocked when they read about this test.
And Lavrentiy Beria,
who was in charge of the whole
police and intelligence apparatus,
pulls together scientists who have already
been working on the hydrogen bomb,
and prepares a memo for Stalin saying,
"This will be very expensive,
but our enemies are developing it,
so we have to develop it too."
[tense music playing]
[Holloway] In 1953, the Soviet Union
tested the so-called layer cake design,
which had a yield of about 400 kilotons.
This situation then opens things up
to a kind of war of nerves.
[broadcaster] 1954, and the US
prepared to set off a nuclear explosion
that would dwarf the atomic blasts
at Hiroshima and Nagasaki
to the category of small firecrackers.
The newest and most powerful
atomic weapon yet tested
was to be detonated in the South Pacific
in the midst of the Marshall Islands.
[Serhii Plokhy]
The Castle Bravo test was done
in the Pacific testing grounds
at Bikini Atoll.
That was the location where
one of the first American atomic bombs
were tested back in the late 1940s.
There were people
on the other atolls in the Pacific.
So they were completely unaware,
unprepared to deal
with the explosion of the hydrogen bombs.
The Castle Bravo test becomes the scariest
moment yet of the nuclear age.
We didn't really understand
how thermonuclear bombs worked,
and the scientists
and the military leaders
who were present that day
were horrified by what they saw
because what they saw was a bomb
that went off several times larger
and more powerful
than anything that they had imagined.
[dramatic music playing]
[Herken] The Bravo test was meant
to be seven megatons,
but it turned out it was 15 megatons.
[Graff] It turns out to be
three times larger
than anything we had imagined.
Fifteen megatons of explosive power.
A four-mile-wide fireball
that evaporates
almost everything in its path.
[rumbling]
[loud blast]
[dramatic music playing]
[music fades]
[seagulls squawking]
[Plokhy] The atolls and islands
populated by the natives
were affected by the radiation.
[distant blast]
[Plokhy] Many of them could see
the mushroom of that explosion going up.
They were talking about the sun
actually coming from the west
instead of coming from the east.
[Neisen Laukon] I grew up on the island.
I remember people were
really, really sick all the time.
Babies were born, and no shell
to the back of their head, you know?
You could see their brain.
[mournful music playing]
[Plokhy] The area around Bikini Atoll,
the so-called security area and zone,
was cleared from all the ships.
Or at least they tried to do that.
But one of the Japanese trailers,
Lucky Dragon,
ended up in the area of the explosion.
[distant rumble]
[Terumi Tanaka, in Japanese]
The destructive power of the hydrogen bomb
was so powerful that it far exceeded
the estimates of Americans who tested it.
So even though the ship
was outside the security zone,
there was a lot of radioactive fallout.
We called it the death ash.
[device crackling]
[Plokhy, in English]
It was an international scandal.
[unsettling music playing]
Japan, the only country
hit by nuclear weapons,
becomes one of the first casualties
of this new weapon too.
The fisherman's dying wish is,
"Let me be the last person
killed by this awful weapon."
We didn't really know
how to use nuclear bombs.
This was a new technology,
and the military needed to learn
how to fight with it.
And the way that they learned
was by firing off
a lot of nuclear bombs all over the world
[wind whistling]
[Graff]including
domestic nuclear testing
in the desert above Las Vegas.
[blast]
[Graff] This is probably
the high watermark
of the nation's public
nuclear war planning.
There were documents and plans
showing how every aspect
of the US government
could lead a nuclear war-damaged country.
[somber music playing]
[Daniel Ellsberg] I arrive at Rand
as a consultant,
having gotten out of the Marines.
I was assigned to a study group
working on a problem then
of deterring a Russian surprise attack
that would disarm us basically,
and let them, in effect, rule the world.
It seemed morally almost obligatory
to try to develop an ability
to retaliate in kind.
This was a very smart bunch.
Including my mentor at Rand,
Albert Wohlstetter,
and my friend Herman Kahn.
The smartest group of people
I ever did associate with.
It turns out, by the way,
intelligence is not a very good
guarantee of wisdom.
Deterrence is the art of producing
in the mind of the enemy
the fear to attack.
[Ellsberg] In the movie Dr. Strangelove,
many of the words
are taken from Herman Kahn,
the leader
inventor of the doomsday machine,
on his book on thermonuclear war.
The doomsday machine is terrifying.
[chuckles] It's simple to understand.
