Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War (2024) s01e05 Episode Script
War Games
1
[unsettling music playing]
[gunfire]
[reporter] Video shows flames and smoke
engulfing the Zaporizhzhia power plant.
[German Galushchenko] Zaporizhzhia
is the biggest nuclear plant in Europe.
Two of the six units were shelled
by heavy weapons.
[gunfire]
[reporter 1] He's saying,
"Stop shooting immediately."
"You threaten the security
of the whole world."
[reporter 2] We're hearing
that Russian forces
have actually taken over
that massive nuclear plant.
[speaking in Russian]
Putin is using civil infrastructure
and militarizing it, weaponizing it.
He's aware that it's impossible
to shoot back
if the weapons are being used from
the territory of a nuclear power plant.
He does not even need an actual bomb.
[Volodymyr Zelenskyy] Six blocks.
It means six Chernobyls.
It means the biggest danger in Europe.
[Galushchenko] They already occupied
at that time Chernobyl.
[reporter 3] Ukrainian officials say
Russian forces have now taken control
of that infamous Chernobyl nuclear plant.
[reporter 4] The scene of the world's
worst nuclear disaster in 1986.
They They could say,
"We could do this catastrophe again."
It's insane.
ZAPORIZHZHIA
FORBIDDEN ZONE - RESTRICTED ZONE
[Garrett Graff]
Russia is dangerously close
to risking another
Chernobyl-like catastrophe,
and in some ways,
risking the creation of this dirty bomb
of nuclear destruction
right there on the Ukrainian battlefield.
[intense music playing]
[opening theme music playing]
[tense music playing]
[Tom Z. Collina] In the summer of 1980,
the National Security Advisor, Brzezinski,
who worked for President Carter,
got this call at home
in the middle of the night.
[phone ringing]
[Robert Gates] It was Brzezinski's
military assistant, Colonel Bill Odom,
and he said, "We've just gotten an alert
that there are like 200 Soviet missiles
headed toward the United States."
[tense music rising]
[alarm ringing]
[Gates] Brzezinski says,
"Well, get better confirmation."
[phone ringing]
[Gates] Odom calls him back
and he says, "I was mistaken."
"It's not 200."
"It's like 2,000."
[alarm blaring]
[Tom Nichols] In later years,
Brzezinski, talking about it,
said he chose not to wake up his wife.
Washington would be gone
in a matter of minutes.
He thought she was better off
dying in her sleep.
And he gets ready to wake up
the President of the United States
and say, "You have a choice to make."
[phone ringing]
[Collina] And just before he does that,
he gets another call
from his military advisor saying,
"Ah. It's a false alarm."
[introspective music playing]
[Collina] There was a 40-cent
computer chip that went bad
that told the system that we were
under attack by the Soviet Union.
[whirring]
If President Carter had decided to launch,
the United States would have launched
a full-scale attack against Russia
that probably would have triggered
retaliation by Russia against us.
That could have been the end of the world.
[tense music playing]
[Collina] The history of nuclear weapons
over the last 77 years
will tell us that we've gotten very close
to catastrophe numerous times.
And when we've survived,
it's because we've gotten
incredibly lucky.
[Elisabeth Eaves] Close calls are just
a feature of having nuclear weapons.
There have been literally dozens
over the years.
Dozens just that
the Pentagon acknowledges.
They've taken the shape of explosions
lost nuclear material,
misplaced weapons, and close calls.
[Timothy Naftali] By the early 1970s,
there's an effort
to regulate the nuclear conflict
to reduce nuclear danger.
But when Jimmy Carter was president,
a lot of people had a generalized sense
that the Soviet Union was on the advance.
The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan.
They violated an understanding
since the end of World War II.
They had moved
into a part of the world, militarily,
that had not been part
of the sphere created
when they liberated Eastern Europe
from Nazi occupation.
[somber music playing]
[Naftali] The Soviet invasion
of Afghanistan
seemed to crystallize that the Soviets
wanted world domination.
And with news that the Soviets had more
nuclear missiles than the United States,
the sense was, "We are falling behind."
"They are a threat."
[cheering]
[dramatic music playing]
[music fades]
We have opened a dangerous window
of vulnerability to the Soviet Union.
[Naftali] Ronald Reagan
was a former actor.
He is a two-term governor of California,
and he builds his constituency
of conservatives
who are unhappy with this idea
of détente with the Soviet Union,
or relaxation of tensions.
The question of war and peace has emerged
as a central issue in this campaign,
and the give and take
[Naftali] Reagan was among
the harshest critics of détente.
We cannot shirk our responsibility
as the leader of the free world
because we're the only one that can do it,
and therefore the burden
of maintaining the peace falls on us.
And to maintain that peace,
requires strength.
It's the same kind of fear
that had dominated American politics
in 1959 and 1960.
It was happening all over again.
[cheering]
[Naftali] Ronald Reagan
rode the wave of that fear
into the White House.
["Eighties" by Killing Joke playing]
The early 1980s,
some people call it the second Cold War
because it came on the heels
of a period of détente.
Ahh, eighties ♪
[Reagan] Since 1970, the Soviet Union
has invested $300 billion more
in its military forces than we have.
To allow this imbalance to continue
is a threat to our national security.
Eighties ♪
Get out of my way
I'm not for sale ♪
[Nichols] The Cold War and the fear
of World War III and nuclear war
really permeated the '80s.
And it saturated into popular culture.
[man] Warning! Warning! Nuclear attack!
[Nichols] Movies and books
and popular music
help us process through our anxieties.
[narrator] For 40 years, both sides
observed the unwritten rules
of the deadliest game
the world has ever known.
[Nichols] There were a lot of movies
about World War III, about nuclear war.
[woman] This time,
they are playing with, at best,
the destruction of life as we know it.
You cannot win a nuclear war!
["Eighties" continues playing]
Eighties ♪
I'm living in the eighties ♪
It was the wallpaper of everybody's life.
So it was always in the background.
[crowd cheering and clapping]
[Morra] When Ronald Reagan
became president in January 1981,
Leonid Brezhnev
was still the general secretary.
The nuclear arsenals were enormous.
But there was also a lack of communication
at the senior levels of both governments.
[tense music playing]
Reagan felt that the combination
of mutual assured destruction and détente
had put the Americans in a box,
that we were afraid to do anything,
because we were obsessed
with strategic stability.
Reagan says, "I'm going to approve
new nuclear weapons systems
as a way of putting the screws
to the Soviets,
to force them to negotiate."
The modernization of our strategic
and conventional forces
will assure that deterrence works
and peace prevails.
[Morra] As a result, the Soviet leadership
was quite paranoid.
They believed that the United States
and its allies
were plotting a nuclear first strike
to decapitate
the leadership in the Kremlin
and to then achieve world domination.
In May 1981, Yuri Andropov,
who was chairman of the KGB,
proposed they embark
on a major new intelligence operation.
[Gates] Andropov orders this operation
to try and enhance their ability
to identify whether
the United States is, in fact,
getting ready to launch a
a nuclear war against them.
[intense music playing]
[Morra] Operation RYAN
was the largest intelligence operation
the Soviet Union conducted
after World War II.
RYAN is an English version
of a Russian acronym
that stands for "Nuclear Rocket Attack."
And its intention was to find indications
of a US first nuclear strike
against the Soviet Union.
[Gates] Their embassy guys are being told
to monitor American hospitals.
Are we stockpiling blood? Plasma?
All the things you'd expect if you were
getting ready to launch a nuclear war.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Gates] Bureaucracies are bureaucracies.
And so if the head of the KGB
tells these guys,
"I want you looking for these signs,"
they're gonna find them
regardless of what they mean.
[Morra] In November of '82,
Andropov replaces Brezhnev
as the new general secretary.
Then in 1983, the deployments
of US Pershing II missiles to West Germany
are scheduled for the end of the year.
[reporter] The Army says
that the Pershing II
can fly up to a thousand miles
in under 10 minutes,
and drop a nuclear warhead
on a target with surgical precision.
[Gates] Pershing missiles give the Soviets
like seven minutes' warning
before the missile hits the Kremlin.
So they're scared to death about
the deployment of these Pershing missiles,
which are in response
to the Soviets' deployment
of SS-20 intermediate-range missiles
in the western Soviet Union.
[Reagan] Although the Soviet leaders
earlier this year
declared they'd frozen deployment
of this dangerous missile,
they have, in fact, continued deployment.
[Morra] The SS-20 was deemed
to be a first-strike weapon itself.
It could reach any target
in NATO Europe in minutes.
