Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War (2024) s01e04 Episode Script
The Wall
1
[tense music playing]
[reporter] The arms control treaty,
which has helped keep Europeans safe,
could soon end.
If Russia does not return to full
and verifiable compliance with the treaty
within this six-month period
by verifiably destroying
its INF-violating missiles,
their launchers and associated equipment,
the treaty will terminate.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
announcing that the US is leaving
the intermediate-range
nuclear forces treaty with Russia.
[Collina] We saw
in the Trump Administration,
President Trump withdraw from one treaty,
the Intermediate-Range
Nuclear Forces Treaty.
[Susan Glasser] There's only
one arms control treaty left
between the United States and Russia,
the New START Treaty,
and even that is due to expire
in a few years.
[loud blast]
[tense music continues]
[Any Weber] Because US-Russian relations
are at such a low point
because of Ukraine,
they might not be able to restart
those negotiations, which could be tragic.
Because if that treaty expires,
this would be the first time in 50 years
where there's no limits
on the total number of nuclear weapons
that the United States
and Russia can deploy.
Tonight, the Kremlin now suspending all
notifications involving nuclear weapons,
communications required
under the New START Treaty.
I feel we're already in the first inning
of a new nuclear arms race.
[Sam Nunn] We are in a race
between cooperation and catastrophe.
It is not just the US, Russia.
It's also all the countries in the world
that can make weapons
that can eliminate God's creation.
That's where we are on the human scale.
Catastrophe is running
a lot faster than cooperation.
[music fades]
[opening theme music playing]
[enigmatic music playing]
[Timothy Naftali]
One of the characteristics of the Cold War
was that the Soviets were always
insecure about American power.
They knew they were behind.
They also knew,
because the US had a free press,
how afraid Americans got
whenever they showed
a little bit of might.
And Khrushchev wanted
to weaponize American fears.
He felt that nuclear weapons
were such a threat
that he could use them psychologically
to contain American power.
So he set about exaggerating.
The Soviets began to pretend
that they had more missiles.
[in Russian] We don't want war,
but we won't stop.
Nothing stops us from defending
our sovereignty and our motherland.
[enigmatic music continues]
[Tim Weiner, in English] The problem
for the CIA is trying to figure out
what's going on inside the Kremlin.
What are the military capabilities
of the Soviet Union?
How many missiles do they have?
How many bombs do they have?
How big is their army?
[intriguing music playing]
[Weiner] So the CIA,
through the brilliant Richard Bissell,
spearheads the effort
to develop a spy plane.
The first spy plane is called the U-2.
[plane roars]
[Weiner] The U-2 can fly at an altitude
of more than 70,000 feet,
and it can take pictures
from that altitude
that are good enough to let you know
what is happening at a certain airfield.
When the U-2 came along,
it really did change the whole game.
The Cold War cat-and-mouse game.
For the first time,
the Americans could map
what was happening in the Soviet Union,
could see this stuff in real detail.
[Naftali] But these flights
were not every day.
And they couldn't photograph
every part of the Soviet Union
that might have a missile farm.
In a time of nuclear weapons,
you don't want to underestimate your enemy
because the costs of getting it wrong
are potentially catastrophic.
And then the Soviets
surprised the United States
by putting the first
artificial satellite into space.
[reporter] October 4, 1957.
Sputnik, the first Earth satellite,
was launched.
The Soviet Union gets to space first
with this tiny beeping ball
called Sputnik.
[reporter] In the history of the Earth,
no other event
had captured the imagination
of so many people
as this first step into space.
[Graff] You could watch it
from your backyard with binoculars
as it passes over your house.
You could pick it up
on your household radio.
And it becomes this sort of beeping
harbinger of doom for the United States
that Russia got to space first,
and then sort of more broadly,
this fear that the US was falling behind
in science and technology.
[Weiner] Well, if they can put
that capsule into space,
they can put a missile
with a nuclear warhead into space,
and the game's over.
The U-2 is followed by an even more
useful piece of spy technology,
which is called the CORONA satellite.
That's a small satellite placed in orbit,
which can take continuous,
first, still pictures,
and then video of what's going on
in the Soviet Union.
The first satellites actually used film,
and they would eject these pods of film
from the satellite with electronics,
so you'd know where it was.
Air Force planes
with big prongs at the front of the plane
would snatch this canister
coming down to earth.
The canisters would then
be sent to Kodak to be developed.
[enigmatic music playing]
The first photographic satellites
gave us a lot of information
about what was going on
in the Soviet Union
in terms of both bombers and missiles.
[Weiner] As the CIA discovered,
the Soviet Union did not
have thousands of missiles
capable of striking the United States.
It did not have hundreds of nukes
capable of striking the United States.
It had four.
Not 4,000.
[blast]
Turned out there was a missile gap,
but it was around
a thousand to one in our favor.
[children screaming]
[Graff] This thing that we had feared
through all of the 1950s
as this existential threat
to the United States
was really a paper tiger.
[Daniel Ellsberg] The Russian army
had been enormously overestimated.
The Russians were not
on a crash program to build missiles,
which the people around me
all took for granted that they were,
and were not superior,
were not trying to be superior,
which meant that they were not trying
for a first-strike capability
against the US,
which in turn really meant they weren't
trying to dominate the world militarily.
That discovery
should have led to a rethinking
of our whole paradigm there
of our whole world perspective,
as to who we were confronting,
and what their aims were,
and how we dealt with them.
But it didn't at all.
[reporter] The foreign policy of
the Soviet Union is, in a word, conquest.
They envision the entire world Sovietized
and united communist-style.
[Ellsberg] Why has such
a totally fraudulent belief
been so persistent all this time?
Because there's jobs.
It's very profitable.
[Graff] All manner
of private-sector companies,
defense contractors,
communications contractors,
becomes reliant on the government
and the defense spending.
This is becoming
sort of a nuclear-headed hydra
unlike anything that the US
has ever experienced before.
[bell tolling]
[Audra J. Wolfe] The defense orientation
also dramatically changed
American universities,
particularly in science and technology.
By some estimates,
75% of funding for the natural sciences
was coming from defense institutes
in the 1950s.
This was a society that had become
increasingly oriented around defense,
and security, and nuclear weapons.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Alex Wellerstein] Under Eisenhower,
the number of weapons
and the diversity of types of weapons
starts to exponentially increase.
The American scientists
within the nuclear infrastructure
get extremely creative.
So they end up
with this wide variety of bombs
for all sorts
of different types of circumstances.
The smallest bombs that the US ever made
could fit into a reasonably large
duffel bag or backpack
and be carried by a single person.
The largest bombs
that get made in this period
were the size
of a sort of school bus, essentially.
It's a huge bomb.
It doesn't really fit inside the bomber.
It has to sort of hang underneath it.
And then you have everything in between.
Might be a bomb meant to be on a missile.
It might be a bomb that's meant
to have ten of them on one missile.
It might be a torpedo.
It might be a land mine,
a regular bomb you drop out of a plane,
a rocket meant to carry a nuclear bomb
to shoot down a bomber.
Just a tremendous
variety of weapons in this time.
They sort of have an unlimited budget
for this, and unlimited ideas.
[loud blast]
[Ellsberg] When Eisenhower
came into office,
there was about a thousand
atomic warheads.
When Eisenhower left office,
there was about 23,000 nuclear warheads.
And most of them by now
were thermonuclear,
which was a thousand times more powerful
than the Nagasaki bomb.
This immense expansion
of destructive power
took place with very little
attention of the public.
[somber music playing]
[Wolfe] By the time
that he left office in 1961,
Eisenhower was concerned
at how these spending levels
just seemed to keep going
up and up and up,
even after he himself
had endorsed many of the policies
that created that situation
in the first place.
To Eisenhower, this was beginning
to pose a threat to American democracy.
We have been compelled to create
a permanent armaments industry
of vast proportions.
In the councils of government,
we must guard against
the acquisition of unwarranted influence,
whether sought or unsought,
by the military-industrial complex.
The potential for the disastrous rise
of misplaced power
exists and will persist.
[introspective music playing]
[Graff] Eisenhower becomes deeply afraid
by the end of his presidency.
The Cold War is spinning out of control.
So many congressmen are reliant
on the jobs in their districts
that it's sort of in everyone's interest
to keep building
towards this world-ending moment
because it's good business.
[cheering]
[Scott Anderson] Both sides played it.
Democrat, Republican,
they all played this game.
[Nixon] Although we are today
the strongest nation
in the world militarily,
we must increase our strength.
[Kennedy]
The fundamental problem of our time
is the steady erosion of American power
relative to that of the communists
in recent years.
[Anderson] John Kennedy,
when he's running for president in 1960,
talks about the missile gap,
you know, and-and kind of suggesting
that somehow the Eisenhower administration
had been soft.
Had been caught with their pants down
against the Soviets.
They all played it.
[crowd cheering]
[cheering continues]
I, John Fitzgerald Kennedy,
do solemnly swear
[Earl Warren] That you will faithfully
execute the office
of President of the United States.
that I will faithfully execute the office
of President of the United States.
[Nina Khrushcheva] Kennedy comes in.
Kennedy's a young president.
Only when our arms
are sufficient beyond doubt
can we be certain beyond doubt
that they will never be employed.
Khrushchev thinks,
"Who is that little boy?"
He's the age of his own son Leonid.
[dramatic music playing]
And, of course, Khrushchev
had his own opposition already growing,
the hardliners who were saying,
"Well, the Americans
are treating you so horribly."
So he had a lot of people in his ear
saying that he was just
being a total fool,
and a punching bag
for the West, and so on.
[applause]
[Khrushcheva] Then the famous visit
of Khrushchev to the United Nations
when he was banging his fists
and screaming that, you know,
America is an imperialist country
and racist country.
[in Russian] All the sparrows
on the rooftops are chirping about this
that the most imperialist power
which supports colonial regimes
is the United States of America.
[applause]
[Khrushcheva, in English]
So the confrontation was increasing,
and Kennedy had his own hawks
in the administration
pushing him to step up and be against
this horrible Soviet despot.