And completely credible and convincing.
Gee, I wish we had one of them
doomsday machines, Stainesey.
[interviewer] What did you think of
Dr. Strangelove when you saw that movie?
See, that was a documentary.
Everything in Dr. Strangelove
could have happened.
[clears throat]
Mr. President
[clicks tongue]
about, uh, 35 minutes ago,
General Jack Ripper,
the commanding general
of, um, Burpelson Air Force Base,
issued an order
to the 34 B-52s of his wing,
which were airborne at the time,
as part of a special exercise
we were holding called Operation Dropkick.
Now, it appears that the order
called for the planes
to attack their targets inside Russia.
[clamoring]
[Turgidson] The planes are fully armed
with nuclear weapons
with an average load of, um,
40 megatons each.
[Ellsberg] The notion that only
the president had the authority
to launch those weapons was a myth.
- [interviewer] That's not true? So
- It has never been true.
Many other people can launch this.
Not only the Joint Chiefs.
There have always been arrangements
for lower-level people,
if they believe that a war is going on,
or if communications are cut off,
to launch those weapons.
Then why haven't you radioed the planes
countermanding the go code?
Well, I'm afraid we're unable
to communicate with any of the aircraft.
[Ellsberg] When Buck Turgidson,
the head of the Air Force in the movie,
says to the president,
"The planes are sent off
and can't be recalled."
"They might as well go now.
They're on their way."
That was an Air Force attitude,
pretty much.
I don't think too many people realize
that Eisenhower had said
there's to be no planning
for limited war with the Soviets.
At Rand, I was given full access
to the war plans.
I was one of a handful of civilians
who did see these plans,
and they were strange and horrible.
Uh, terrible plans.
They seemed like the worst plans
that had ever existed.
Eisenhower felt any fighting with Soviets,
even if it starts small,
is going to escalate very quickly
to a larger war.
And under Eisenhower,
that meant full-scale nuclear war.
We anticipated a world
of peace and cooperation.
The calculated pressures
of aggressive communism
have forced us instead
to live in a world of turmoil.
[Ellsberg] The plan was to hit
every city in Russia and China
with thermonuclear weapons.
H-bombs.
[loud blast]
[foreboding music playing]
[Ellsberg] So I thought
that it would put them off-balance
to know how many people
altogether would be killed by this.
So I drafted a question, one among many,
to be given to the Joint Chiefs
by the Secretary of Defense.
"If you carried out your plans,
how many people would be killed
in Russia and China alone?"
I really thought
they wouldn't have an answer.
But they did have an answer,
and it was top secret.
"For the president's eyes only."
And it's a graph with,
on the horizontal axis, "time" in months,
and then millions of dead
on the vertical axis.
The line began at 275 million people.
And it rose, as fallout killed
people over the next six months,
to 325 million people.
This was Russia and China alone.
So I sent another question
that I'd drafted.
"How many all together?"
And that just took them a week to answer,
but this time in the form of a table.
Another hundred million
in the satellites of East Europe, Poland,
and Hungary, Romania.
In West Europe, another hundred million
depending on which way the wind blew.
And a third hundred million
in areas contiguous to the Soviet Union
like Afghanistan, Japan, and India.
So the total,
in addition to the 325 million
in Russia and China,
was 600 million.
A hundred Holocausts.
[tense music rising]
Now, the population
of the world at that time
was 3,600,000,000.
That's one-fifth
of the world's population.
It struck me as
the most evil and insane plan
that had ever existed
in the history of humanity.
[tense music continues]
[Ellsberg] This is institutional insanity.
[music fades]
[inaudible]
[Scott Anderson] When Eisenhower came in,
he initiated this policy.
The "New Look" policy.
"New Look" was, for the first time,
the Americans reserve the right
to use massive retaliation
if it felt that its vital
national security interests
were under threat anywhere in the world.
And the Soviets immediately
turned around and said the same thing.
So it froze the battlefield,
certainly in Europe.
And it opened up the entire
rest of the world as the new battlefield,
as the playground of the two powers.
Can't do anything in Europe, so you have
to make mischief everywhere else.
So that's when you see this explosion
around the world of covert operations
and these massive intelligence
and defense conglomerates
that both the superpowers have.
The amazing thing
is that prior to World War II,
the United States never had a permanent
foreign intelligence agency at all.
[ominous music playing]
[Tim Weiner] You can trace
the roots of the CIA
to a mansion in Berlin
in the summer of 1945.