[Wolfgang Ischinger] The SS-20 was capable
of flying a couple of thousand kilometers,
certainly to Berlin or to Paris.
And that, of course,
was for us in in in Germany,
almost an existential, uh, question.
[applause]
[Nichols] Tensions were
at an all-time high.
1983 was probably the most dangerous year
of the Cold War since 1962.
Ladies and gentlemen,
the President of the United States,
Ronald Reagan.
[applause]
[Morra] In early 1983,
things are heating up a lot.
And then Ronald Reagan
gave two nationally televised speeches
that seemed to confirm
the Soviets' worst fears
and the premise of Operation RYAN.
The first speech became known
as the Evil Empire speech.
[Reagan] I urge you to beware
the temptation of pride,
the temptation of blithely
declaring yourselves above it all
and label both sides equally at fault,
to ignore the facts of history
and the aggressive impulses
of an evil empire,
to simply call the arms race
a giant misunderstanding,
and thereby remove yourself
from the struggle
between right and wrong and good and evil.
[dramatic music playing]
[Gates] The Evil Empire speech really,
uh, I think,
had a significant impact
on the Soviet leadership.
The speech kind of gets them
where it hurts.
HIS STATEMENTS WERE THE REVIVAL OF
THE WORST RHETORIC OF THE COLD WAR TIMES
It attacks their legitimacy
as a normal country
and as the equivalent
of the United States.
Legitimacy that they desperately sought.
And then he delivers a speech
announcing that we're gonna build
this Strategic Defense Initiative.
If it works,
it renders
the Soviet Missile Force useless.
During the past decade and a half,
the Soviets have built up
a massive arsenal
of new strategic nuclear weapons.
Weapons that can strike directly
at the United States.
[Audra J. Wolfe]
Reagan was alarmed to learn
that the United States did not
actually have a way of protecting itself
from a potential nuclear attack.
[Nichols] Reagan says,
"Wouldn't it be so much better
that instead of relying
on nuclear deterrence,
we could destroy
nuclear missiles in flight?"
[boom]
[announcer] It is time for a bold,
new stroke in strategic planning.
High Frontier addresses this need
by proposing a triple-layered,
non-nuclear defense.
[Wolfe] Scientist Ed Teller suggested
that the solution
to Reagan's nuclear fears
might be through space lasers.
You could put lasers on top of satellites
and place them in orbit,
and this would be a way
to shoot down weapons
before they returned to the atmosphere,
thereby preventing a nuclear holocaust.
What if free people
could live secure in the knowledge
that their security did not rest
upon the threat of instant US retaliation
to deter a Soviet attack?
That we could intercept and destroy
strategic ballistic missiles
before they reached our own soil
or that of our allies?
[Wolfe] The official name for this program
was the Strategic Defense Initiative.
But it came to be known
as Star Wars among its critics,
who were many, particularly
in the scientific and technical community,
because it seemed like science fiction.
[Nichols] The technology
was nowhere near possible,
and, in my view,
still is not 40 years later.
But the Soviets
find this extremely threatening,
not because it was going
to happen anytime soon,
but because they were worried
about a new attitude
among the Americans that said,
"All the old deals are off."
My fellow Americans,
tonight we're launching an effort
which holds the promise
of changing the course of human history.
[Morra] Then came a sequence of events
that just ratcheted up the tensions
between East and West very dramatically.
[compelling music playing]
[Morra] FleetEx '83
was a very large US naval exercise
in a part of the North Pacific Ocean
that's bounded by Soviet territory.
The US intent was to demonstrate
to the Soviet Union,
"We can operate even in your backyard."
"You can't do anything about it."
During the exercise,
US Navy fighters overflew Soviet territory
in the Kuril Islands.
It was a secret hiding place for their
nuclear ballistic missile submarines,
and penetrating airspace
can be deemed an act of war.
There is a MiG-23 fighter base
on the Kuril Islands,
and the Soviets
never launch their fighters.
They looked incompetent.
The leadership in Moscow
cracked the whip on them and said,
"You guys better get your act together."
And over the next couple of months,
they started massive fighter reactions
to all of these reconnaissance aircraft.
Increasingly provocative,
where they were getting
into firing position behind the planes,
in some cases even arming their missiles.
The air-to-air situation
got really dangerous.
And then, on the night
of the 1st of September, 1983,
Korean Airlines Flight 007
was en route to Seoul, South Korea.
That flight had 269 people aboard,
passengers and crew.
It's a civilian plane.
And it departed Anchorage,
and they got off course.
And ultimately overflew
the Kamchatka Peninsula,
which is part of the Soviet Union
and the location of a Soviet
ballistic missile submarine base.
That's the holy of the holiest
for the Soviet Union.
Those are the crown jewels.
You don't let anybody
fly over one of your submarine bases.
I went into work
maybe 1:30 in the morning.
The NCO of the watch said,
"The Soviets are conducting
a really weird exercise."
They were reacting to something.
What came to mind,
"Maybe it's an airliner."
[phones ringing]
[Morra] And I told him,
"Call the Transport Ministry
and see if they have any
transpacific airliners off course."
[KAL-007] Roger, Korean Air 007 climb and
maintain at 350, leaving 330 at this time.
Tokyo, roger.
[Morra] The aircraft
crossed Sakhalin Island.
It was intercepted
by a Soviet air defense fighter.
[pilot] I see it.
Roger, understood. I'm flying behind.
[Morra] The Soviet Air Defense forces knew
that if someone violates our border,
we have to shoot them down
because the US Navy violated our border
just a few months ago during FleetEx '83,
and we didn't react.
I was still bugging
the Transport Ministry in Tokyo,
"Are you missing anybody?
Are you missing anybody?"
And finally they said,
"Yes, we are missing someone."
At the same time, we were intercepting
what the Soviets were saying.
[pilot, in Russian] Z.G.
I have executed the launch.
The target is destroyed.
[Morra, in English]
Suddenly the pieces fit together.
A civilian airliner had been shot down,
and almost certainly everybody was dead.
It was extremely distressing.
Just on a human level.
[emotional music playing]
[reporter] The Americans say
as many as eight Soviet Fighters
tracked Flight 007
for two and a half hours.
Then came the crunch.
A 1960s vintage Sukhoi jet was ordered
to fire a missile at the unarmed jumbo.
Meanwhile, at Seoul's airport,
big crowds were waiting
to meet the jumbo that never came.
[emotional music continues playing]
[Morra] There were
over 60 Americans, I believe, on board,
including a US Congressman,
Larry McDonald,
who was a very anti-communist kind of guy.
There is an elitist core in this country
that has seen value
in subsidizing communism,
of protecting communism.
- [interviewer] It has?
- Sure.
[Morra] Everyone obviously perished
on the flight, including a US Congressman,
which led to some speculation
that maybe he was the target.
Those of us in Air Force intelligence
held to the view that
this was a terrible loss of life.
Tragic, but it was a mistake
borne of all of these building tensions
month after month.
Major Osipovich
was the Soviet Air Defense pilot
who shot down Korean Airlines Flight 007.
I could see two rows of windows,
which were lit up.
I wondered if it was a civilian aircraft.
Military cargo planes
don't have such windows.
I wondered what kind of plane it was.
But I had no time to think.
I had a job to do.
[Morra] He never shows any regret.
He absolutely believes
he did the right thing.
He was gonna take that plane down,
come hell or high water.
My orders were to destroy the intruder.
I fulfilled my mission.
[Gates] From a career standpoint,
it was safer for that pilot
to shoot down that plane
than to not shoot it
and then have it found out that it was,
in fact, a reconnaissance plane.
[tense music playing]
[Morra] As early as the 2nd of September,
CIA's presidential daily briefing
that went to Reagan
did tell the same story we were telling.
[Gates] We knew pretty quickly
that the Soviets had not deliberately
shot down this commercial airliner
or that that had not been their intent.
We were trying to say,
"Look, this is a catastrophic mistake
that the Soviets have made,"
because we had the radio signals
between the pilot
and the Air Defense Center and so on.
[Reagan] My fellow Americans,
I'm coming before you tonight
about the Korean airline massacre.
[Morra] Reagan made
a nationally televised speech,
in which he called the Soviets barbarians,
and this was a criminal act.
It was an act of barbarism,
born of a society
which wantonly disregards
individual rights
and the value of human life,
and seeks constantly
to expand and dominate other nations.
The line from Washington became,
very rapidly,
that this was an intentional act
on the Soviets' part,
and it just shows
how corrupt and evil they really are.