And so a lot of it
just was getting out of control.
And then they met in Vienna in 1961.
I went to Vienna to meet the leader
of the Soviet Union, Mr. Khrushchev.
For two days, we met in sober,
intensive conversation.
But our most somber talks
were on the subject of Germany and Berlin.
[Timothy Garton Ash] In 1961,
the confrontation between East and West
becomes more and more intense in Berlin.
[dramatic music continues]
YOU ARE ENTERING THE FRENCH SECTOR
[Garton Ash] East Germany is in some ways
the jewel in the crown
of the Soviet Empire.
It's in the heart of Europe,
and it's one of the most developed parts
of the entire Soviet Bloc.
But East Germany is bleeding to death
because its people are just leaving.
[reporter] Doctors, engineers,
teachers, technicians.
People with skills badly needed
in the communists' faltering economy.
More than four million people
have fled from Soviet domination
since the post-war
occupation zones were established.
[Joachim Neumann]
The part of Berlin where I grew up,
was would become, uh,
East Berlin, unfortunately.
As a little child, the border between
East and West Berlin was open.
So we could go to West Berlin
so often as we liked.
In West Berlin, we were able to see
all movies which we want to see.
We could read all books.
We could listen to every kind of music.
And in East Berlin, the GDR,
a lot of such things was not allowed.
And then our life changed.
[Garton Ash] On the 13th of August, 1961,
the East German communist authorities
throw up what we call the wall,
which is initially just breeze-blocks
and barbwire.
[somber music playing]
[Garton Ash] And they say
it's the anti-fascist protective wall,
to protect us against the fascists
in West Berlin.
Everybody knows it's to keep
their own people in, not us out.
[somber music continues]
[Garton Ash] The wall goes up.
It's a terrible shock.
You have to imagine New York or London
being divided down the middle.
So, literally one side of West 42nd Street
is in East New York,
and the other side of West 42nd Street
is in West New York.
And there's a wall between them,
and you get shot if you try to escape
from one side to the other.
[dramatic music playing]
[inaudible]
[Neumann] We came
not very close to the border,
maybe 200 or 300 away,
and the police catch us and sent us back.
Told us it was not allowed
to go too close to the border.
It was no longer allowed to move
through the city as we are used to.
The political pressure
was higher and higher.
You have a famous picture
of a frontier guard,
an actual East German frontier guard,
looking around.
And then taking a leap
and jumping over the barbwire.
[dramatic music continues]
[Garton Ash] It gets more difficult,
so you have people tunneling underneath
and trying to get out of the tunnels,
trying to get down from the windows
of apartment blocks.
[reporter] While an East German guard
attempts to yank her back to prison,
West Berliners pull her
to a fire net and freedom.
[Mary Elise Sarotte] The regime
would just destroy buildings
that were near to the wall
in order to create
this larger security zone.
There's a famous case when a particularly
beautiful church was just detonated
in order to make room for, you know,
another area for guards
and guard towers and so forth.
There would be additional walls built.
Then there would be death strips put in.
Self-triggering machine guns. Barbed wire.
Something called Stalin's Lawn,
which was like a bed
of iron spikes sitting up.
We were prisoners in our own country.
[brooding music playing]
[Horst Teltschik] At the border
between East and West Berlin,
Soviet tanks and American tanks
were confronting one another.
They could watch on the other side,
the tank of the opponent.
Therefore, just by accident,
something could happen
almost all the time possible.
[anxious music playing]
[Garton Ash] Everything about the greatest
geopolitical conflict of the time
is concentrated in one place
and in one symbol, that wall.
And there were so many
Red Army troops in East Germany.
So it was an absolutely
overwhelming military presence.
[Ellsberg] The Soviets could have walked
into West Berlin at any time.
What kept them from doing that
was an explicit threat
that that would lead
to a nuclear response.
We had thousands
of intermediate-range missiles and bombers
within range of Russia.
[Anderson] In 1961,
the Americans led this new generation
of very advanced missiles in Turkey.
[reporter] The Jupiter,
an intermediate missile
with a range of 1,500 miles,
is being deployed by the Air Force
to bases in Italy and Turkey.
The American missiles are right there
in Turkey, aiming at the Kremlin,
and Khrushchev said,
"Oh, this is so close. How horrible."
"We're surrounded by NATO bases.
We have to do something about it."
[Naftali] The Soviets said,
"Look, we don't have any land allies
close to the United States."
"We can't quite do the same thing,
but we do have Cuba."
[suspenseful music builds]
[news fanfare playing]
[news anchor] From his small hole
in the wild Sierra Maestra mountains,
Cuba's Fidel Castro emerged triumphant
after two years of guerrilla warfare
ended with the flight
of dictator Fulgencio Batista
and the entry into Havana of rebel forces
to be acclaimed by the city.
FIDEL: GREETS YOU
[Peter Kornbluh] Fidel Castro, a lawyer,
a very prominent political figure in Cuba,
pulled off an improbable, uh, revolution.
For over a hundred years,
the United States treated Latin America
as our backyard.
And Cuba was the closest part
of that backyard.
It's only 90 miles
off the shore of Florida.
This region was presumed
to be ours to control,
and it became clear that, uh,
Castro could not be told what to do
by the United States.
[in Spanish] What imperialists
cannot forgive is that we are here
and that we have made
a socialist revolution
under the very nose of the United States.
[cheering]
[Kornbluh, in English] Fidel Castro
promoted agricultural reform.
He nationalized US oil refineries
so that they wouldn't be dependent
on the United States for oil.
Castro began nationalizing the properties
of the wealthiest class of Cubans,
Cubans who owned ranches, and big farms,
and businesses, and factories,
and sugar plantations.
My father was a pediatrician.
So I grew up in what was probably
a very nice society.
We begin then to see
the interference of communists.
There was a tremendous resentment
in the street for anybody
that had any kind of wealth.
So eventually I came to Miami.
[Latell] Many families have been forced
out of everything they owned,
and they've all gone into exile.
Most of them are in Miami.
But much of the middle class
is still supportive of Castro.
[Anderson] Castro revealed
his true colors as a communist.
So the Americans
were determined to overthrow him
like they had overthrown
Árbenz in Guatemala and Mossadegh in Iran.
[Weiner] Over and over again,
the United States
was subverting governments
in the name of American democracy.
The CIA had this elaborate plan
it had developed
to recruit and train
an army of Cuban exiles
to overthrow and kill Fidel Castro.
Like so many of the CIA's
operations in the Cold War,
it was ill-conceived and ill-run.
[Kornbluh] They would launch
a paramilitary invasion of Cuba
with about a thousand exiles
led by the CIA.
[Ada Ferrer] And their assumption
was that the Cuban people would rise up
when the invaders arrived,
you know, and join them,
and that Castro's government
would fall within a week or days.
[Latell] But these assumptions
proved to be false.
They were not tested either politically
by Kennedy and his political team,
or by the intelligence officers
in the operations directorate of the CIA.
[Kornbluh] The CIA
had come to think of itself
as omnipotent in these covert operations,
and boy, were they wrong.
[Latell]
Castro had very good intelligence.
He had at least one source
in Guatemala in the training camp,
and he had sources
all around the streets of Miami.
[tense music playing]
[Humberto Arguelles]
I signed up December 3 or 4th of 1960,
and I was called upon
to go to the training camps in January.
[distant clamoring]
[Montalvo] I had no military background.
I thought we were gonna land in there
and we were gonna fight
Castro's government head-on,
and that we were going to bring in
freedom to all the Cubans
and get rid of communism.
[Kornbluh] The CIA,
in its inimical wisdom,
picked a location in Cuba
at the Bay of Pigs,
where Castro's reforms
had actually changed the lives
of everybody in that area for the better.
Castro had brought in electricity,
water systems, education,
a literacy campaign.
So there was nobody
that wasn't a supporter of Castro there.
[dramatic music rising]
[Montalvo] The Bay of Pigs, it's a
You land in the middle of a swamp.
The beach in Girón, the mainland,
this spot had a coral reef on the outside
that prevented landing ships
from getting to shore.
[Arguelles] We were landing at night,
four o'clock in the morning.
We had to jump from the reef
to the water with all our weapons,
with a piece of a mortar
with two boxes of, uh, ammunition,
and the water up to your neck.
And as soon as we reached shore,
the shooting began.
[gunfire]
[Arguelles] Castro was ready for us.
[Montalvo] They sent first a battalion
of a thousand men with tanks.
Then they sent another battalion
in the afternoon.
And then at night, they attacked us
with artillery for four hours.
[loud artillery shooting]
We couldn't advance
very far from the beach.
We ran out of heavy ammunition completely.
No food, no air cover.
That's when we really
came to terms with reality
that we were abandoned and betrayed.
[Montalvo] They captured us.
We were in prison 21 months.
It was a disaster.
[Kennedy] There's an old saying
that victory has 100 fathers
and defeat is an orphan.
Through the statement's
detailed, uh, discussions,
I'm not to, uh, conceal responsibility
because I'm the responsible officer
of the government,
but merely because I
And that is quite obvious.
But merely because I do not believe
that such a discussion
would benefit us
during the present difficult
uh, situation.
[introspective music playing]
[Kornbluh] The Bay of Pigs
turned out to be the perfect failure.
All the planning,
all the execution of this grandiose,
blatant, flagrant, active intervention
from the United States
became the biggest fiasco for the CIA
and for the young new president
John F. Kennedy.
The world, frankly, was aghast.
And that led to the most
extraordinary consequence,
the decision by Nikita Khrushchev to put
intermediate-range
nuclear missiles in Cuba
as a way of making sure
that the United States would be deterred
from invading Cuba again,
and to help the Soviet Union
kind of psychologically balance
the mismatch and the size
of the US nuclear arsenal
and the Russian nuclear arsenal.
[striking music playing]
[Naftali] Soviets were having a hard time
with intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The Americans could project power
in a way the Soviets couldn't.
Soviets didn't have
any aircraft carriers, for example.
So, Khrushchev came up with this idea.