The war in Europe is over. Hitler is dead.
Berlin is in ruins.
But in a well-pointed mansion
in the center of the city are two men.
One is Allen Dulles,
and the other is his favorite lieutenant,
Richard Helms.
They were both products of the OSS,
the Office of Strategic Services.
[Anderson] It was really the British,
the MI6,
who kind of created the OSS,
the Office of Strategic Services.
So it was very much
modeled on the British model.
[Weiner] Allen Dulles,
he was into sabotage,
covert operations,
paramilitary operations.
He was interested in the more,
shall we say,
dangerous aspects of the job.
Helms was uniquely fascinated
by espionage.
He believed that the business
of intelligence
was gathering intelligence by spying.
[Anderson] Berlin, at that point,
the former capital of Nazi Germany,
is rapidly becoming ground zero
of certainly what the Soviets
are seeing as the contest with the West.
I was transferred to Berlin
because we had in Berlin two stations.
[Anderson] The Soviets probably had
hundreds of operatives in Berlin
in late 1945.
Peter Sichel had a few dozen
answering to him,
and he had just turned 23 years old.
[Sichel] The Soviets had put
enormous resources
into their intelligence services.
And they had continuity
going back to the '20s and '30s,
when they were implanting people
into universities, into society.
[tense music playing]
[Milton Bearden] The way
the Soviet Union ran,
there was three legs to that stool.
The party, the army, and the KGB.
There's nothing like that in America.
[Nina Khrushcheva] Dzerzhinsky,
founder of what we now know is the KGB.
Security forces in Russia have always been
the second nature to the state.
Dzerzhinsky just took over that system
and created his own security apparatus,
which got more and more repressive
when Stalin got into power early on.
[music fades]
[inaudible]
[Weiner] Harry Truman
thought there was no need
for a peacetime intelligence service
in the United States.
Our problems were over.
But a few of its officers,
like Allen Dulles, like Richard Helms,
fought with their allies in the Army,
the US Army, to keep it alive.
In 1947,
the National Security Act created,
in a very short six-page order,
the Central Intelligence Agency.
[Stephen Kinzer] In that act,
there's something unique, very important,
that went on to have
a shattering impact at the CIA.
In the old system,
particularly in Britain,
there was always an absolute firewall
between the people who analyzed situations
and decided what might be done
or shouldn't have to be done,
and then on the other side,
the covert operatives.
In the National Security Act,
both of these functions were combined
into one agency, the CIA.
So it was gonna be the agency
that advised the president
on what the world looked like,
and then decided
whether a covert action was necessary,
and then carried it out.
That naturally gave the incentive
to present the world
as if covert action
was necessary everywhere.
[Weiner] By 1949,
the CIA's recruiting foreign agents
throughout Germany and beyond,
to conduct paramilitary operations
against the nations of Central Europe
where Stalin has installed
his puppet governments,
to parachute behind the Iron Curtain
and subvert the Soviet state.
The first of these operations,
in the fall of 1949,
were Ukrainians who had gotten
out of Ukraine after Stalin took it over,
found their way to Germany.
The CIA trains these Ukrainian exiles
in Germany for a month or two or three.
"Here's how you jump out of an airplane
with a parachute and a gun."
"Hit the ground and roll if you can."
"Here's how you set up
a clandestine radio
to communicate with us."
"Here's $50,000 worth of local currency
to buy yourself access."
"And you're to establish
a clandestine base
inside of Soviet-controlled Ukraine,
and we'll tell you what to do
when you get there."
[Anderson] Peter Sichel's kind of
in a supervisory role in all this.
[Sichel] Ukraine was never
totally controlled by the Soviets.
There was always pockets of resistance.
They created so-called
"Ukrainian resistance cells."
We would supply them
with arms, money, whatever.
These operations which the CIA conducted
with every fiber of its being
from 1949 to 1953,
were suicide missions.
Uncounted thousands
of recruited foreign agents died.
And one reason they were suicide missions
is that the CIA had been
penetrated by a Soviet spy.
And that spy was the head
of British intelligence in Washington,
Kim Philby.
He is the liaison
between the British intelligence services
and the CIA.
Philby was read
into what the CIA was doing
in its paramilitary missions,
and immediately conveys this information
back to Moscow Central,
thus ensuring that the missions
would end in disaster.
I was asked to resign
from the foreign office
because of an imprudent association.
[reporter] What about these alleged
communist associations?