We do have evidence that's come out
in the decade since, that Andropov,
once he found out
that it was a civilian airliner,
was incensed.
He was very angry at the military
because we're in this fraught period.
"We've got all this tension
with the United States."
"What are you guys doing?"
You know? "You can't go around
shooting down civilian airliners."
He pivoted off of that point
fairly quickly.
[reporter, in Russian]
It was undeniably proved
that the invasion
of the South Korean aircraft
into the Soviet airspace
was a deliberate,
neatly-planned operation.
[Morra, in English] The Kremlin
essentially decided to circle the wagons
and not criticize the Soviet military,
and instead create a party line,
which was, "This was an intentional
American intelligence collection flight."
"The nefarious Americans
are so devious and clever
that they must have outfitted
this aircraft with intelligence sensors."
[in Russian] I think this provocation by
the CIA agencies was performed, clearly,
for provocative purposes now,
when important
international events are taking place,
and we are filled with indignation
about this provocation
that was clearly intended
against our country and world's détente.
[Morra, in English] And then,
just a couple of weeks later
[tense music playing]
at the Soviets'
National Missile Defense Center,
sixty miles outside of Moscow,
Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov
was called into duty that night,
because the regular
watch officer was sick.
Petrov was not an operational officer.
He's an engineer scientist.
He was in charge of algorithm development
for signals coming in
from satellites and other sensors.
The Soviets' relatively new
and untested missile warning satellites
had only been on orbit for about a year.
[clock ticking]
[alarm blaring]
[Petrov] It was completely unexpected,
as such things usually are.
The sirens sounded very loudly,
and I just sat there
for a few seconds staring at the screen
with the word "launch"
displayed in bold red letters.
A minute later, this siren went off again.
The second missile was launched,
then the third,
and the fourth, and the fifth.
[Collina] His computers are telling him
there are five nuclear weapons
coming in against Russia.
The regulations would say that
he should alert the president of Russia
that there's an incoming attack.
We knew that every second of delay
took away valuable time
that the Soviet Union's military
and political leadership needed.
And then I made my decision.
I would not trust the computer.
He thought, "This doesn't make sense,
because if the US is going to attack us,
they're not going to attack us
with small numbers."
[Morra] They wouldn't
just launch one or two.
They'd launch them all.
[tense music fades]
I picked up the telephone handset,
spoke to my superiors,
and reported that the alarm was false.
But I myself was not sure
until the very last moment.
Honestly, 50-50.
[Morra] And finally, Petrov gets reports
from the Arctic radar stations
that there are, in fact,
no US ICBMs flying over the pole.
What his early warning system
is, is seeing,
is actually reflections off clouds
that make it look like it's an attack.
He is now credited
as the man who saved the world
because if he had reported this
up the chain of the command,
the president of Russia could have
responded with a nuclear attack.
[Morra] Unfortunately for Petrov,
his career was destroyed by this incident.
He exposed the flaws
of these new satellite systems,
and that embarrassed a lot of people
higher up the food chain than him.
So the Soviets were determined
to keep this secret,
but it's emblematic of the tension-filled
environment in 1983.
Soviet forces did things
in November of 1983
they never had done before,
including during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Able Archer '83 was the latest installment
in a NATO nuclear war exercise.
[Nichols] Some forces
within the Kremlin said,
"You know, they say it's an exercise,
but this might be a prelude to war."
The Able Archer exercise,
it was meant to test communications
and procedures
for releasing nuclear weapons
in the event of World War III.
[commander] Three, two, one, mark.
[interviewer] WarGames, basically.
WarGames, essentially. Yes.
All right!
[Morra] It was one
of the first of these exercises
to really play out
a very realistic scenario
from tension, to conventional war,
to limited nuclear war,
to all-out nuclear war.
The climax of this exercise
was around the 8th of November,
when the national command authorities,
that is to say, Margaret Thatcher
and Ronald Reagan,
would be present to authorize
the launch of nuclear weapons.
And just as that was occurring,
NATO changed the codes.
The Soviets had been able to intercept
a lot of what was going on.
So when we change
the codes suddenly on them,
what does that say to them?
You change the codes
if you're going to war. [chuckles]
From the Soviet standpoint,
it just looked like
this is the real thing.
They were definitely ready
for a full thermonuclear war.
Their nuclear alert posture
was unprecedented.
Loading fighter bombers with nuclear bombs
and having them sit on alert.
They sent a number of their ballistic
missile submarines up to the Arctic
to their wartime launch locations
under the Arctic ice cap.
[suspenseful music builds]
[Morra] Andropov at the time
was very, very ill.
He was in the hospital.
He had an aide with him 24/7
that had their version
of the nuclear football with him,
which alarmed
the senior military leadership.
They were afraid Andropov
might start pushing buttons.
The head of the Soviet general staff
actually went to his bunker under Moscow.
It was as serious as that.
[suspenseful music crescendoes]
[Morra] Oleg Gordievsky
was a career KGB officer.
[camera shutter clicking]
[Morra] He also had been spying
for the British for some years.
Gordievsky was deeply disenchanted
with the KGB and the Soviet system,
and decided to become an agent
for British intelligence.
[Morra] He was reporting to MI6
on this extreme paranoia
that permeated the leadership
in the Kremlin, Andropov in particular.
Gordievsky, during Able Archer '83,
is telling MI6,
"The Kremlin thinks this is real."
When I told the British,
they simply couldn't believe
that the Soviet leadership
was so stupid and narrow-minded
as to believe in something so impossible.
I said to them,
"Okay, I'll get you the documents."
[Morra] And MI6 provided
Gordievsky's intelligence to CIA.
CIA did not pass that along to anyone,
certainly not to anyone that I'm aware of
in the Pentagon or in NATO.
There was enough evidence that the Soviets
were taking unprecedented steps
that it got to the attention
of Brigadier General Leonard Perroots,
who was the chief intelligence officer
for the US Air Force in Europe.
Some very strong feelings
[Morra] Perroots briefed his leadership
and the NATO leadership,
that the Soviets are doing some things
we haven't seen before.
This is alarming.
He was asked by his leadership,
"Well, should we reciprocate?"
"Should we heighten our nuclear
alert posture here in Europe?"
And Perroots' gut feeling was, "No."
"Let's just bring Able Archer
to a conclusion."
"Let's not escalate."
It's Perroots' understanding
of the adversary
that diffuses this crisis.
We see time and again in this '83 crisis,
it's the individuals that have the courage
to stand up and make a call,
not the system necessarily that works.
[Fiona Hill] When it was brought to
the attention of Reagan in the aftermath,
that prompted him to realize
the Soviet Union
was more scared of the United States
than anyone realized,
and that we were in an environment
in which it was very easy
to misinterpret information.
At this moment,
there was an important film
that was put together
called The Day After.
- [narrator] Sunday.
- This is not an exercise.
[narrator] The movie beyond imagining.
It's not gonna happen, huh?
Nah. People are crazy, but not that crazy.
Over 300 missiles inbound now.
[loud explosion]
Nothing like The Day After
had ever been seen on network television,
that's for sure.
The purpose of network television
is to sell advertising
and to be as inoffensive and mindless
and infantilizing as possible.
The head of ABC Circle Films
was responsible for The Day After,
and he had the idea of,
what would it be like
to make a movie that would depict,
without taking sides
or specifying who started it,
nuclear war between the United States
and the Soviet Union.
We were offered cooperation
by the Defense Department.
They were gonna give us helicopters
and God knows what all else,
provided that we showed
that the Soviet Union started the war.
And we said, "No, no, no,
that's not the point."
I didn't want to make propaganda.
Any more news?
They just hit one of our ships
in the Persian Gulf.
- Who's they?
- The Russians. Who do you think?
We hit 'em back.
One of their ships, you know?
It was presented in the simplest way.
A farm family out in the Midwest
who happened to have a missile site
next to their farm.
And they were eating lunch one day,
and suddenly
they see the missiles taking off.
[rumbling]
[Gottemoeller] And they say,
"Oh, the moment has finally come
where we are exchanging a nuclear strike."
And, "Oh, within moments,
our farm will be destroyed."
[boom]
[Meyer] What the movie did
was to imagine for people
what they couldn't or wouldn't
imagine for themselves.
Good evening. Here's what's happening.
Most of you who watched the ABC movie,
The Day After,
are probably still feeling
just a little numb right now.
[Meyer] The next day,
I was astonished to learn
that a hundred million people
had seen the movie.
It has the distinction of being
the most watched movie
ever made for television.
It was completely devastating.
It was a horrible thing
to see the reality,
and how fast it could happen.