Well, the only way to scare them
is to put missiles
90 miles from the United States.
[music fades]
[Latell] The first missile installation
was under construction
near a town called San Cristóbal
in Western Cuba in October of '62.
It was a medium-range
ballistic missile installation.
[Ferrer] The missiles arrived
on these large ships.
The Soviets didn't want
American reconnaissance planes
to recognize what was happening,
so the people on the ships
were kept below deck.
All of a sudden,
there were big trucks coming in
under the cover of night.
They're so huge that the streets
in the little town tremble,
and the trucks
can't make it around corners.
The Cuban police
would tell them to stay inside,
but they'd peek out their windows,
and through the slats,
people could make out the large trucks
with large, long beds.
And on the beds of the truck were tarps.
People said that the things under
the tarps looked like large palm trees.
[Naftali] The United States had
a few spies and a few defectors from Cuba
who provided very precise information
about areas west of Havana,
the capital city,
where some very strange things
were going on.
The intelligence community said,
"Mr. President,
please consider approving
the U-2 spy plane flight over Cuba."
So they carefully plotted out
one crossing of the island
around where spies
had indicated very suspicious activity.
It was that flight that found
the missiles on October 14th.
[Kornbluh] The days that followed
come to be known
as the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In Cuba, they call it
the Crisis de Octubre,
the Crisis of October.
[suspenseful music builds]
[Naftali] Kennedy is furious.
[Marshall Carter] The launch site at one
of the encampments contains a total
of at least
14 canvas-covered missile trailers.
[Kennedy] How far advanced is this?
[Lundahl] Sir, we've never seen
this kind of an installation before.
- [Kennedy] Not even in the Soviet Union?
- [Lundahl] No, sir.
[Kennedy] It's a goddamn mystery to me.
I don't know enough
about the Soviet Union,
but if anybody can tell me
any other time since the Berlin blockade
where the Russians have given us
so clear a provocation,
I don't know what it's been.
[Naftali] For six days, there were secret
deliberations in Washington
about how to respond
to the presence of the missiles.
What would be the best way
to get them out?
And, of course,
almost everybody in the administration
were focused on an act of aggression.
Attack the missile sites by air,
and then launch an invasion
for us to unseat the Cuban regime.
The military started to amass
a massive invasion force.
[noble music playing]
[Bill Ober] I joined the Marines
because I thought it would be
the most challenging of the services,
which it turned out to be.
I was told that we had to pack RC bags
because we were going, uh, to Cuba.
We, as Marines, would be planning
an invasion of Cuba itself,
and that's where we practiced on,
the island of Vieques,
and landing on the beaches.
I was aboard a troop transport.
And they put these cargo nets
over the side,
and we had to climb down these nets
with our backpacks and rifles,
and all our gear into these wooden boats
from World War II vintage.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Ober] I just happened
to have my camera with me,
and I took photographs
of the chaos at the time.
When we looked down the beach
as far as you could see,
there was personnel and equipment.
[Naftali] It was clear
that it might be only hours
before the United States
launched air strikes on Cuba.
[suspenseful music continues]
[Kornbluh] The dangers were extraordinary.
The CIA estimated there were
8,000 Soviet personnel on the island.
In reality, there were 42,000.
Kennedy started to actually think through,
"If I end up being responsible for
the death of that many Soviet soldiers,
what is the pressure going to be
on Nikita Khrushchev to retaliate?"
"Will he retaliate by attacking us?
Will he retaliate by attacking Berlin?"
"If he attacks Berlin, we will definitely
have World War III on our hands."
"How will we keep
nuclear weapons from being used?"
[Robert McNamara] The question really is,
are we willing to pay
some kind of a rather substantial price
to eliminate these missiles?
I think the price is going to be high.
[Kennedy] You mean nuclear exchange?
[tense music playing]
[Naftali] To give you a sense
of the danger zone
that was developing on and around Cuba,
you had missiles
that could reach the United States.
You had nuclear-tipped torpedoes
on submarines headed toward the Caribbean.
And you had additional missiles
on ships also going to Cuba.
What are Kennedy's options?
One is an air strike to knock out
the missiles that have been found.
Two, an air strike,
plus an invasion to occupy Cuba
and achieve regime change.
Three, some kind of diplomacy
with the Soviets.
That third option was known
as the blockade, or quarantine option.
Basically, making sure the Soviets
could not bring more missiles to Cuba.
[R. Kennedy] Just the whole question
of assuming you do survive all this.
We don't have The fact that we're not
What kind of a country we are.
[Naftali] Robert F. Kennedy
is the most important factor
in shifting majority support
from the hawks
to those who want to seek some way
short of war to deal with the missiles.
[R. Kennedy] We've talked for 15 years
that the Russians
doing a first strike against us,
and we'd never do that.
Now, in the interest of time,
we do that to a small country.
I think that's a hell
of a burden to carry.
[brooding music playing]
[Naftali] Kennedy asks the big question
of the US Air Force.
"If we go ahead with an air strike,
can you get all of the missiles?"
And the Air Force says, "Mr. President,
we can get about 90% of them."
"Well, what happens to the other 10%?"
And the military says,
"Well, they could be launched."
"And the consequence
could be millions of people dying
in the United States."
And he couldn't take that risk.
And so Kennedy, reluctantly,
embraced the blockade option.
Because it was the only sane,
ethical response in the nuclear age.
And that is the response that he shares
with the world on October 22nd.
[Kennedy] Good evening,
my fellow citizens.
This government has maintained
the closest surveillance
of the Soviet military buildup
on the island of Cuba.
Within the past week,
unmistakable evidence
has established the fact
that a series of offensive missile sites
is now in preparation
on that imprisoned island.
The purpose of these bases
can be none other than to provide
a nuclear strike capability
against the western hemisphere.
[Ober] We were part
of, uh, the quarantine fleet.
We were to keep the Russians
from sending any more missiles into Cuba.
- [interviewer] This was at DEFCON 2?
- Yes.
[interviewer] What is DEFCON 2?
[Ober] This has to do
with a state of readiness.
When they get to DEFCON 2,
that's the last step
before all-out nuclear war,
which is DEFCON 1.
All these safety devices that they have
on these nuclear weapons are off.
They're ready to launch, in other words.
Hundreds and hundreds
of our planes are airborne,
headed towards the Soviet Union
with one thing in mind,
that this could be a nuclear war
and we may not be returning.
[unsettling music playing]
It's the closest you could possibly come
to all-out nuclear war.
[Ferrer] Castro dictates a letter
to send to Khrushchev.
[Latell] Castro writes,
"We are at what I believe to be
the end stage of this crisis,
and there are two possibilities now."
"One is that the Americans
will invade Cuba
and they will seek to occupy Cuba."
"The other is that they're going
to try to destroy your missiles
that are armed with nuclear warheads."
"You must strike preemptively
with all of your nuclear forces
against American targets."
"You must not wait
for the Americans to fire."
"You must act first."
[unsettling music continues]
[Ferrer] Even though it was Khrushchev's
idea to put the missiles in Cuba,
I think Khrushchev comes to worry
quite a bit about Fidel Castro.
[Latell] The 12th day,
some of the most
precarious things occurred
that put the Cold War
onto a much higher plateau of danger.
An unprecedented plateau of danger.
[Naftali] On Saturday, October 27th,
a US U-2 spy plane was shot down
by a Soviet anti-aircraft battery.
[McNamara] A U-2 was shot down.
They fired against
our low-altitude surveillance.
[Kennedy] A U-2 was shot down?
This is much of an escalation by them.
[McNamara] Yes, exactly.
I think we can defer an air attack on Cuba
until Wednesday or Thursday,
but only if we continue our surveillance
and and, uh, fire against anything that
fires against a surveillance aircraft.
[Naftali] Moscow did not authorize this,
and Khrushchev was appalled when he heard
that the U-2 had been shot down.
He did not order that.
[McCone] Write to Khrushchev.
Here's an action they've taken against us.
A new order in defiance
of a public statement.
- [McNamara] I think we ought to.
- [Nitze] They've fired the first shot.
[tense music playing]
[Ellsberg] The Air Force, at that point,
were within minutes
of sending back retaliatory forces.
But Kennedy held back and said,
"We'll give them another day,"
because he was trying to negotiate
an end to the crisis.
[Naftali] Khrushchev had decided
that he needed to find an off-ramp.
He tells the leadership,
"We got to find a way out of this."
He wants to do it and save face.
What Khrushchev wants to get from Kennedy
is a promise not to invade Cuba.
As it becomes clear
that the Americans are afraid,
Khrushchev decides,
"I want more than that."
"I want Kennedy
to pull those missiles out of Turkey
and pull the missiles
that NATO has in Italy."
[tense music continues]
[Kornbluh] Kennedy sent his brother,
Robert Kennedy,
to secretly meet with the Soviet
ambassador to Washington,
Anatoly Dobrynin,
the night of Saturday, October 27th.
Robert Kennedy said,
"We would swap
the missiles that we have in Turkey
for the withdrawal
of the missiles in Cuba."
"We will never publicly acknowledge
that there was a quid pro quo
to ending the Missile Crisis this way,
but we will do that."
"I'm representing my brother,
and you have his word
that that will happen
down the road from now."
Khrushchev decided
to announce publicly on the radio,
so that Kennedy would hear it quickly,
that the Soviet Union
was agreeing to withdraw the missiles
on the basis of the pledge
that the United States was making
that it would not invade Cuba.
[announcer] The Soviet government
has ordered the dismantling
of weapons in Cuba,
as well as their crating
and return to the Soviet Union.
Radio Moscow at 9:00 this morning.
Mr. Khrushchev crating up his missiles
and shipping them home.
[Naftali] Khrushchev never said
anything publicly
about the connection between the removal
of the missiles from Turkey
and his removal of the missiles from Cuba.
Never. He never crowed about it.
And that secret
basically kept being a secret
for years and years and years,
much distorting everybody's understanding
of how the Missile Crisis ended.
[Ferrer] Castro is livid.
He wasn't consulted
on the withdrawal happening.