Can you say anything about them?
The last time I spoke to a communist,
knowing him to be a communist,
was sometime in 1934.
[interviewer] So what happened
to all the people, the arms, and money
that the United States flew into Ukraine
in order to support those groups?
Basically ended up in Soviet hands.
And the people were shot,
or sent to Siberia, or whatever.
[Anderson] Each succeeding operation
into Poland, Romania,
they're all disasters.
People just disappear.
[somber music playing]
[Sichel] When it became so obvious
that it was a lesson they never learned,
I decided I didn't want
to be associated with people
who were so cavalier with human lives.
End of story.
I felt that an agency
that had so little regard for human life,
was not for me.
I approved of what they did,
but not where they did it
and how they did it.
[Weiner] The CIA was operating
so far out of its depths
that you can safely say
almost nothing the agency did worked.
Not in gathering intelligence,
not in running secret operations,
paramilitary missions.
It was a failure.
But 1953 was a new era for the CIA.
[Kinzer] Under the Truman Administration,
the CIA did carry out covert operations,
but always stopped short
of overthrowing governments.
When the Eisenhower Administration
took office, the gloves came off.
Allen Dulles became director of the CIA,
and his older brother John Foster Dulles
became Secretary of State.
This was the first time two siblings,
two brothers,
controlled the overt and the covert sides
of American foreign policy.
The Dulles brothers saw communism
behind every nationalist movement
in the world.
America was going to be
this beacon of democracy.
We were going to spread
democracy around the world.
It didn't matter how corrupt,
or how vicious,
or how brutal the regime was.
If you were anti-communist,
you were fine by us.
I often joke that if the Dulleses wanted
to throw their grandmother under the bus,
they would say they needed to do it
to save America
from international communism.
[Kinzer] One factor
that shaped the Dulles brothers
was a lifetime of dedication
to protecting the interests
of multinational corporations.
What this meant
was that they had a deep interest
in preserving the world economic system.
This system was based above all
on an understanding
that developed countries
that consume resources
need to be able to control the countries
where those resources are produced.
[dramatic music playing]
[Kinzer] The first two targets
for the Dulles brothers
as leaders who needed to be overthrown,
were two leaders against
whom they already had grudges.
It was Mosaddegh in Iran
and Árbenz in Guatemala.
[Weiner] And this led to two of the CIA's
most famous and infamous operations
of the early 1950s,
which was to overthrow
the duly elected governments
of Guatemala and Iran.
[broadcaster] The world's largest
oil refinery at Abadan, Iran,
becomes the center
of a major international crisis,
as Iran's parliament votes unanimously
to nationalize her vast oil fields.
[Kinzer] The Iranian government
had nationalized its oil resources.
[Anderson] The British had a stranglehold
over Iranian oil going back to 1914.
The British are pretty broke
at this point.
They go and sit
with John Foster Dulles and go,
"Yeah, we think Mosaddegh's a communist."
[laughs] "And will you help us
overthrow him?"
[Weiner] And the British and the Americans
conceived an operation
to get rid of Mosaddegh.
[suspenseful music playing]
[distant call to prayer]
[Weiner] So there were two elements
to the CIA's plan,
a chaotic plan that worked.
And one was money for bribing people,
and the other was propaganda.
HORRIFIC SPECTER OF BULLYING
AND COMMUNISM HAUNTS IRAN
[Kinzer] They had most of the newspapers
in Tehran
printing articles denouncing Mosaddegh.
[indistinct chatter]
[Abrahamian] This type
of what is now called fake news
was very much used by the CIA
to basically flood the Iranian media.
[Weiner] Then the CIA hired thugs
who posed as members
of the very small Communist Party of Iran,
who attacked mullahs, defiled a mosque.
The operation basically failed.
And then at the last minute,
through a comical
and Byzantine series of events,
there was just enough money,
propaganda, and treachery
flowing through the streets of Tehran
to allow a small corps
of rebellious officers
who had been paid by the CIA
to roll a tank up
to Prime Minister Mosaddegh's house,
blow a hole in it,
and convince him it would probably
be best if he left office.
[clamoring]
This opened the way
for the reinstallation of a Shah of Iran.
[broadcaster] Army officers reveal
Mosaddegh has surrendered.
His reign as virtual
dictator of Iran is ended.
Now crowds shout pro-shah slogans
and carry pictures of a troubled ruler
of a troubled nation.