Those of us who watch it
in the viewing public
are not the ones who really should
get the education from that film.
It's more the people who have
the authority to push the button.
- [blast]
- [scream echoing]
[whimpering]
[somber music playing]
Reagan got an early, uh, screening of it,
and it it bothered him.
Um
Reagan kept diaries,
which I think surprises a lot of folks
because he sort of had this genial,
not very thoughtful way about him.
And yet every night, he would sit down
and actually write in a diary that he kept
as president.
And he wrote in that diary,
"It disturbed me greatly."
He had spent most of his life
in entertainment and movies,
and that night, he wrote that this
is something that really stayed with him.
[poignant music playing]
Just suppose with me for a moment,
that an Ivan and an Anya
could find themselves,
say, in a waiting room,
or sharing a shelter from the rain
or a storm with a Jim and Sally,
and there was no language barrier
to keep them from getting acquainted.
Would they then debate the differences
between their respective governments?
Or would they find themselves
comparing notes
just about their children
and what each other did for a living?
If the Soviet government wants peace,
then there will be peace.
Together, we can strengthen peace,
reduce the level of arms,
and know in doing so,
that we have helped fulfill
the hopes and dreams
of those we represent,
and indeed, of people everywhere.
Let us begin now.
Thank you.
[applause]
[dramatic music playing]
[Gates] Reagan, from the beginning,
had the view that he would
use his first term
to right the balance of power
and make it clear that the United States
was superior to the Soviet Union
in military power.
People would have laughed
at this notion at the time,
but Reagan's writing made clear
that what he wanted to be as president
was a peacemaker.
And he had a duality of intent.
On the one hand,
he wanted the Soviet Union to disappear.
And he thought
that could happen on his watch
if he followed the right policies.
But at the same time, he also wanted
to avoid a conflict with the Russians,
even as he was trying to bring them down.
[reporter] The White House's
desire to start the thaw,
comes after three years
of a Reagan administration
for whom countering what is seen
as the Soviet threat to world peace
has been the central plank
of all foreign policy.
[inaudible]
I was, I guess, the most senior
foreign service officer
with extensive experience
in the Soviet Union.
I was Ambassador to Czechoslovakia
at the time.
They brought me back,
telling me that the president
had decided that it was time to negotiate.
He thought he had, you might say,
enough chips on the table
to start negotiating.
[Naftali] Reagan was trying to find a way
to set up a meeting with Andropov in 1984.
Andropov would die
before Reagan could meet him.
But he finally gets a partner
that he can talk to.
Mikhail Gorbachev.
[atmospheric music playing]
[Dan Rather] Mikhail Gorbachev,
the Kremlin's new number two,
and heir apparent to the top job.
He opened a diplomatic
and public relations offensive
in Britain over the weekend.
[reporter] At 53,
this rising star of the politburo,
exudes charm, smiles easily,
has a keen sense of humor,
and an attractive wife.
[Pavel Palazhchenko] Margaret Thatcher
came to the conclusion very early,
that Gorbachev was for real.
I like Mr. Gorbachev.
We can do business together.
He represented a different generation.
He wanted real change.
Mikhail Gorbachev was born during
Stalin's time in the region of Stavropol,
which is the south of Russia rather close
to the borders of the Soviet Union.
[evocative music playing]
[Palazhchenko] His father
was a combine harvester.
There were victims of injustice
in Gorbachev's own family.
His grandfather on the father's side
never accepted the collectivization.
So he was arrested and exiled to Siberia,
where they worked
in tremendously difficult conditions.
His other grandfather on his mother's side
was one of the leaders of the collective
farm movement imposed by Stalin.
Despite the fact that he was a communist,
a dedicated communist,
he too was arrested.
But then he said, "Do not blame Stalin.
Stalin is good."
"It's the bad people who have done this."
So Gorbachev had this experience
of seeing the complexity
of life in the Soviet Union.
[Richard Rhodes] Mikhail Gorbachev
won a four-year scholarship
to the best university
in the Soviet Union,
Moscow University,
by harvesting more wheat
than any other 17-year-old
in the entire Soviet Union
with his family.
[David Remnick] So Mikhail Gorbachev
makes his way to Moscow University,
which is a big thing
for a country boy to do.
He meets his future wife there, Raisa,
and he enters in the stream
of the Communist Party.
[Palazhchenko] Gorbachev was
a relatively young leader
when Khrushchev
made his famous speech against Stalin,
and he saw that the perfection
that the ideology promised
was not there.
After Khrushchev's speech,
he was asking more questions.
TO THE SUPREME SOVIET OF THE USSR
MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH GORBACHEV
[Remnick] Gorbachev goes back to Stavropol
and becomes the local party chief.
And eventually Yuri Andropov
takes a liking to Gorbachev.
And Gorbachev is elevated to Moscow,
which is the center
of the political universe
in the Soviet Union.
[funeral march playing]
[Rachmaninov's "Vocalise, No. 14" playing]
[Palazhchenko] Many people expected
that when Andropov died,
he would be succeeded by Gorbachev.
But that did not happen.
He was succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko,
a Brezhnev loyalist and associate
who, again, died in '85.
[Gates] I saw Brezhnev in Vienna in 1979
when I was there with Carter,
and the KGB guys next to him
are basically holding him up.
And then Andropov, who was dying.
And then you got Chernenko,
who was also ancient.
I mean, when Reagan was criticized for not
meeting with his Soviet counterparts,
his response was,
"How can I? They keep dying on me."
[Ted Koppel] Another Soviet leader,
who was too old and too sick
when he took power to hold on to it,
has died.
And now a 54-year-old has taken over.
Someone who, theoretically, at least,
will be around for a generation.
Get used to the name Mikhail Gorbachev.
[speaking in Russian]
[Gates] Gorbachev represented
a totally different, more vigorous,
energetic, smart leader.
[crowd cheering]
[Palazhchenko] When Gorbachev came in,
the overall number
of nuclear warheads on both sides,
American and Soviet, was enormous,
from nuclear mines
to intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Nuclear weapons are expensive
and, for the Soviet Union,
it was the kind of burden that distorted
the structure of the Soviet economy.
A lot of money, a lot of resources,
a lot of expertise,
a lot of human minds went into that.
[Mary Elise Sarotte]
We in the United States,
spend roughly 4 to 5% of GDP on defense.
By the time Gorbachev came to power,
the Soviet Union was spending
around 20% of its GDP on defense.
And meanwhile,
there were all kinds of shortages.
[introspective music playing]
[Gates] The Soviets were under
increasing economic pressure
as early as the late 1960s,
because they invested so much in military.
[reporter] Low growth
has left officials freely acknowledging
that the Soviet economy is facing
its worst crisis since the war.
[Rhodes] He saw,
"If we can get rid of the weapons,
if we can get rid of the Cold War,
that money will become available
to restore the countryside
to what it should be,
and people will once again be able
to feed themselves in this country."
[Palazhchenko] In addition to that,
he really believed that nuclear war
was totally and absolutely inadmissible.
When he was secretary
of the Komsomol organization in Stavropol,
he and his colleagues were shown
a documentary of a nuclear test.
[soldier counting down in Russian]
[blast]
[Palazhchenko]
They also said in that documentary
that even though nuclear weapons
were enormously devastating,
it's not kind of the end of the world.
That civil defense and certain steps
to be taken can provide protection
even in case of nuclear attack.
Gorbachev didn't believe that.
When he saw that documentary,
he said to his friends,
"Well, folks, this whole thing is wrong.
Such weapons should not exist."
[atmospheric music playing]
Mikhail Gorbachev comes to power
in March 1985.
Ronald Reagan is going
into his second term.
And they decide to meet.
[Matlock] But Reagan didn't know whether
the new Soviet leader, Gorbachev,
would be a reformer or not.
I said, "Let's push the envelope."
"Let's test him.
Let's see how far he will go."
Reagan wanted to learn
about Gorbachev most of all,
and, in effect, "How can I deal with him?"
He spent a lot of time
really learning about the Soviet Union.
He would read enormous amounts of material
before he first met Gorbachev.
I wrote a few of the chapters myself,
and he would comment on them.
And what struck me was how often
he would underline something and write,
"Thanks, Jack, for pointing this out."
He was a man who knew very well
that he didn't know everything,
and he was quite willing
and grateful to be instructed.
[compelling music playing]
[Garton Ash] The first time the two meet,
it's autumn 1985.
Freezing cold in Geneva.
There's immense tension,
and nobody knows how this is gonna go
because Reagan is the old
cold warrior, isn't he?