He heard about it,
you know, basically on the radio,
when the rest of the world
learned about it,
and he essentially believed
that by withdrawing the missiles,
the Soviets were giving the US
a green light to invade.
[in Spanish] We know what we are doing.
And we know how to defend ourselves,
our integrity, and our sovereignty.
[applause]
[Ellsberg, in English] It's clear to me
neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev
had any desire
to go to armed conflict with the other.
Each of them was threatening it openly
and to their subordinates.
"Get ready for it. We're gonna do it."
Et cetera.
Both of them were bluffing,
but they weren't in control.
[Graff] The Cuban Missile Crisis
brings home to the American people
just how real the possibility
of nuclear war actually is.
[Kennedy] Total war makes no sense
in an age where great powers
can maintain large
and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces
and refuse to surrender
without resort to those forces.
Kennedy, some months later,
spoke of his sincere, genuine commitment
to strive with the Soviets
for peaceful solutions to our conflicts.
Today, the expenditure
of billions of dollars every year
on weapons acquired for the purpose
of making sure we never need them,
is essential to the keeping of peace.
But surely, the acquisition
of such idle stockpiles,
which can only destroy and never create,
is not the only,
much less the most efficient,
means of assuring peace.
The Soviets and Americans
also agreed after the Missile Crisis,
because of the Missile Crisis,
to the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty,
which put American and Soviet
nuclear testing underground,
not in the atmosphere.
[Naftali] In the aftermath
of the Cuban Missile Crisis,
John F. Kennedy
and Nikita Khrushchev believe
that Moscow and Washington shared
an interest in reducing nuclear tension.
But within two years, they would be gone
from the center of power.
[martial music playing]
[Naftali] Kennedy would be assassinated
in November of 1963
and Khrushchev will be toppled
in October of the next year.
Khrushchev would lose his job in part
because of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The effort to put missiles in Cuba
was Khrushchev's baby.
It was his brainchild.
When it failed, it was his fault.
[Khrushcheva] He went quietly.
He said, "My greatest achievement
is that today I'm ousted by mere voting."
Because only ten years before that,
he would have gone to gulag
and everybody else,
the whole family, would go with him.
[Naftali] Khrushchev had just put
the entire Soviet leadership through hell
because of his original thinking.
What the leadership wanted
was a completely banal,
predictable,
incredibly uninteresting leader.
And they got that with Leonid Brezhnev.
[Brezhnev, in Russian] Our foreign policy
aims to consolidate
and develop the world socialist system,
mobilize all anti-imperialist forces
to defend the cause of freedom,
of independence,
and the security of people
in the cause of peace
and progress throughout the world.
[Naftali] Brezhnev importantly shares
one thing with Khrushchev.
He does not want nuclear war.
But Brezhnev and his colleagues
do not ever want
to be in the position of inferiority
that Khrushchev put them in in 1962,
when they were looking
down the barrel of a gun.
When the Americans were threatened
by the placement of missiles in Cuba,
the Americans made clear to the Soviets
how much further ahead they were.
And the Soviets knew it.
So Brezhnev and his allies decide,
"We're never again going to be as far
behind because we're gonna be ahead."
And the Soviets launch
a missile-building program
after the Cuban Missile Crisis,
not only to catch up, but to get ahead.
Nuclear weapons, and the drive
for ever more powerful,
or more functional,
or more versatile weapons,
really drove much
of science and technology policy,
but also national policy,
during the Cold War.
At the same time,
the United States and the Soviet Union
largely considered them
to be unusable weapons
because the use of an atomic weapon
would basically trigger
a mutual suicide pact.
[Nichols] By the late '60s,
when we've taken
all these weapons, thousands of them,
we've put them on missiles
that arrive in 27, 28, 30 minutes
from launch to impact,
we now have entered a situation
where you're simply not going to get away
with a strike and survive somehow.
There's going to be another strike.
Your opponent is gonna fire those rockets
out of the ground.
You're going to fire yours.
And at some point, the assured destruction
reached such high levels on both sides
that it became
mutually assured destruction.
[tense music playing]
[Wolfe] These weapons are so horrible
that if one country used them
and the other responded,
that the response would just
basically kill off the entire Earth.
If you had dozens, hundreds,
thousands of nuclear explosions
happening in very short order,
it would coat the Earth in a film
that would both
prevent sunlight from getting in,
but also would prevent things
from growing,
coating the entire globe
in alarming levels of fallout.
So the United States and the Soviet Union
could not engage in direct conflict.
You have, instead, different kinds
of conflicts around the world
as the United States and the Soviet Union
conducted their battles
on proxy battlefields.
[clamoring]
[Wolfe] Intervening
in other countries' civil wars.
Taking part in interregional conflicts.
Arming one side over the other.
The Cold War was a global war.
It was not simply a struggle for dominion
between Washington and Moscow.
Every nation in the world
was a battleground in the Cold War
between American-backed forces
and Soviet-backed forces.
Every African nation was a battlefield
in the struggle for control.
The proxy wars in Angola,
in Mozambique, and in Congo
were particularly brutish,
particularly nasty, and particularly long.
Vietnam was not simply a war between
the United States and North Vietnam.
The United States mobilized
all its allies throughout Asia.
The North Vietnamese
were supplied and aided
by the Soviet Union and China.
[Kornbluh] In Latin America,
Cuba, El Salvador,
and Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua,
became cause célèbres
for US foreign policymakers
who wanted to use the Cold War
as a rationale to intervene once again
in countries that had already
suffered decades, if not centuries,
of US intervention previously.
In Chile, we helped
orchestrate the assassination
of the commander in chief
of the Chilean Armed Forces,
in order to overthrow
a democratically elected president
of another country.
[Weiner] And a military dictatorship
led by General Augusto Pinochet took over.
Pinochet murdered his political opponents,
and ruled by force and fear
for the next 17 years
until the end of the Cold War.
[gunshots]
[Stephen Kinzer] It's remarkable
the extent to which
we abandoned those countries
after we overthrew their governments.
Guatemala is now a corrupt
and highly violent country.
It's wracked by gang violence,
and the state has effectively
ceased to function.
It's a country that was violently
thrown off the path to democracy,
which it had been on for ten years
and which seemed to be taking hold.
[indistinct chanting]
[Kinzer] And you can say that about Iran
and many other countries
where the United States has intervened.
[Anderson] I think America
post-World War II
had this just massive
crisis of confidence.
Rather than standing on our ideals
that we are going to be this exporter
of democracy,
you know, as naive as that might sound,
what happened was this mentality set in,
that everything was a zero-sum game,
and we're going to get into bed with
whoever calls themselves anti-communist.
I think there was a huge moral cost.
We should have stood on our ideals.
I, Richard Milhous Nixon,
do solemnly swear
That you will faithfully
execute the office
That I will faithfully execute the office
of President of the United States.
of President of the United States.
[applause]
[Nichols] When Richard Nixon's elected,
takes office in 1969,
he has a reputation for being
a really hard-line anti-communist,
anti-Soviet kind of guy.
Made his bones as an anti-communist
crusader in the '50s.
The communists have been ruthless
toward the people of the nations
they have engulfed.
They have no memory of former favors,
no kindness toward those
who tried to be friendly.
They are cold and calculating masters.
[Nichols] But as the president,
he approaches the Soviets and says,
"Look, you don't like us,
we don't like you,
but we can't blow up the world."
[cheering]
"Mutual assured destruction
is a real thing."
"We have to find some other way
to deal with each other."
[introspective music playing]
[Nichols] It's more than about
just nuclear weapons.
Nixon goes to the Soviets and he says,
"We will recognize you
as a legitimate superpower."
And this policy comes to be known
by the term "détente."
Now we have well begun the long journey,
which will lead us to a new age
in the relations
between our two countries.
[Rose Gottemoeller] In 1972,
two major agreements were reached.
One is the Strategic Arms
Limitation Agreement,
which is called SALT I.
It was the first effort
to limit strategic, offensive,
big intercontinental ballistic missiles,
sea-launched ballistic missiles,
bomber forces,
and the warheads that go with them.
There was also the so-called
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
that put limitations on national
missile defense systems.
Quickly, it became evident in the 1970s
that the Soviets
were building capabilities
to get out from under the constraints
of the first SALT agreement.
They were putting multiple warheads
on each of their missiles.
And so while the number of missiles
remained constrained,
the number of warheads started to go up.
[brooding music playing]
[mechanism whirring]
[commander] On my command mark,
I'll be running at T-minus 1-0 minutes.
[Collina] If you look at the buildup
of US and Russian
nuclear weapons over time,
it was the United States
that built up first and fastest.
[riveting music playing]
[Collina] It was in the 1960s
the United States peaked
with somewhere around
30,000 nuclear weapons.
That buildup then inspired
what was a follow-on Russian buildup.
And so their peak was in the 1980s,
where they had
about 40,000 nuclear weapons.
So all told, it was a combined arsenal
of about 70,000 nuclear weapons.
In promoting détente with the Soviets,
American leaders
were telling the American people,
"We don't really trust the Soviets,
but we know they don't want war."
"And the best way for us to avoid war
is to control
the number of nuclear missiles."
There are many Americans who say,
"You can't trust the Soviets at all."
"How do you know
they're not hiding missiles?"
"How do you know where all of them are?"
There was a growing group of Americans
who began to worry that this effort
to regulate the nuclear conflict
was only giving the Soviets
an opportunity to deceive us
and ultimately to win in a nuclear war.
[music intensifies]
Those Americans would later rally
in support of Ronald Reagan.
[introspective music playing]
This administration
has eroded our margin of safety
and allowed our defensive capability
to decline in this country
to the point that we are in danger
and no longer can say
we are second to none.
We are second to one, the Soviet Union.
[Naftali] Reagan was a complicated man.
Yes, he exaggerated Soviet power.
Yes, he had a passionate dislike
for communists.
But he also hated war,
and he especially hated nuclear weapons.
[Pavel Palazhchenko] That is what I think
brought Gorbachev and Reagan together.
The revulsion of nuclear weapons.