[Weiner] The shah
ran a viciously repressive,
but pro-American government.
[Abrahamian] After the coup in Iran,
what you had was a consortium
between Iran and Western oil companies
obeying American companies,
a British company, and a French company.
They ran the oil industry.
If you read the documents,
there is really no real concern
about a serious communist takeover.
But it was a convenient argument to use
in the American public
that they were saving the country
from communism.
[enthralling music playing]
[Anderson] The following year,
almost the same thing happens in Guatemala
with Jacobo Árbenz.
I'm Chiquita Banana
And I've come to say ♪
Bananas have to ripen
In a certain way ♪
United Fruit has been running Guatemala
as a virtual slave plantation for decades.
People are paid virtually nothing,
and Árbenz is talking about nationalizing.
[enthralling music continues]
[Kinzer] The government of Jacobo Árbenz
had won congressional approval
for a large land reform that required
the United Fruit Company
to sell its unused land
to the Guatemalan government,
which would then cut up that land
and give it away
to starving peasant families.
United Fruit convinces John Foster Dulles
that Árbenz is communist.
So again, the Americans
back this coup against Árbenz.
[Weiner] This man wasn't a communist.
He proposed to expropriate
some fallow land
that United Fruit Company owned,
and to distribute it to peasants.
[Kinzer] The CIA recruited
a cashiered colonel named Castillo Armas,
and anointed him as "the liberator."
Then the CIA swept into action.
They saturated Guatemalan airwaves
with pre-recorded phony broadcasts.
[man in Spanish] Listen to us
and you will know the reality
of Guatemala's political moment
and the irrefutable progress
of the great liberation movement.
[Kinzer, in English]
In which, it seemed like
a big civil war
was unfolding in Guatemala.
Meanwhile, CIA planes were dropping bombs
that were then coordinated
with these radio broadcasts.
- LONG LIVE CASTILLO ARMAS
- COMMUNISTS, LEAVE ESQUIPULAS
[Kinzer] There wasn't any real fighting,
but finally it became clear
to the generals
that they had to overthrow Árbenz.
That brought Castillo Armas into power,
the liberator
that the Americans had anointed.
He went on immediately
to ban labor unions,
close Congress
- [gunfire]
- [crowd clamoring]
impose an oppressive regime,
execute hundreds of people,
and then that led to a holocaust
in Guatemala for many years.
Back in Washington,
in the White House and the CIA,
this operation was considered
a complete success.
Spectacular.
It didn't cost much money.
Only a few hundred people were killed,
none of them were Americans.
[Anderson] To my mind, John Foster Dulles
is really one of the great villains
of the second half of the 20th century,
from the standpoint
of the American standing in the world.
He saw the world as black and white.
You either stood with America,
or were against us.
There was no neutrality.
[Allen Dulles]
Intelligence is nothing really
other than information and knowledge.
From the days of Socrates
by various methods, and even before that,
uh, mankind has been seeking knowledge
of everything that influences his own life
or the life of the nation
to which he belongs.
But the idea
that it is necessarily nefarious,
it's always engaged
in overthrowing governments, that's false.
- [typewriter keys clacking]
- [phones ringing]
[ominous music playing]
[man on radio speaking indistinctly]
[Bailey] The Cold War was a battle
for the mind and hearts of the opponent
and the opponent's people.
So the Cold War
was being fought over thought.
[Weiner] The early CIA
from the late '40s into the '60s
had hundreds of influence operations,
where they purchased the favor
of a newspaper editor in Buenos Aires,
or Tokyo, or Berlin.
There were a handful,
some say more than a handful,
of American journalists
who were paid by the CIA,
or cooperated with the CIA free of charge.
So it was nothing for Allen Dulles
to call up the publisher
of the New York Times,
and say, "You have
an annoying journalist in Guatemala
who is reporting on a CIA operation
to overthrow the government."
"Yank him."
The publisher did.
[music fades]
[Bailey] Controlling people's thoughts
and actions was also integral
to the Soviet Union's effort
to make US policy
either do or not do what it wished,
and used what is called "active measures."
The formal structure
of the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union
dedicated to disinformation
and active measures
was set up in the 1950s.
That's using disinformation,
using agents of influence,
forgeries, and other tools
to manipulate the way people perceived
the factual universe around them.
We know about the early examples,
principally from defectors.