The guy who's called the Soviet Union
an evil empire.
Gorbachev has privately described Reagan
as a dinosaur.
Reagan born in 1911.
Gorbachev a young man, dynamic.
The first meeting between the leaders
of the two most powerful forces
in the history of civilization
in more than six years now,
and it will be a dramatic opening session.
The two men will meet one-on-one
with only their translators present.
[inaudible]
[Palazhchenko] I participated
as an interpreter in that summit.
I think both of them did their best
to establish an atmosphere
of a frank discussion.
[speaking in Russian]
[Palazhchenko, translating] Everything's
going on in a very careful way
while looking at all the problems
that are of concern
both to the Soviet people
and the American people.
The people of other countries.
[Palazhchenko]
But it was not without problems.
Reagan began the first conversation
with a kind of anti-communist diatribe,
where he criticized very sharply
Marxism-Leninism as an evil doctrine
that spreads problems around the world.
Gorbachev took it on the chin, so to say.
He didn't want to continue
an ideological discussion, and he said so.
He said, "Mr. President,
there are so many problems in the world
and between our countries."
"Let us discuss those problems
and let us see what we can do
to bring our countries
closer together and, in particular,
to end the nuclear arms race."
[inaudible]
[Garton Ash] And it emerges
that they've actually got on really well
and actually understood each other.
And that really is the beginning
of the great turn in the relationship
between the United States
and the Soviet Union.
I leave Geneva today,
and our fireside summit,
determined to pursue every opportunity
to build a safer world
of peace and freedom.
General Secretary Gorbachev,
we ask you to join us
in getting the job done,
as I'm sure you will.
[Palazhchenko] Then you can use
the word "turning point."
Gorbachev said,
"There's a line that divides my life,
and that's before Chernobyl
and after Chernobyl."
[speaking in Russian]
[woman, translating] Official announcement
from the Council of Ministers.
There has been an accident
at the Chernobyl Atomic Power Station.
One of the atomic reactors was damaged.
[Serhii Plokhy] I learned
about the Chernobyl accident
three days after it actually happened
from a very short,
terse announcement from the Soviet media.
THE COUNCIL OF MINISTERS OF THE CCCP
I lived in the major city in Ukraine,
roughly 500 kilometers downstream
on Pripyat River from Chernobyl.
I immediately knew that something
really significant happened
because the Soviet media
normally didn't report on any accidents.
[somber music playing]
[Palazhchenko] The initial situation
was enormously confusing.
Extremely confusing.
A group of scientists and military people
was sent to Chernobyl.
GOVERNMENT COMMISSION
SENT TO DISASTER SITE
The information that they sent to Moscow
was very scant.
[men speaking in Russian]
[Palazhchenko] The extent of what happened
and some of the mechanics
of what happened,
became clearer as time went by.
[reporter] The worst that can happen
involves a loss of cooling water
around the fuel rods.
Even if the plant operation
is immediately shut down,
the uncovered fuel rods
would reach an extraordinary heat,
soon melting themselves
right through the reactor vessel,
the beginning of a total meltdown.
[alarm blaring]
[tense music playing]
[Plokhy]
A very important part of the story
was how unprepared the leadership
of the country, the society as a whole,
was for nuclear accidents
like the one that happened at Chernobyl.
[helicopter blades whirring]
[Plokhy] The Soviet Union
and the party apparatus
could do nothing to control
the radiation released by Chernobyl.
[radiation static]
[Plokhy] I had small children
at that time. We kept them inside.
It-it was for for some time,
uh, really an impression
that the world was coming to an end.
[somber music continues]
[Plokhy] The Soviets tried to keep
the whole accident under wraps,
but the direction of the wind
that was blowing across the Baltic Sea,
toward Norway, toward Finland,
activated the nuclear alarms
at the nuclear power plants
in Sweden, in particular.
[reporter] In Sweden, about 600 people
were evacuated from a nuclear plant
north of Stockholm.
Authorities there thought at first
the radiation levels must be coming
from a leak in their own reactor.
Some Western scientists suggest
the type of pollution detected
could indicate a nuclear meltdown.
[Plokhy] So the world learned about
the accident in Chernobyl from Sweden,
before it learned about the accident
from the Soviet Union.
[Archie Brown] The fact that it was
from the West this was first reported,
this showed the disadvantages,
to put it mildly,
of Soviet cover-ups and Soviet secrecy.
[reporter] In an unprecedented step,
the Kremlin acknowledged
there's been an accident,
but only after Scandinavian scientists
had picked up high radiation levels.
[Plokhy] The government succeeded
in getting away with proverbial murder
when it comes to control
over the information.
[reporter] On May 6th,
Soviet television presented coverage
of the first official news conference
about the Chernobyl accident.
The conference began with prepared
statements from government officials.
[Plokhy] It took Gorbachev
more than two weeks
to address the public
about what happened at Chernobyl.
[Gorbachev speaking in Russian]
[man translating in English]
We were recently stricken by a disaster.
The Chernobyl nuclear power accident.
It deeply affected the Soviet people,
and disturbed world opinion.
[somber music continues]
[Palazhchenko] While the situation
was not really clear about what happened
and the extent of the medical
and other damage,
he has said that it would have been
irresponsible for him
to talk about these things.
He was the top leader of the Soviet Union.
So everything that a top leader says
in such situations,
has to be very carefully weighed
and has to be very fully informed.
RADIATION LEVELS HAVE DROPPED
So you always have to bear in mind
that in such situations,
there is always a danger of panic.
IT DOES NOT POSE A DANGER
TO THE HEALTH OF THE PEOPLE.
[men speaking in Russian]
[men continue speaking in Russian]
[Plokhy] Mostly men, but women as well,
were mobilized to deal
with the consequences of the disaster.
[man speaking in Russian]
[Plokhy] Cleanup workers.
The people whom I knew,
who went to Chernobyl,
continue to have all sorts
of health issues
related to being present
in the exclusion zone
during the first days,
weeks after the accident.
[Palazhchenko] There is no question
that quite a few people,
particularly those who were
involved in the cleanup operation,
and then the response to that accident,
lost their health, even in my family.
There is a person
who was very closely involved
in the cleanup operations who was
in the immediate vicinity of the reactor.
[Plokhy] There is very little agreement
on the medical consequences
of the irradiation
except of one particular issue,
and that issue is the thyroid cancers
among children.
[plaintive music playing]
[Plokhy] Children turned out
to be the most affected category
as the result of those explosions.
[Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya] I remember
children had annual check-ups in hospitals
but I think that I was too young
to understand anything.
We didn't understand
the horror of this disaster.
A lot of children had bad diseases.
In my classroom,
children died because of cancer.
[Palazhchenko] I interpreted
some of his discussions
with doctors from the United States
and Japan who volunteered to help
in dealing with the medical consequences
of that accident.
And so I saw that it really touched him
very deeply, in a very emotional way.
Even though, at that time,
nominally, we were still in a Cold War,
the United States, Japan, other countries,
were quite willing to help.
Ultimately, it linked in his mind
with the idea that nuclear weapons
were just wrong,
and that the problem
of reducing them radically,
needed to be addressed.
[Brown] Chernobyl was very important
for Gorbachev.
It strengthened his belief
in greater freedom of information
because there was a real cover-up
after Chernobyl.
[Palazhchenko] The conclusion
that Gorbachev drew was,
that the government has to be more open,
that one of the reasons
for that technical failure
was that the government agency
that was involved,
was totally insulated
in terms of giving out any information
LENIN
and therefore glasnost began
to happen right after Chernobyl.
GLASNOST NOW
[Palazhchenko] Glasnost means
not just freedom of the press,
but the accountability of the government.
And the government,
including the Communist Party
and the various government agencies,
had not been accountable to the people
for years and decades before Chernobyl.
But things can change.
[clamoring]
[Gates] A lot of people predicted
that the Soviet Union was gonna collapse.
The tough question was when.
[applause]
[Gates] The one thing nobody anticipated
was that a Soviet leader himself
would begin to tear apart
the Soviet Union.
[Condoleezza Rice] The hard decisions
that Kennedy had taken,
and that Reagan had taken,
they were finally now coming to fruition.
Are these the beginnings
of profound changes in the Soviet state?
[applause]
Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
[crowd cheering]
[Rice] We were about to see
the end of the Cold War.
[dramatic music crescendoes]
[music fades]
[closing theme music playing]
[unsettling music playing]
[gunfire]
[reporter] Video shows flames and smoke
engulfing the Zaporizhzhia power plant.