[dramatic music builds]
[closing theme music playing]
[tense music playing]
[reporter] The arms control treaty,
which has helped keep Europeans safe,
could soon end.
If Russia does not return to full
and verifiable compliance with the treaty
within this six-month period
by verifiably destroying
its INF-violating missiles,
their launchers and associated equipment,
the treaty will terminate.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
announcing that the US is leaving
the intermediate-range
nuclear forces treaty with Russia.
[Collina] We saw
in the Trump Administration,
President Trump withdraw from one treaty,
the Intermediate-Range
Nuclear Forces Treaty.
[Susan Glasser] There's only
one arms control treaty left
between the United States and Russia,
the New START Treaty,
and even that is due to expire
in a few years.
[loud blast]
[tense music continues]
[Any Weber] Because US-Russian relations
are at such a low point
because of Ukraine,
they might not be able to restart
those negotiations, which could be tragic.
Because if that treaty expires,
this would be the first time in 50 years
where there's no limits
on the total number of nuclear weapons
that the United States
and Russia can deploy.
Tonight, the Kremlin now suspending all
notifications involving nuclear weapons,
communications required
under the New START Treaty.
I feel we're already in the first inning
of a new nuclear arms race.
[Sam Nunn] We are in a race
between cooperation and catastrophe.
It is not just the US, Russia.
It's also all the countries in the world
that can make weapons
that can eliminate God's creation.
That's where we are on the human scale.
Catastrophe is running
a lot faster than cooperation.
[music fades]
[opening theme music playing]
[enigmatic music playing]
[Timothy Naftali]
One of the characteristics of the Cold War
was that the Soviets were always
insecure about American power.
They knew they were behind.
They also knew,
because the US had a free press,
how afraid Americans got
whenever they showed
a little bit of might.
And Khrushchev wanted
to weaponize American fears.
He felt that nuclear weapons
were such a threat
that he could use them psychologically
to contain American power.
So he set about exaggerating.
The Soviets began to pretend
that they had more missiles.
[in Russian] We don't want war,
but we won't stop.
Nothing stops us from defending
our sovereignty and our motherland.
[enigmatic music continues]
[Tim Weiner, in English] The problem
for the CIA is trying to figure out
what's going on inside the Kremlin.
What are the military capabilities
of the Soviet Union?
How many missiles do they have?
How many bombs do they have?
How big is their army?
[intriguing music playing]
[Weiner] So the CIA,
through the brilliant Richard Bissell,
spearheads the effort
to develop a spy plane.
The first spy plane is called the U-2.
[plane roars]
[Weiner] The U-2 can fly at an altitude
of more than 70,000 feet,
and it can take pictures
from that altitude
that are good enough to let you know
what is happening at a certain airfield.
When the U-2 came along,
it really did change the whole game.
The Cold War cat-and-mouse game.
For the first time,
the Americans could map
what was happening in the Soviet Union,
could see this stuff in real detail.
[Naftali] But these flights
were not every day.
And they couldn't photograph
every part of the Soviet Union
that might have a missile farm.
In a time of nuclear weapons,
you don't want to underestimate your enemy
because the costs of getting it wrong
are potentially catastrophic.
And then the Soviets
surprised the United States
by putting the first
artificial satellite into space.
[reporter] October 4, 1957.
Sputnik, the first Earth satellite,
was launched.
The Soviet Union gets to space first
with this tiny beeping ball
called Sputnik.
[reporter] In the history of the Earth,
no other event
had captured the imagination
of so many people
as this first step into space.
[Graff] You could watch it
from your backyard with binoculars
as it passes over your house.
You could pick it up
on your household radio.
And it becomes this sort of beeping
harbinger of doom for the United States
that Russia got to space first,
and then sort of more broadly,
this fear that the US was falling behind
in science and technology.
[Weiner] Well, if they can put
that capsule into space,
they can put a missile
with a nuclear warhead into space,
and the game's over.
The U-2 is followed by an even more
useful piece of spy technology,
which is called the CORONA satellite.
That's a small satellite placed in orbit,
which can take continuous,
first, still pictures,
and then video of what's going on
in the Soviet Union.
The first satellites actually used film,
and they would eject these pods of film
from the satellite with electronics,
so you'd know where it was.
Air Force planes
with big prongs at the front of the plane
would snatch this canister
coming down to earth.
The canisters would then
be sent to Kodak to be developed.
[enigmatic music playing]
The first photographic satellites
gave us a lot of information
about what was going on
in the Soviet Union
in terms of both bombers and missiles.
[Weiner] As the CIA discovered,
the Soviet Union did not
have thousands of missiles
capable of striking the United States.
It did not have hundreds of nukes
capable of striking the United States.
It had four.
Not 4,000.
[blast]
Turned out there was a missile gap,
but it was around
a thousand to one in our favor.
[children screaming]
[Graff] This thing that we had feared
through all of the 1950s
as this existential threat
to the United States
was really a paper tiger.
[Daniel Ellsberg] The Russian army
had been enormously overestimated.
The Russians were not
on a crash program to build missiles,
which the people around me
all took for granted that they were,
and were not superior,
were not trying to be superior,
which meant that they were not trying
for a first-strike capability
against the US,
which in turn really meant they weren't
trying to dominate the world militarily.
That discovery
should have led to a rethinking
of our whole paradigm there
of our whole world perspective,
as to who we were confronting,
and what their aims were,
and how we dealt with them.
But it didn't at all.
[reporter] The foreign policy of
the Soviet Union is, in a word, conquest.
They envision the entire world Sovietized
and united communist-style.
[Ellsberg] Why has such
a totally fraudulent belief
been so persistent all this time?
Because there's jobs.
It's very profitable.
[Graff] All manner
of private-sector companies,
defense contractors,
communications contractors,
becomes reliant on the government
and the defense spending.
This is becoming
sort of a nuclear-headed hydra
unlike anything that the US
has ever experienced before.
[bell tolling]
[Audra J. Wolfe] The defense orientation
also dramatically changed
American universities,
particularly in science and technology.
By some estimates,
75% of funding for the natural sciences
was coming from defense institutes
in the 1950s.
This was a society that had become
increasingly oriented around defense,
and security, and nuclear weapons.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Alex Wellerstein] Under Eisenhower,
the number of weapons
and the diversity of types of weapons
starts to exponentially increase.
The American scientists
within the nuclear infrastructure
get extremely creative.
So they end up
with this wide variety of bombs
for all sorts
of different types of circumstances.
The smallest bombs that the US ever made
could fit into a reasonably large
duffel bag or backpack
and be carried by a single person.
The largest bombs
that get made in this period
were the size
of a sort of school bus, essentially.
It's a huge bomb.
It doesn't really fit inside the bomber.
It has to sort of hang underneath it.
And then you have everything in between.
Might be a bomb meant to be on a missile.
It might be a bomb that's meant
to have ten of them on one missile.
It might be a torpedo.
It might be a land mine,
a regular bomb you drop out of a plane,
a rocket meant to carry a nuclear bomb
to shoot down a bomber.
Just a tremendous
variety of weapons in this time.
They sort of have an unlimited budget
for this, and unlimited ideas.
[loud blast]
[Ellsberg] When Eisenhower
came into office,
there was about a thousand
atomic warheads.
When Eisenhower left office,
there was about 23,000 nuclear warheads.
And most of them by now
were thermonuclear,
which was a thousand times more powerful
than the Nagasaki bomb.
This immense expansion
of destructive power
took place with very little
attention of the public.
[somber music playing]
[Wolfe] By the time
that he left office in 1961,
Eisenhower was concerned
at how these spending levels
just seemed to keep going
up and up and up,
even after he himself
had endorsed many of the policies
that created that situation
in the first place.
To Eisenhower, this was beginning
to pose a threat to American democracy.
We have been compelled to create
a permanent armaments industry
of vast proportions.
In the councils of government,
we must guard against
the acquisition of unwarranted influence,
whether sought or unsought,
by the military-industrial complex.
The potential for the disastrous rise
of misplaced power
exists and will persist.
[introspective music playing]
[Graff] Eisenhower becomes deeply afraid
by the end of his presidency.
The Cold War is spinning out of control.
So many congressmen are reliant
on the jobs in their districts
that it's sort of in everyone's interest
to keep building
towards this world-ending moment
because it's good business.
[cheering]
[Scott Anderson] Both sides played it.
Democrat, Republican,
they all played this game.
[Nixon] Although we are today
the strongest nation
in the world militarily,
we must increase our strength.
[Kennedy]
The fundamental problem of our time
is the steady erosion of American power
relative to that of the communists
in recent years.
[Anderson] John Kennedy,
when he's running for president in 1960,
talks about the missile gap,
you know, and-and kind of suggesting
that somehow the Eisenhower administration
had been soft.
Had been caught with their pants down
against the Soviets.
They all played it.
[crowd cheering]
[cheering continues]
I, John Fitzgerald Kennedy,
do solemnly swear
[Earl Warren] That you will faithfully
execute the office
of President of the United States.
that I will faithfully execute the office
of President of the United States.
[Nina Khrushcheva] Kennedy comes in.
Kennedy's a young president.
Only when our arms
are sufficient beyond doubt
can we be certain beyond doubt
that they will never be employed.
Khrushchev thinks,
"Who is that little boy?"
He's the age of his own son Leonid.
[dramatic music playing]
And, of course, Khrushchev
had his own opposition already growing,
the hardliners who were saying,
"Well, the Americans
are treating you so horribly."
So he had a lot of people in his ear
saying that he was just
being a total fool,
and a punching bag
for the West, and so on.
[applause]
[Khrushcheva] Then the famous visit
of Khrushchev to the United Nations
when he was banging his fists
and screaming that, you know,
America is an imperialist country
and racist country.
[in Russian] All the sparrows
on the rooftops are chirping about this
that the most imperialist power
which supports colonial regimes
is the United States of America.
[applause]
[Khrushcheva, in English]
So the confrontation was increasing,
and Kennedy had his own hawks
in the administration
pushing him to step up and be against
this horrible Soviet despot.