When Soviets are running some clandestine
active measures operation,
like, for instance,
planting some major story
in the newspaper in France, West Germany,
United States, elsewhere, Japan,
that kind of article normally would be
written by local prominent journalist,
who will express
as if his own or her own opinion.
These kinds of things normally won't
be traceable back to the Soviet Union.
[Bailey] The objective was to cause
disruption, confusion,
and to turn each other against each other.
The Soviet Union tried
very hard in its early days
to use forgeries like government documents
that they would make up a story,
put it on letterhead,
and slip it to a journalist in hope
that it would take off like wildfire,
and sometimes it did.
ROCKEFELLER GIVES DIRECTIVES
FOR US SUPERCOLONIALISM
[Ladislav Bittman] I would say
that the major successes
were in developing countries where
governments didn't have the expertise
EISENHOWER PLAYS WITH FIRE
AMERICAN PLANES FLY OVER ARAB REPUBLIC
to analyze properly these operations.
And, for example, sometimes
very cheap forgeries are accepted
in developing countries
as a genuine proof of American conspiracy.
[festive military band music playing]
[Plokhy] In the Soviet Union,
Stalin has complete control
over the media.
[crowd cheering]
[Plokhy] It was quite easy to create
an atmosphere of the besieged fortress,
of the spies and enemies around us.
[ominous music playing]
It was impermissible,
certainly in a classroom,
or a newspaper, anything,
to cast any doubt whatsoever on Stalin.
Stalin was the uncontested ruler
of the Soviet Union until 1953,
when he died of a stroke.
This is a major turning point
of the Cold War.
[reporter] The Kremlin's cold stone walls,
the eerie face of Moscow,
a howling wind and snow
adding to the somber picture,
is the description
accompanying the announcement
that the most powerful dictator in history
has come to the inevitable end.
[Remnick] In March of 1953
when Stalin died, everybody cried.
If you're surrounded by,
and you're growing up in a school
and you're worshiping Stalin,
not like George Washington
or saying pledge allegiance to the flag,
but in a, in a semi-mystical way,
that he's like the godhead,
and that suddenly the godhead is dead,
well, it's of no surprise that you'd cry.
[somber music playing]
[Weiner] After Stalin dies,
there is a power struggle
as to who will succeed him
that is finally resolved
with the rise of a new leader
named Nikita Khrushchev.
[Remnick] In the Khrushchev era,
there was something called the Thaw.
[Khrushcheva] I was born in Moscow.
I was raised in Moscow.
I had a privileged childhood
being the great-granddaughter
of Nikita Khrushchev.
He worked as a coal miner in East Ukraine.
In the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917,
he was a very low-level
political commissar,
and began kind of rising up
in the Communist ranks.
When Stalin dies,
Khrushchev came into power.
[reporter] The peasant from Kursk finally
emerges as dictator of the Soviet Union.
[Holloway] One of the things
that the new leadership does
is introduce amnesty for many people
who have been imprisoned.
[Masha Lipman] Khrushchev could not
bring back those who had been executed,
but he released from jail,
from labor camps,
those people who had been
innocent victims of Stalin's terror.
[Khrushcheva] And Khrushchev kept saying
to all those other Stalin flunkies,
"We need to talk about the crimes
of Stalin's that we were part of."
[applause]
[Khrushcheva]
In the last session of the Congress
ON THE CULT OF PERSONALITY
AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
Khrushchev delivered
what is called the Secret Speech.
It spoke about numbers of people
that got prosecuted
during Stalin's years in office,
and how many were imprisoned,
and how many went without trial.
It spoke about the secret police.
All the things that people knew some,
but they didn't have it in numbers
and never had it in a speech
by the first Secretary of
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
So it was an amazing moment.
After the speech was delivered,
there was an absolute silence in the room.
[Anne Applebaum] People who had believed
that the stories of Stalin's excesses
were exaggerated,
people who still believed
in the ideals of the Soviet Union
or the ideals of communism,
many of them had their eyes opened
by these revelations.
[Pavel Litvinov] In that speech,
he said Stalin was really a criminal.
Stalin was God for me.
I started to lose faith in God,
in Stalin, and in communism.
[Applebaum] It wasn't an admission that
the system was fundamentally wrong.
He didn't apologize
for everything that was done,
but it did set the Soviet Union
on a different course.
[Khrushchev speaking in Russian]
[Naftali] Khrushchev was very human.
[indistinct]
[Naftali] Khrushchev was emotional.
He loved to punctuate
sentences with swear words.