[German Galushchenko] Zaporizhzhia
is the biggest nuclear plant in Europe.
Two of the six units were shelled
by heavy weapons.
[gunfire]
[reporter 1] He's saying,
"Stop shooting immediately."
"You threaten the security
of the whole world."
[reporter 2] We're hearing
that Russian forces
have actually taken over
that massive nuclear plant.
[speaking in Russian]
Putin is using civil infrastructure
and militarizing it, weaponizing it.
He's aware that it's impossible
to shoot back
if the weapons are being used from
the territory of a nuclear power plant.
He does not even need an actual bomb.
[Volodymyr Zelenskyy] Six blocks.
It means six Chernobyls.
It means the biggest danger in Europe.
[Galushchenko] They already occupied
at that time Chernobyl.
[reporter 3] Ukrainian officials say
Russian forces have now taken control
of that infamous Chernobyl nuclear plant.
[reporter 4] The scene of the world's
worst nuclear disaster in 1986.
They They could say,
"We could do this catastrophe again."
It's insane.
ZAPORIZHZHIA
FORBIDDEN ZONE - RESTRICTED ZONE
[Garrett Graff]
Russia is dangerously close
to risking another
Chernobyl-like catastrophe,
and in some ways,
risking the creation of this dirty bomb
of nuclear destruction
right there on the Ukrainian battlefield.
[intense music playing]
[opening theme music playing]
[tense music playing]
[Tom Z. Collina] In the summer of 1980,
the National Security Advisor, Brzezinski,
who worked for President Carter,
got this call at home
in the middle of the night.
[phone ringing]
[Robert Gates] It was Brzezinski's
military assistant, Colonel Bill Odom,
and he said, "We've just gotten an alert
that there are like 200 Soviet missiles
headed toward the United States."
[tense music rising]
[alarm ringing]
[Gates] Brzezinski says,
"Well, get better confirmation."
[phone ringing]
[Gates] Odom calls him back
and he says, "I was mistaken."
"It's not 200."
"It's like 2,000."
[alarm blaring]
[Tom Nichols] In later years,
Brzezinski, talking about it,
said he chose not to wake up his wife.
Washington would be gone
in a matter of minutes.
He thought she was better off
dying in her sleep.
And he gets ready to wake up
the President of the United States
and say, "You have a choice to make."
[phone ringing]
[Collina] And just before he does that,
he gets another call
from his military advisor saying,
"Ah. It's a false alarm."
[introspective music playing]
[Collina] There was a 40-cent
computer chip that went bad
that told the system that we were
under attack by the Soviet Union.
[whirring]
If President Carter had decided to launch,
the United States would have launched
a full-scale attack against Russia
that probably would have triggered
retaliation by Russia against us.
That could have been the end of the world.
[tense music playing]
[Collina] The history of nuclear weapons
over the last 77 years
will tell us that we've gotten very close
to catastrophe numerous times.
And when we've survived,
it's because we've gotten
incredibly lucky.
[Elisabeth Eaves] Close calls are just
a feature of having nuclear weapons.
There have been literally dozens
over the years.
Dozens just that
the Pentagon acknowledges.
They've taken the shape of explosions
lost nuclear material,
misplaced weapons, and close calls.
[Timothy Naftali] By the early 1970s,
there's an effort
to regulate the nuclear conflict
to reduce nuclear danger.
But when Jimmy Carter was president,
a lot of people had a generalized sense
that the Soviet Union was on the advance.
The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan.
They violated an understanding
since the end of World War II.
They had moved
into a part of the world, militarily,
that had not been part
of the sphere created
when they liberated Eastern Europe
from Nazi occupation.
[somber music playing]
[Naftali] The Soviet invasion
of Afghanistan
seemed to crystallize that the Soviets
wanted world domination.
And with news that the Soviets had more
nuclear missiles than the United States,
the sense was, "We are falling behind."
"They are a threat."
[cheering]
[dramatic music playing]
[music fades]
We have opened a dangerous window
of vulnerability to the Soviet Union.
[Naftali] Ronald Reagan
was a former actor.
He is a two-term governor of California,
and he builds his constituency
of conservatives
who are unhappy with this idea
of détente with the Soviet Union,
or relaxation of tensions.
The question of war and peace has emerged
as a central issue in this campaign,
and the give and take
[Naftali] Reagan was among
the harshest critics of détente.
We cannot shirk our responsibility
as the leader of the free world
because we're the only one that can do it,
and therefore the burden
of maintaining the peace falls on us.
And to maintain that peace,
requires strength.
It's the same kind of fear
that had dominated American politics
in 1959 and 1960.
It was happening all over again.
[cheering]
[Naftali] Ronald Reagan
rode the wave of that fear
into the White House.
["Eighties" by Killing Joke playing]
The early 1980s,
some people call it the second Cold War
because it came on the heels
of a period of détente.
Ahh, eighties ♪
[Reagan] Since 1970, the Soviet Union
has invested $300 billion more
in its military forces than we have.
To allow this imbalance to continue
is a threat to our national security.
Eighties ♪
Get out of my way
I'm not for sale ♪
[Nichols] The Cold War and the fear
of World War III and nuclear war
really permeated the '80s.
And it saturated into popular culture.
[man] Warning! Warning! Nuclear attack!
[Nichols] Movies and books
and popular music
help us process through our anxieties.
[narrator] For 40 years, both sides
observed the unwritten rules
of the deadliest game
the world has ever known.
[Nichols] There were a lot of movies
about World War III, about nuclear war.
[woman] This time,
they are playing with, at best,
the destruction of life as we know it.
You cannot win a nuclear war!
["Eighties" continues playing]
Eighties ♪
I'm living in the eighties ♪
It was the wallpaper of everybody's life.
So it was always in the background.
[crowd cheering and clapping]
[Morra] When Ronald Reagan
became president in January 1981,
Leonid Brezhnev
was still the general secretary.
The nuclear arsenals were enormous.
But there was also a lack of communication
at the senior levels of both governments.
[tense music playing]
Reagan felt that the combination
of mutual assured destruction and détente
had put the Americans in a box,
that we were afraid to do anything,
because we were obsessed
with strategic stability.
Reagan says, "I'm going to approve
new nuclear weapons systems
as a way of putting the screws
to the Soviets,
to force them to negotiate."
The modernization of our strategic
and conventional forces
will assure that deterrence works
and peace prevails.
[Morra] As a result, the Soviet leadership
was quite paranoid.
They believed that the United States
and its allies
were plotting a nuclear first strike
to decapitate
the leadership in the Kremlin
and to then achieve world domination.
In May 1981, Yuri Andropov,
who was chairman of the KGB,
proposed they embark
on a major new intelligence operation.
[Gates] Andropov orders this operation
to try and enhance their ability
to identify whether
the United States is, in fact,
getting ready to launch a
a nuclear war against them.
[intense music playing]
[Morra] Operation RYAN
was the largest intelligence operation
the Soviet Union conducted
after World War II.
RYAN is an English version
of a Russian acronym
that stands for "Nuclear Rocket Attack."
And its intention was to find indications
of a US first nuclear strike
against the Soviet Union.
[Gates] Their embassy guys are being told
to monitor American hospitals.
Are we stockpiling blood? Plasma?
All the things you'd expect if you were
getting ready to launch a nuclear war.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Gates] Bureaucracies are bureaucracies.
And so if the head of the KGB
tells these guys,
"I want you looking for these signs,"
they're gonna find them
regardless of what they mean.
[Morra] In November of '82,
Andropov replaces Brezhnev
as the new general secretary.
Then in 1983, the deployments
of US Pershing II missiles to West Germany
are scheduled for the end of the year.
[reporter] The Army says
that the Pershing II
can fly up to a thousand miles
in under 10 minutes,
and drop a nuclear warhead
on a target with surgical precision.
[Gates] Pershing missiles give the Soviets
like seven minutes' warning
before the missile hits the Kremlin.
So they're scared to death about
the deployment of these Pershing missiles,
which are in response
to the Soviets' deployment
of SS-20 intermediate-range missiles
in the western Soviet Union.
[Reagan] Although the Soviet leaders
earlier this year
declared they'd frozen deployment
of this dangerous missile,
they have, in fact, continued deployment.
[Morra] The SS-20 was deemed
to be a first-strike weapon itself.
It could reach any target
in NATO Europe in minutes.
[Wolfgang Ischinger] The SS-20 was capable
of flying a couple of thousand kilometers,
certainly to Berlin or to Paris.
And that, of course,
was for us in in in Germany,
almost an existential, uh, question.