And so a lot of it
just was getting out of control.
And then they met in Vienna in 1961.
I went to Vienna to meet the leader
of the Soviet Union, Mr. Khrushchev.
For two days, we met in sober,
intensive conversation.
But our most somber talks
were on the subject of Germany and Berlin.
[Timothy Garton Ash] In 1961,
the confrontation between East and West
becomes more and more intense in Berlin.
[dramatic music continues]
YOU ARE ENTERING THE FRENCH SECTOR
[Garton Ash] East Germany is in some ways
the jewel in the crown
of the Soviet Empire.
It's in the heart of Europe,
and it's one of the most developed parts
of the entire Soviet Bloc.
But East Germany is bleeding to death
because its people are just leaving.
[reporter] Doctors, engineers,
teachers, technicians.
People with skills badly needed
in the communists' faltering economy.
More than four million people
have fled from Soviet domination
since the post-war
occupation zones were established.
[Joachim Neumann]
The part of Berlin where I grew up,
was would become, uh,
East Berlin, unfortunately.
As a little child, the border between
East and West Berlin was open.
So we could go to West Berlin
so often as we liked.
In West Berlin, we were able to see
all movies which we want to see.
We could read all books.
We could listen to every kind of music.
And in East Berlin, the GDR,
a lot of such things was not allowed.
And then our life changed.
[Garton Ash] On the 13th of August, 1961,
the East German communist authorities
throw up what we call the wall,
which is initially just breeze-blocks
and barbwire.
[somber music playing]
[Garton Ash] And they say
it's the anti-fascist protective wall,
to protect us against the fascists
in West Berlin.
Everybody knows it's to keep
their own people in, not us out.
[somber music continues]
[Garton Ash] The wall goes up.
It's a terrible shock.
You have to imagine New York or London
being divided down the middle.
So, literally one side of West 42nd Street
is in East New York,
and the other side of West 42nd Street
is in West New York.
And there's a wall between them,
and you get shot if you try to escape
from one side to the other.
[dramatic music playing]
[inaudible]
[Neumann] We came
not very close to the border,
maybe 200 or 300 away,
and the police catch us and sent us back.
Told us it was not allowed
to go too close to the border.
It was no longer allowed to move
through the city as we are used to.
The political pressure
was higher and higher.
You have a famous picture
of a frontier guard,
an actual East German frontier guard,
looking around.
And then taking a leap
and jumping over the barbwire.
[dramatic music continues]
[Garton Ash] It gets more difficult,
so you have people tunneling underneath
and trying to get out of the tunnels,
trying to get down from the windows
of apartment blocks.
[reporter] While an East German guard
attempts to yank her back to prison,
West Berliners pull her
to a fire net and freedom.
[Mary Elise Sarotte] The regime
would just destroy buildings
that were near to the wall
in order to create
this larger security zone.
There's a famous case when a particularly
beautiful church was just detonated
in order to make room for, you know,
another area for guards
and guard towers and so forth.
There would be additional walls built.
Then there would be death strips put in.
Self-triggering machine guns. Barbed wire.
Something called Stalin's Lawn,
which was like a bed
of iron spikes sitting up.
We were prisoners in our own country.
[brooding music playing]
[Horst Teltschik] At the border
between East and West Berlin,
Soviet tanks and American tanks
were confronting one another.
They could watch on the other side,
the tank of the opponent.
Therefore, just by accident,
something could happen
almost all the time possible.
[anxious music playing]
[Garton Ash] Everything about the greatest
geopolitical conflict of the time
is concentrated in one place
and in one symbol, that wall.
And there were so many
Red Army troops in East Germany.
So it was an absolutely
overwhelming military presence.
[Ellsberg] The Soviets could have walked
into West Berlin at any time.
What kept them from doing that
was an explicit threat
that that would lead
to a nuclear response.
We had thousands
of intermediate-range missiles and bombers
within range of Russia.
[Anderson] In 1961,
the Americans led this new generation
of very advanced missiles in Turkey.
[reporter] The Jupiter,
an intermediate missile
with a range of 1,500 miles,
is being deployed by the Air Force
to bases in Italy and Turkey.
The American missiles are right there
in Turkey, aiming at the Kremlin,
and Khrushchev said,
"Oh, this is so close. How horrible."
"We're surrounded by NATO bases.
We have to do something about it."
[Naftali] The Soviets said,
"Look, we don't have any land allies
close to the United States."
"We can't quite do the same thing,
but we do have Cuba."
[suspenseful music builds]
[news fanfare playing]
[news anchor] From his small hole
in the wild Sierra Maestra mountains,
Cuba's Fidel Castro emerged triumphant
after two years of guerrilla warfare
ended with the flight
of dictator Fulgencio Batista
and the entry into Havana of rebel forces
to be acclaimed by the city.
FIDEL: GREETS YOU
[Peter Kornbluh] Fidel Castro, a lawyer,
a very prominent political figure in Cuba,
pulled off an improbable, uh, revolution.
For over a hundred years,
the United States treated Latin America
as our backyard.
And Cuba was the closest part
of that backyard.
It's only 90 miles
off the shore of Florida.
This region was presumed
to be ours to control,
and it became clear that, uh,
Castro could not be told what to do
by the United States.
[in Spanish] What imperialists
cannot forgive is that we are here
and that we have made
a socialist revolution
under the very nose of the United States.
[cheering]
[Kornbluh, in English] Fidel Castro
promoted agricultural reform.
He nationalized US oil refineries
so that they wouldn't be dependent
on the United States for oil.
Castro began nationalizing the properties
of the wealthiest class of Cubans,
Cubans who owned ranches, and big farms,
and businesses, and factories,
and sugar plantations.
My father was a pediatrician.
So I grew up in what was probably
a very nice society.
We begin then to see
the interference of communists.
There was a tremendous resentment
in the street for anybody
that had any kind of wealth.
So eventually I came to Miami.
[Latell] Many families have been forced
out of everything they owned,
and they've all gone into exile.
Most of them are in Miami.
But much of the middle class
is still supportive of Castro.
[Anderson] Castro revealed
his true colors as a communist.
So the Americans
were determined to overthrow him
like they had overthrown
Árbenz in Guatemala and Mossadegh in Iran.
[Weiner] Over and over again,
the United States
was subverting governments
in the name of American democracy.
The CIA had this elaborate plan
it had developed
to recruit and train
an army of Cuban exiles
to overthrow and kill Fidel Castro.
Like so many of the CIA's
operations in the Cold War,
it was ill-conceived and ill-run.
[Kornbluh] They would launch
a paramilitary invasion of Cuba
with about a thousand exiles
led by the CIA.
[Ada Ferrer] And their assumption
was that the Cuban people would rise up
when the invaders arrived,
you know, and join them,
and that Castro's government
would fall within a week or days.
[Latell] But these assumptions
proved to be false.
They were not tested either politically
by Kennedy and his political team,
or by the intelligence officers
in the operations directorate of the CIA.
[Kornbluh] The CIA
had come to think of itself
as omnipotent in these covert operations,
and boy, were they wrong.
[Latell]
Castro had very good intelligence.
He had at least one source
in Guatemala in the training camp,
and he had sources
all around the streets of Miami.
[tense music playing]
[Humberto Arguelles]
I signed up December 3 or 4th of 1960,
and I was called upon
to go to the training camps in January.
[distant clamoring]
[Montalvo] I had no military background.
I thought we were gonna land in there
and we were gonna fight
Castro's government head-on,
and that we were going to bring in
freedom to all the Cubans
and get rid of communism.
[Kornbluh] The CIA,
in its inimical wisdom,
picked a location in Cuba
at the Bay of Pigs,
where Castro's reforms
had actually changed the lives
of everybody in that area for the better.
Castro had brought in electricity,
water systems, education,
a literacy campaign.
So there was nobody
that wasn't a supporter of Castro there.
[dramatic music rising]
[Montalvo] The Bay of Pigs, it's a
You land in the middle of a swamp.
The beach in Girón, the mainland,
this spot had a coral reef on the outside
that prevented landing ships
from getting to shore.
[Arguelles] We were landing at night,
four o'clock in the morning.
We had to jump from the reef
to the water with all our weapons,
with a piece of a mortar
with two boxes of, uh, ammunition,
and the water up to your neck.
And as soon as we reached shore,
the shooting began.
[gunfire]
[Arguelles] Castro was ready for us.
[Montalvo] They sent first a battalion
of a thousand men with tanks.
Then they sent another battalion
in the afternoon.
And then at night, they attacked us
with artillery for four hours.
[loud artillery shooting]
We couldn't advance
very far from the beach.
We ran out of heavy ammunition completely.
No food, no air cover.
That's when we really
came to terms with reality
that we were abandoned and betrayed.
[Montalvo] They captured us.
We were in prison 21 months.
It was a disaster.
[Kennedy] There's an old saying
that victory has 100 fathers
and defeat is an orphan.
Through the statement's
detailed, uh, discussions,
I'm not to, uh, conceal responsibility
because I'm the responsible officer
of the government,
but merely because I
And that is quite obvious.
But merely because I do not believe
that such a discussion
would benefit us
during the present difficult
uh, situation.
[introspective music playing]
[Kornbluh] The Bay of Pigs
turned out to be the perfect failure.
All the planning,
all the execution of this grandiose,
blatant, flagrant, active intervention
from the United States
became the biggest fiasco for the CIA
and for the young new president
John F. Kennedy.
The world, frankly, was aghast.
And that led to the most
extraordinary consequence,
the decision by Nikita Khrushchev to put
intermediate-range
nuclear missiles in Cuba
as a way of making sure
that the United States would be deterred
from invading Cuba again,
and to help the Soviet Union
kind of psychologically balance
the mismatch and the size
of the US nuclear arsenal
and the Russian nuclear arsenal.
[striking music playing]
[Naftali] Soviets were having a hard time
with intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The Americans could project power
in a way the Soviets couldn't.
Soviets didn't have
any aircraft carriers, for example.
So, Khrushchev came up with this idea.
Well, the only way to scare them
is to put missiles
90 miles from the United States.