Didn't matter who he was talking to.
[Remnick] There's a period
in which a generation,
then quite young,
sees the possibility
of what would be called liberal reform
in the post-Stalinist era.
They're not dissidents.
They're not willing to go to jail.
But they become journalists.
They become party officials.
Khrushchev decided to try to introduce
some critics permitted in newspapers
in the magazine Novy Mir
NOVY MIR MAGAZINE
which was very popular
political magazine.
And kind of supported
certain de-Stalinization
and liberalization of Russian life.
People under Khrushchev,
they started to perform.
There were some concerts
of classical music,
which was almost forbidden.
Books were published.
[Remnick] He allows the publication of a
young writer named Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
[Naftali] But Khrushchev
was absolutely a believer
in the possibilities of Marxist-Leninism.
[applause]
[in Russian]
You are an advocate of capitalism,
and I am an advocate of communism.
So let's compete.
[dreamy music playing]
[Naftali, in English]
Central to Khrushchev's worldview,
the Soviet Union
was superior ideologically
and inferior militarily.
He believed the only way to make up
for the gap between American power
and Soviet power
was to scare Americans
about the Soviet Union
and to make them think the Soviet Union
was more powerful than it actually was.
[in Russian] We said we had
a 50-megaton bomb, that's correct.
[inaudible]
[dramatic music playing]
[Naftali, in English] It's why Khrushchev
engages in a disinformation campaign
to exaggerate
the number of Soviet missiles
that can reach the United States.
[speaking in Russian]
[Naftali] Khrushchev famously said,
"We can produce missiles like sausages."
And the American elite
believed the Russians.
[inaudible]
[in Russian] But we're not going
to detonate a 100-megaton bomb
because if we detonated that bomb
where it's supposed to go,
we might as well break our own windows.
- So, therefore, it's not worth it.
- [crowd laughs and applauds]
[dramatic music continues]
[Graff, in English] The US government
begins to move away
from this idea of urban evacuations
and fallout shelters,
and into this idea
of evacuating a small number
of high-ranking government officials
out into mountain bunkers
and airborne command posts,
figuring that most of America will die,
but the American government will live.
- [loud blast]
- [poignant music playing]
[blast]
[introspective music playing]
[Ellsberg] Since the early '50s,
but especially since the mid-'60s,
there have been two
doomsday machines in the world,
the US and Soviet, or Russian,
which are each capable
of ending most human life on Earth.
A federal judge today
ordered the New York Times
to suspend temporarily
publication of a series of reports
based on a secret Pentagon study
of how the United States became involved
in the Vietnamese War.
[reporter] Daniel Ellsberg,
the man named as the source
of the Pentagon copy
that appeared in the New York Times,
turned himself in today
to federal authorities.
I can't regret having done what I knew
at the time to be what I ought to do,
my duty as a citizen.
[Ellsberg, present day]
When I released the Pentagon Papers,
I figured, "Well, I'm gonna go to prison
for the rest of my life for this."
"So, why stop at this? Let me"
"I'll figure on putting out what I think
is much more important."
All my nuclear files.
They would, I hoped,
lessen the likelihood of nuclear war.
So I copied also,
in addition to the Pentagon Papers,
everything in my top secret safe.
My notes on nuclear war plans,
in hopes of raising people's consciousness
as to the dangers we are living with.
The defense budget
should be cut more than in half,
rather than being increased right now,
but starting with the most
dangerous weapons, the ICBMs.
[introspective music playing]
[Ellsberg]
I saw a nuclear crisis coming at us.
I see very little chance now
of reducing that.
For the last several years,
I've been focusing on trying
to eliminate US land-based ICBMs,
intercontinental ballistic missiles.
These are the hair trigger
on a doomsday machine.
I do have to say now,
in this point in my life,
the chance of actually affecting things
is lower even than I thought it was.
And yet, can it be worse
than risking your life, your freedom,
for a very low chance of saving lives?
And the answer is yes.
Of course it can be worth it.
There are lessons we learned
during the Cold War
we have conveniently forgotten,
including how unstable
a crisis can become,
and how fast.
And this is what happened in 1962.
[Kornbluh] On October 14th,
the U2 plane took these pictures.
There was now clear proof
that the Russians had secretly placed
intermediate-range nuclear missiles
on the island of Cuba.
The days that followed
were the most dangerous days
the world has ever faced then and now.
[tense music builds]
[music fades]
[closing theme music playing]