[applause]
[Nichols] Tensions were
at an all-time high.
1983 was probably the most dangerous year
of the Cold War since 1962.
Ladies and gentlemen,
the President of the United States,
Ronald Reagan.
[applause]
[Morra] In early 1983,
things are heating up a lot.
And then Ronald Reagan
gave two nationally televised speeches
that seemed to confirm
the Soviets' worst fears
and the premise of Operation RYAN.
The first speech became known
as the Evil Empire speech.
[Reagan] I urge you to beware
the temptation of pride,
the temptation of blithely
declaring yourselves above it all
and label both sides equally at fault,
to ignore the facts of history
and the aggressive impulses
of an evil empire,
to simply call the arms race
a giant misunderstanding,
and thereby remove yourself
from the struggle
between right and wrong and good and evil.
[dramatic music playing]
[Gates] The Evil Empire speech really,
uh, I think,
had a significant impact
on the Soviet leadership.
The speech kind of gets them
where it hurts.
HIS STATEMENTS WERE THE REVIVAL OF
THE WORST RHETORIC OF THE COLD WAR TIMES
It attacks their legitimacy
as a normal country
and as the equivalent
of the United States.
Legitimacy that they desperately sought.
And then he delivers a speech
announcing that we're gonna build
this Strategic Defense Initiative.
If it works,
it renders
the Soviet Missile Force useless.
During the past decade and a half,
the Soviets have built up
a massive arsenal
of new strategic nuclear weapons.
Weapons that can strike directly
at the United States.
[Audra J. Wolfe]
Reagan was alarmed to learn
that the United States did not
actually have a way of protecting itself
from a potential nuclear attack.
[Nichols] Reagan says,
"Wouldn't it be so much better
that instead of relying
on nuclear deterrence,
we could destroy
nuclear missiles in flight?"
[boom]
[announcer] It is time for a bold,
new stroke in strategic planning.
High Frontier addresses this need
by proposing a triple-layered,
non-nuclear defense.
[Wolfe] Scientist Ed Teller suggested
that the solution
to Reagan's nuclear fears
might be through space lasers.
You could put lasers on top of satellites
and place them in orbit,
and this would be a way
to shoot down weapons
before they returned to the atmosphere,
thereby preventing a nuclear holocaust.
What if free people
could live secure in the knowledge
that their security did not rest
upon the threat of instant US retaliation
to deter a Soviet attack?
That we could intercept and destroy
strategic ballistic missiles
before they reached our own soil
or that of our allies?
[Wolfe] The official name for this program
was the Strategic Defense Initiative.
But it came to be known
as Star Wars among its critics,
who were many, particularly
in the scientific and technical community,
because it seemed like science fiction.
[Nichols] The technology
was nowhere near possible,
and, in my view,
still is not 40 years later.
But the Soviets
find this extremely threatening,
not because it was going
to happen anytime soon,
but because they were worried
about a new attitude
among the Americans that said,
"All the old deals are off."
My fellow Americans,
tonight we're launching an effort
which holds the promise
of changing the course of human history.
[Morra] Then came a sequence of events
that just ratcheted up the tensions
between East and West very dramatically.
[compelling music playing]
[Morra] FleetEx '83
was a very large US naval exercise
in a part of the North Pacific Ocean
that's bounded by Soviet territory.
The US intent was to demonstrate
to the Soviet Union,
"We can operate even in your backyard."
"You can't do anything about it."
During the exercise,
US Navy fighters overflew Soviet territory
in the Kuril Islands.
It was a secret hiding place for their
nuclear ballistic missile submarines,
and penetrating airspace
can be deemed an act of war.
There is a MiG-23 fighter base
on the Kuril Islands,
and the Soviets
never launch their fighters.
They looked incompetent.
The leadership in Moscow
cracked the whip on them and said,
"You guys better get your act together."
And over the next couple of months,
they started massive fighter reactions
to all of these reconnaissance aircraft.
Increasingly provocative,
where they were getting
into firing position behind the planes,
in some cases even arming their missiles.
The air-to-air situation
got really dangerous.
And then, on the night
of the 1st of September, 1983,
Korean Airlines Flight 007
was en route to Seoul, South Korea.
That flight had 269 people aboard,
passengers and crew.
It's a civilian plane.
And it departed Anchorage,
and they got off course.
And ultimately overflew
the Kamchatka Peninsula,
which is part of the Soviet Union
and the location of a Soviet
ballistic missile submarine base.
That's the holy of the holiest
for the Soviet Union.
Those are the crown jewels.
You don't let anybody
fly over one of your submarine bases.
I went into work
maybe 1:30 in the morning.
The NCO of the watch said,
"The Soviets are conducting
a really weird exercise."
They were reacting to something.
What came to mind,
"Maybe it's an airliner."
[phones ringing]
[Morra] And I told him,
"Call the Transport Ministry
and see if they have any
transpacific airliners off course."
[KAL-007] Roger, Korean Air 007 climb and
maintain at 350, leaving 330 at this time.
Tokyo, roger.
[Morra] The aircraft
crossed Sakhalin Island.
It was intercepted
by a Soviet air defense fighter.
[pilot] I see it.
Roger, understood. I'm flying behind.
[Morra] The Soviet Air Defense forces knew
that if someone violates our border,
we have to shoot them down
because the US Navy violated our border
just a few months ago during FleetEx '83,
and we didn't react.
I was still bugging
the Transport Ministry in Tokyo,
"Are you missing anybody?
Are you missing anybody?"
And finally they said,
"Yes, we are missing someone."
At the same time, we were intercepting
what the Soviets were saying.
[pilot, in Russian] Z.G.
I have executed the launch.
The target is destroyed.
[Morra, in English]
Suddenly the pieces fit together.
A civilian airliner had been shot down,
and almost certainly everybody was dead.
It was extremely distressing.
Just on a human level.
[emotional music playing]
[reporter] The Americans say
as many as eight Soviet Fighters
tracked Flight 007
for two and a half hours.
Then came the crunch.
A 1960s vintage Sukhoi jet was ordered
to fire a missile at the unarmed jumbo.
Meanwhile, at Seoul's airport,
big crowds were waiting
to meet the jumbo that never came.
[emotional music continues playing]
[Morra] There were
over 60 Americans, I believe, on board,
including a US Congressman,
Larry McDonald,
who was a very anti-communist kind of guy.
There is an elitist core in this country
that has seen value
in subsidizing communism,
of protecting communism.
- [interviewer] It has?
- Sure.
[Morra] Everyone obviously perished
on the flight, including a US Congressman,
which led to some speculation
that maybe he was the target.
Those of us in Air Force intelligence
held to the view that
this was a terrible loss of life.
Tragic, but it was a mistake
borne of all of these building tensions
month after month.
Major Osipovich
was the Soviet Air Defense pilot
who shot down Korean Airlines Flight 007.
I could see two rows of windows,
which were lit up.
I wondered if it was a civilian aircraft.
Military cargo planes
don't have such windows.
I wondered what kind of plane it was.
But I had no time to think.
I had a job to do.
[Morra] He never shows any regret.
He absolutely believes
he did the right thing.
He was gonna take that plane down,
come hell or high water.
My orders were to destroy the intruder.
I fulfilled my mission.
[Gates] From a career standpoint,
it was safer for that pilot
to shoot down that plane
than to not shoot it
and then have it found out that it was,
in fact, a reconnaissance plane.
[tense music playing]
[Morra] As early as the 2nd of September,
CIA's presidential daily briefing
that went to Reagan
did tell the same story we were telling.
[Gates] We knew pretty quickly
that the Soviets had not deliberately
shot down this commercial airliner
or that that had not been their intent.
We were trying to say,
"Look, this is a catastrophic mistake
that the Soviets have made,"
because we had the radio signals
between the pilot
and the Air Defense Center and so on.
[Reagan] My fellow Americans,
I'm coming before you tonight
about the Korean airline massacre.
[Morra] Reagan made
a nationally televised speech,
in which he called the Soviets barbarians,
and this was a criminal act.
It was an act of barbarism,
born of a society
which wantonly disregards
individual rights
and the value of human life,
and seeks constantly
to expand and dominate other nations.
The line from Washington became,
very rapidly,
that this was an intentional act
on the Soviets' part,
and it just shows
how corrupt and evil they really are.
We do have evidence that's come out
in the decade since, that Andropov,
once he found out
that it was a civilian airliner,
was incensed.
He was very angry at the military
because we're in this fraught period.
"We've got all this tension
with the United States."
"What are you guys doing?"
You know? "You can't go around
shooting down civilian airliners."