[music fades]
[Latell] The first missile installation
was under construction
near a town called San Cristóbal
in Western Cuba in October of '62.
It was a medium-range
ballistic missile installation.
[Ferrer] The missiles arrived
on these large ships.
The Soviets didn't want
American reconnaissance planes
to recognize what was happening,
so the people on the ships
were kept below deck.
All of a sudden,
there were big trucks coming in
under the cover of night.
They're so huge that the streets
in the little town tremble,
and the trucks
can't make it around corners.
The Cuban police
would tell them to stay inside,
but they'd peek out their windows,
and through the slats,
people could make out the large trucks
with large, long beds.
And on the beds of the truck were tarps.
People said that the things under
the tarps looked like large palm trees.
[Naftali] The United States had
a few spies and a few defectors from Cuba
who provided very precise information
about areas west of Havana,
the capital city,
where some very strange things
were going on.
The intelligence community said,
"Mr. President,
please consider approving
the U-2 spy plane flight over Cuba."
So they carefully plotted out
one crossing of the island
around where spies
had indicated very suspicious activity.
It was that flight that found
the missiles on October 14th.
[Kornbluh] The days that followed
come to be known
as the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In Cuba, they call it
the Crisis de Octubre,
the Crisis of October.
[suspenseful music builds]
[Naftali] Kennedy is furious.
[Marshall Carter] The launch site at one
of the encampments contains a total
of at least
14 canvas-covered missile trailers.
[Kennedy] How far advanced is this?
[Lundahl] Sir, we've never seen
this kind of an installation before.
- [Kennedy] Not even in the Soviet Union?
- [Lundahl] No, sir.
[Kennedy] It's a goddamn mystery to me.
I don't know enough
about the Soviet Union,
but if anybody can tell me
any other time since the Berlin blockade
where the Russians have given us
so clear a provocation,
I don't know what it's been.
[Naftali] For six days, there were secret
deliberations in Washington
about how to respond
to the presence of the missiles.
What would be the best way
to get them out?
And, of course,
almost everybody in the administration
were focused on an act of aggression.
Attack the missile sites by air,
and then launch an invasion
for us to unseat the Cuban regime.
The military started to amass
a massive invasion force.
[noble music playing]
[Bill Ober] I joined the Marines
because I thought it would be
the most challenging of the services,
which it turned out to be.
I was told that we had to pack RC bags
because we were going, uh, to Cuba.
We, as Marines, would be planning
an invasion of Cuba itself,
and that's where we practiced on,
the island of Vieques,
and landing on the beaches.
I was aboard a troop transport.
And they put these cargo nets
over the side,
and we had to climb down these nets
with our backpacks and rifles,
and all our gear into these wooden boats
from World War II vintage.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Ober] I just happened
to have my camera with me,
and I took photographs
of the chaos at the time.
When we looked down the beach
as far as you could see,
there was personnel and equipment.
[Naftali] It was clear
that it might be only hours
before the United States
launched air strikes on Cuba.
[suspenseful music continues]
[Kornbluh] The dangers were extraordinary.
The CIA estimated there were
8,000 Soviet personnel on the island.
In reality, there were 42,000.
Kennedy started to actually think through,
"If I end up being responsible for
the death of that many Soviet soldiers,
what is the pressure going to be
on Nikita Khrushchev to retaliate?"
"Will he retaliate by attacking us?
Will he retaliate by attacking Berlin?"
"If he attacks Berlin, we will definitely
have World War III on our hands."
"How will we keep
nuclear weapons from being used?"
[Robert McNamara] The question really is,
are we willing to pay
some kind of a rather substantial price
to eliminate these missiles?
I think the price is going to be high.
[Kennedy] You mean nuclear exchange?
[tense music playing]
[Naftali] To give you a sense
of the danger zone
that was developing on and around Cuba,
you had missiles
that could reach the United States.
You had nuclear-tipped torpedoes
on submarines headed toward the Caribbean.
And you had additional missiles
on ships also going to Cuba.
What are Kennedy's options?
One is an air strike to knock out
the missiles that have been found.
Two, an air strike,
plus an invasion to occupy Cuba
and achieve regime change.
Three, some kind of diplomacy
with the Soviets.
That third option was known
as the blockade, or quarantine option.
Basically, making sure the Soviets
could not bring more missiles to Cuba.
[R. Kennedy] Just the whole question
of assuming you do survive all this.
We don't have The fact that we're not
What kind of a country we are.
[Naftali] Robert F. Kennedy
is the most important factor
in shifting majority support
from the hawks
to those who want to seek some way
short of war to deal with the missiles.
[R. Kennedy] We've talked for 15 years
that the Russians
doing a first strike against us,
and we'd never do that.
Now, in the interest of time,
we do that to a small country.
I think that's a hell
of a burden to carry.
[brooding music playing]
[Naftali] Kennedy asks the big question
of the US Air Force.
"If we go ahead with an air strike,
can you get all of the missiles?"
And the Air Force says, "Mr. President,
we can get about 90% of them."
"Well, what happens to the other 10%?"
And the military says,
"Well, they could be launched."
"And the consequence
could be millions of people dying
in the United States."
And he couldn't take that risk.
And so Kennedy, reluctantly,
embraced the blockade option.
Because it was the only sane,
ethical response in the nuclear age.
And that is the response that he shares
with the world on October 22nd.
[Kennedy] Good evening,
my fellow citizens.
This government has maintained
the closest surveillance
of the Soviet military buildup
on the island of Cuba.
Within the past week,
unmistakable evidence
has established the fact
that a series of offensive missile sites
is now in preparation
on that imprisoned island.
The purpose of these bases
can be none other than to provide
a nuclear strike capability
against the western hemisphere.
[Ober] We were part
of, uh, the quarantine fleet.
We were to keep the Russians
from sending any more missiles into Cuba.
- [interviewer] This was at DEFCON 2?
- Yes.
[interviewer] What is DEFCON 2?
[Ober] This has to do
with a state of readiness.
When they get to DEFCON 2,
that's the last step
before all-out nuclear war,
which is DEFCON 1.
All these safety devices that they have
on these nuclear weapons are off.
They're ready to launch, in other words.
Hundreds and hundreds
of our planes are airborne,
headed towards the Soviet Union
with one thing in mind,
that this could be a nuclear war
and we may not be returning.
[unsettling music playing]
It's the closest you could possibly come
to all-out nuclear war.
[Ferrer] Castro dictates a letter
to send to Khrushchev.
[Latell] Castro writes,
"We are at what I believe to be
the end stage of this crisis,
and there are two possibilities now."
"One is that the Americans
will invade Cuba
and they will seek to occupy Cuba."
"The other is that they're going
to try to destroy your missiles
that are armed with nuclear warheads."
"You must strike preemptively
with all of your nuclear forces
against American targets."
"You must not wait
for the Americans to fire."
"You must act first."
[unsettling music continues]
[Ferrer] Even though it was Khrushchev's
idea to put the missiles in Cuba,
I think Khrushchev comes to worry
quite a bit about Fidel Castro.
[Latell] The 12th day,
some of the most
precarious things occurred
that put the Cold War
onto a much higher plateau of danger.
An unprecedented plateau of danger.
[Naftali] On Saturday, October 27th,
a US U-2 spy plane was shot down
by a Soviet anti-aircraft battery.
[McNamara] A U-2 was shot down.
They fired against
our low-altitude surveillance.
[Kennedy] A U-2 was shot down?
This is much of an escalation by them.
[McNamara] Yes, exactly.
I think we can defer an air attack on Cuba
until Wednesday or Thursday,
but only if we continue our surveillance
and and, uh, fire against anything that
fires against a surveillance aircraft.
[Naftali] Moscow did not authorize this,
and Khrushchev was appalled when he heard
that the U-2 had been shot down.
He did not order that.
[McCone] Write to Khrushchev.
Here's an action they've taken against us.
A new order in defiance
of a public statement.
- [McNamara] I think we ought to.
- [Nitze] They've fired the first shot.
[tense music playing]
[Ellsberg] The Air Force, at that point,
were within minutes
of sending back retaliatory forces.
But Kennedy held back and said,
"We'll give them another day,"
because he was trying to negotiate
an end to the crisis.
[Naftali] Khrushchev had decided
that he needed to find an off-ramp.
He tells the leadership,
"We got to find a way out of this."
He wants to do it and save face.
What Khrushchev wants to get from Kennedy
is a promise not to invade Cuba.
As it becomes clear
that the Americans are afraid,
Khrushchev decides,
"I want more than that."
"I want Kennedy
to pull those missiles out of Turkey
and pull the missiles
that NATO has in Italy."
[tense music continues]
[Kornbluh] Kennedy sent his brother,
Robert Kennedy,
to secretly meet with the Soviet
ambassador to Washington,
Anatoly Dobrynin,
the night of Saturday, October 27th.
Robert Kennedy said,
"We would swap
the missiles that we have in Turkey
for the withdrawal
of the missiles in Cuba."
"We will never publicly acknowledge
that there was a quid pro quo
to ending the Missile Crisis this way,
but we will do that."
"I'm representing my brother,
and you have his word
that that will happen
down the road from now."
Khrushchev decided
to announce publicly on the radio,
so that Kennedy would hear it quickly,
that the Soviet Union
was agreeing to withdraw the missiles
on the basis of the pledge
that the United States was making
that it would not invade Cuba.
[announcer] The Soviet government
has ordered the dismantling
of weapons in Cuba,
as well as their crating
and return to the Soviet Union.
Radio Moscow at 9:00 this morning.
Mr. Khrushchev crating up his missiles
and shipping them home.
[Naftali] Khrushchev never said
anything publicly
about the connection between the removal
of the missiles from Turkey
and his removal of the missiles from Cuba.
Never. He never crowed about it.
And that secret
basically kept being a secret
for years and years and years,
much distorting everybody's understanding
of how the Missile Crisis ended.
[Ferrer] Castro is livid.
He wasn't consulted
on the withdrawal happening.
He heard about it,
you know, basically on the radio,
when the rest of the world
learned about it,
and he essentially believed
that by withdrawing the missiles,
the Soviets were giving the US
a green light to invade.
[in Spanish] We know what we are doing.
And we know how to defend ourselves,
our integrity, and our sovereignty.
[applause]
[Ellsberg, in English] It's clear to me
neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev
had any desire
to go to armed conflict with the other.
Each of them was threatening it openly
and to their subordinates.
"Get ready for it. We're gonna do it."
Et cetera.
Both of them were bluffing,
but they weren't in control.
[Graff] The Cuban Missile Crisis
brings home to the American people
just how real the possibility
of nuclear war actually is.
[Kennedy] Total war makes no sense
in an age where great powers
can maintain large
and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces
and refuse to surrender
without resort to those forces.
Kennedy, some months later,
spoke of his sincere, genuine commitment
to strive with the Soviets
for peaceful solutions to our conflicts.
Today, the expenditure
of billions of dollars every year
on weapons acquired for the purpose
of making sure we never need them,
is essential to the keeping of peace.
But surely, the acquisition
of such idle stockpiles,
which can only destroy and never create,
is not the only,
much less the most efficient,
means of assuring peace.
The Soviets and Americans
also agreed after the Missile Crisis,
because of the Missile Crisis,
to the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty,
which put American and Soviet
nuclear testing underground,
not in the atmosphere.
[Naftali] In the aftermath
of the Cuban Missile Crisis,
John F. Kennedy
and Nikita Khrushchev believe
that Moscow and Washington shared
an interest in reducing nuclear tension.
But within two years, they would be gone
from the center of power.
[martial music playing]
[Naftali] Kennedy would be assassinated
in November of 1963
and Khrushchev will be toppled
in October of the next year.
Khrushchev would lose his job in part
because of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The effort to put missiles in Cuba
was Khrushchev's baby.
It was his brainchild.
When it failed, it was his fault.
[Khrushcheva] He went quietly.
He said, "My greatest achievement
is that today I'm ousted by mere voting."
Because only ten years before that,
he would have gone to gulag
and everybody else,
the whole family, would go with him.
[Naftali] Khrushchev had just put
the entire Soviet leadership through hell
because of his original thinking.
What the leadership wanted
was a completely banal,
predictable,
incredibly uninteresting leader.
And they got that with Leonid Brezhnev.
[Brezhnev, in Russian] Our foreign policy
aims to consolidate
and develop the world socialist system,
mobilize all anti-imperialist forces
to defend the cause of freedom,
of independence,
and the security of people
in the cause of peace
and progress throughout the world.
[Naftali] Brezhnev importantly shares
one thing with Khrushchev.
He does not want nuclear war.
But Brezhnev and his colleagues
do not ever want
to be in the position of inferiority
that Khrushchev put them in in 1962,
when they were looking
down the barrel of a gun.
When the Americans were threatened
by the placement of missiles in Cuba,
the Americans made clear to the Soviets
how much further ahead they were.
And the Soviets knew it.
So Brezhnev and his allies decide,
"We're never again going to be as far
behind because we're gonna be ahead."
And the Soviets launch
a missile-building program
after the Cuban Missile Crisis,
not only to catch up, but to get ahead.
Nuclear weapons, and the drive
for ever more powerful,
or more functional,
or more versatile weapons,
really drove much
of science and technology policy,
but also national policy,
during the Cold War.
At the same time,
the United States and the Soviet Union
largely considered them
to be unusable weapons
because the use of an atomic weapon
would basically trigger
a mutual suicide pact.
[Nichols] By the late '60s,
when we've taken
all these weapons, thousands of them,
we've put them on missiles
that arrive in 27, 28, 30 minutes
from launch to impact,
we now have entered a situation
where you're simply not going to get away
with a strike and survive somehow.
There's going to be another strike.
Your opponent is gonna fire those rockets
out of the ground.
You're going to fire yours.
And at some point, the assured destruction
reached such high levels on both sides
that it became
mutually assured destruction.
[tense music playing]
[Wolfe] These weapons are so horrible
that if one country used them
and the other responded,
that the response would just
basically kill off the entire Earth.
If you had dozens, hundreds,
thousands of nuclear explosions
happening in very short order,
it would coat the Earth in a film
that would both
prevent sunlight from getting in,
but also would prevent things
from growing,
coating the entire globe
in alarming levels of fallout.
So the United States and the Soviet Union
could not engage in direct conflict.
You have, instead, different kinds
of conflicts around the world
as the United States and the Soviet Union
conducted their battles
on proxy battlefields.
[clamoring]
[Wolfe] Intervening
in other countries' civil wars.
Taking part in interregional conflicts.
Arming one side over the other.
The Cold War was a global war.
It was not simply a struggle for dominion
between Washington and Moscow.
Every nation in the world
was a battleground in the Cold War
between American-backed forces
and Soviet-backed forces.
Every African nation was a battlefield
in the struggle for control.
The proxy wars in Angola,
in Mozambique, and in Congo
were particularly brutish,
particularly nasty, and particularly long.
Vietnam was not simply a war between
the United States and North Vietnam.
The United States mobilized
all its allies throughout Asia.
The North Vietnamese
were supplied and aided
by the Soviet Union and China.
[Kornbluh] In Latin America,
Cuba, El Salvador,
and Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua,
became cause célèbres
for US foreign policymakers
who wanted to use the Cold War
as a rationale to intervene once again
in countries that had already
suffered decades, if not centuries,
of US intervention previously.
In Chile, we helped
orchestrate the assassination
of the commander in chief
of the Chilean Armed Forces,
in order to overthrow
a democratically elected president
of another country.
[Weiner] And a military dictatorship
led by General Augusto Pinochet took over.
Pinochet murdered his political opponents,
and ruled by force and fear
for the next 17 years
until the end of the Cold War.
[gunshots]
[Stephen Kinzer] It's remarkable
the extent to which
we abandoned those countries
after we overthrew their governments.
Guatemala is now a corrupt
and highly violent country.
It's wracked by gang violence,
and the state has effectively
ceased to function.
It's a country that was violently
thrown off the path to democracy,
which it had been on for ten years
and which seemed to be taking hold.
[indistinct chanting]
[Kinzer] And you can say that about Iran
and many other countries
where the United States has intervened.
[Anderson] I think America
post-World War II
had this just massive
crisis of confidence.
Rather than standing on our ideals
that we are going to be this exporter
of democracy,
you know, as naive as that might sound,
what happened was this mentality set in,
that everything was a zero-sum game,
and we're going to get into bed with
whoever calls themselves anti-communist.
I think there was a huge moral cost.
We should have stood on our ideals.
I, Richard Milhous Nixon,
do solemnly swear
That you will faithfully
execute the office
That I will faithfully execute the office
of President of the United States.
of President of the United States.
[applause]
[Nichols] When Richard Nixon's elected,
takes office in 1969,
he has a reputation for being
a really hard-line anti-communist,
anti-Soviet kind of guy.
Made his bones as an anti-communist
crusader in the '50s.
The communists have been ruthless
toward the people of the nations
they have engulfed.
They have no memory of former favors,
no kindness toward those
who tried to be friendly.
They are cold and calculating masters.
[Nichols] But as the president,
he approaches the Soviets and says,
"Look, you don't like us,
we don't like you,
but we can't blow up the world."
[cheering]
"Mutual assured destruction
is a real thing."
"We have to find some other way
to deal with each other."
[introspective music playing]
[Nichols] It's more than about
just nuclear weapons.
Nixon goes to the Soviets and he says,
"We will recognize you
as a legitimate superpower."
And this policy comes to be known
by the term "détente."
Now we have well begun the long journey,
which will lead us to a new age
in the relations
between our two countries.
[Rose Gottemoeller] In 1972,
two major agreements were reached.
One is the Strategic Arms
Limitation Agreement,
which is called SALT I.
It was the first effort
to limit strategic, offensive,
big intercontinental ballistic missiles,
sea-launched ballistic missiles,
bomber forces,
and the warheads that go with them.
There was also the so-called
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
that put limitations on national
missile defense systems.
Quickly, it became evident in the 1970s
that the Soviets
were building capabilities
to get out from under the constraints
of the first SALT agreement.
They were putting multiple warheads
on each of their missiles.
And so while the number of missiles
remained constrained,
the number of warheads started to go up.
[brooding music playing]
[mechanism whirring]
[commander] On my command mark,
I'll be running at T-minus 1-0 minutes.
[Collina] If you look at the buildup
of US and Russian
nuclear weapons over time,
it was the United States
that built up first and fastest.
[riveting music playing]
[Collina] It was in the 1960s
the United States peaked
with somewhere around
30,000 nuclear weapons.
That buildup then inspired
what was a follow-on Russian buildup.
And so their peak was in the 1980s,
where they had
about 40,000 nuclear weapons.
So all told, it was a combined arsenal
of about 70,000 nuclear weapons.
In promoting détente with the Soviets,
American leaders
were telling the American people,
"We don't really trust the Soviets,
but we know they don't want war."
"And the best way for us to avoid war
is to control
the number of nuclear missiles."
There are many Americans who say,
"You can't trust the Soviets at all."
"How do you know
they're not hiding missiles?"
"How do you know where all of them are?"
There was a growing group of Americans
who began to worry that this effort
to regulate the nuclear conflict
was only giving the Soviets
an opportunity to deceive us
and ultimately to win in a nuclear war.
[music intensifies]
Those Americans would later rally
in support of Ronald Reagan.
[introspective music playing]
This administration
has eroded our margin of safety
and allowed our defensive capability
to decline in this country
to the point that we are in danger
and no longer can say
we are second to none.
We are second to one, the Soviet Union.
[Naftali] Reagan was a complicated man.
Yes, he exaggerated Soviet power.
Yes, he had a passionate dislike
for communists.
But he also hated war,
and he especially hated nuclear weapons.
[Pavel Palazhchenko] That is what I think
brought Gorbachev and Reagan together.
The revulsion of nuclear weapons.
[dramatic music builds]
[closing theme music playing]