He pivoted off of that point
fairly quickly.
[reporter, in Russian]
It was undeniably proved
that the invasion
of the South Korean aircraft
into the Soviet airspace
was a deliberate,
neatly-planned operation.
[Morra, in English] The Kremlin
essentially decided to circle the wagons
and not criticize the Soviet military,
and instead create a party line,
which was, "This was an intentional
American intelligence collection flight."
"The nefarious Americans
are so devious and clever
that they must have outfitted
this aircraft with intelligence sensors."
[in Russian] I think this provocation by
the CIA agencies was performed, clearly,
for provocative purposes now,
when important
international events are taking place,
and we are filled with indignation
about this provocation
that was clearly intended
against our country and world's détente.
[Morra, in English] And then,
just a couple of weeks later
[tense music playing]
at the Soviets'
National Missile Defense Center,
sixty miles outside of Moscow,
Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov
was called into duty that night,
because the regular
watch officer was sick.
Petrov was not an operational officer.
He's an engineer scientist.
He was in charge of algorithm development
for signals coming in
from satellites and other sensors.
The Soviets' relatively new
and untested missile warning satellites
had only been on orbit for about a year.
[clock ticking]
[alarm blaring]
[Petrov] It was completely unexpected,
as such things usually are.
The sirens sounded very loudly,
and I just sat there
for a few seconds staring at the screen
with the word "launch"
displayed in bold red letters.
A minute later, this siren went off again.
The second missile was launched,
then the third,
and the fourth, and the fifth.
[Collina] His computers are telling him
there are five nuclear weapons
coming in against Russia.
The regulations would say that
he should alert the president of Russia
that there's an incoming attack.
We knew that every second of delay
took away valuable time
that the Soviet Union's military
and political leadership needed.
And then I made my decision.
I would not trust the computer.
He thought, "This doesn't make sense,
because if the US is going to attack us,
they're not going to attack us
with small numbers."
[Morra] They wouldn't
just launch one or two.
They'd launch them all.
[tense music fades]
I picked up the telephone handset,
spoke to my superiors,
and reported that the alarm was false.
But I myself was not sure
until the very last moment.
Honestly, 50-50.
[Morra] And finally, Petrov gets reports
from the Arctic radar stations
that there are, in fact,
no US ICBMs flying over the pole.
What his early warning system
is, is seeing,
is actually reflections off clouds
that make it look like it's an attack.
He is now credited
as the man who saved the world
because if he had reported this
up the chain of the command,
the president of Russia could have
responded with a nuclear attack.
[Morra] Unfortunately for Petrov,
his career was destroyed by this incident.
He exposed the flaws
of these new satellite systems,
and that embarrassed a lot of people
higher up the food chain than him.
So the Soviets were determined
to keep this secret,
but it's emblematic of the tension-filled
environment in 1983.
Soviet forces did things
in November of 1983
they never had done before,
including during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Able Archer '83 was the latest installment
in a NATO nuclear war exercise.
[Nichols] Some forces
within the Kremlin said,
"You know, they say it's an exercise,
but this might be a prelude to war."
The Able Archer exercise,
it was meant to test communications
and procedures
for releasing nuclear weapons
in the event of World War III.
[commander] Three, two, one, mark.
[interviewer] WarGames, basically.
WarGames, essentially. Yes.
All right!
[Morra] It was one
of the first of these exercises
to really play out
a very realistic scenario
from tension, to conventional war,
to limited nuclear war,
to all-out nuclear war.
The climax of this exercise
was around the 8th of November,
when the national command authorities,
that is to say, Margaret Thatcher
and Ronald Reagan,
would be present to authorize
the launch of nuclear weapons.
And just as that was occurring,
NATO changed the codes.
The Soviets had been able to intercept
a lot of what was going on.
So when we change
the codes suddenly on them,
what does that say to them?
You change the codes
if you're going to war. [chuckles]
From the Soviet standpoint,
it just looked like
this is the real thing.
They were definitely ready
for a full thermonuclear war.
Their nuclear alert posture
was unprecedented.
Loading fighter bombers with nuclear bombs
and having them sit on alert.
They sent a number of their ballistic
missile submarines up to the Arctic
to their wartime launch locations
under the Arctic ice cap.
[suspenseful music builds]
[Morra] Andropov at the time
was very, very ill.
He was in the hospital.
He had an aide with him 24/7
that had their version
of the nuclear football with him,
which alarmed
the senior military leadership.
They were afraid Andropov
might start pushing buttons.
The head of the Soviet general staff
actually went to his bunker under Moscow.
It was as serious as that.
[suspenseful music crescendoes]
[Morra] Oleg Gordievsky
was a career KGB officer.
[camera shutter clicking]
[Morra] He also had been spying
for the British for some years.
Gordievsky was deeply disenchanted
with the KGB and the Soviet system,
and decided to become an agent
for British intelligence.
[Morra] He was reporting to MI6
on this extreme paranoia
that permeated the leadership
in the Kremlin, Andropov in particular.
Gordievsky, during Able Archer '83,
is telling MI6,
"The Kremlin thinks this is real."
When I told the British,
they simply couldn't believe
that the Soviet leadership
was so stupid and narrow-minded
as to believe in something so impossible.
I said to them,
"Okay, I'll get you the documents."
[Morra] And MI6 provided
Gordievsky's intelligence to CIA.
CIA did not pass that along to anyone,
certainly not to anyone that I'm aware of
in the Pentagon or in NATO.
There was enough evidence that the Soviets
were taking unprecedented steps
that it got to the attention
of Brigadier General Leonard Perroots,
who was the chief intelligence officer
for the US Air Force in Europe.
Some very strong feelings
[Morra] Perroots briefed his leadership
and the NATO leadership,
that the Soviets are doing some things
we haven't seen before.
This is alarming.
He was asked by his leadership,
"Well, should we reciprocate?"
"Should we heighten our nuclear
alert posture here in Europe?"
And Perroots' gut feeling was, "No."
"Let's just bring Able Archer
to a conclusion."
"Let's not escalate."
It's Perroots' understanding
of the adversary
that diffuses this crisis.
We see time and again in this '83 crisis,
it's the individuals that have the courage
to stand up and make a call,
not the system necessarily that works.
[Fiona Hill] When it was brought to
the attention of Reagan in the aftermath,
that prompted him to realize
the Soviet Union
was more scared of the United States
than anyone realized,
and that we were in an environment
in which it was very easy
to misinterpret information.
At this moment,
there was an important film
that was put together
called The Day After.
- [narrator] Sunday.
- This is not an exercise.
[narrator] The movie beyond imagining.
It's not gonna happen, huh?
Nah. People are crazy, but not that crazy.
Over 300 missiles inbound now.
[loud explosion]
Nothing like The Day After
had ever been seen on network television,
that's for sure.
The purpose of network television
is to sell advertising
and to be as inoffensive and mindless
and infantilizing as possible.
The head of ABC Circle Films
was responsible for The Day After,
and he had the idea of,
what would it be like
to make a movie that would depict,
without taking sides
or specifying who started it,
nuclear war between the United States
and the Soviet Union.
We were offered cooperation
by the Defense Department.
They were gonna give us helicopters
and God knows what all else,
provided that we showed
that the Soviet Union started the war.
And we said, "No, no, no,
that's not the point."
I didn't want to make propaganda.
Any more news?
They just hit one of our ships
in the Persian Gulf.
- Who's they?
- The Russians. Who do you think?
We hit 'em back.
One of their ships, you know?
It was presented in the simplest way.
A farm family out in the Midwest
who happened to have a missile site
next to their farm.
And they were eating lunch one day,
and suddenly
they see the missiles taking off.
[rumbling]
[Gottemoeller] And they say,
"Oh, the moment has finally come
where we are exchanging a nuclear strike."
And, "Oh, within moments,
our farm will be destroyed."
[boom]
[Meyer] What the movie did
was to imagine for people
what they couldn't or wouldn't
imagine for themselves.
Good evening. Here's what's happening.
Most of you who watched the ABC movie,
The Day After,
are probably still feeling
just a little numb right now.
[Meyer] The next day,
I was astonished to learn
that a hundred million people
had seen the movie.
It has the distinction of being
the most watched movie
ever made for television.
It was completely devastating.
It was a horrible thing
to see the reality,
and how fast it could happen.
Those of us who watch it
in the viewing public
are not the ones who really should
get the education from that film.
It's more the people who have
the authority to push the button.
- [blast]
- [scream echoing]
[whimpering]
[somber music playing]
Reagan got an early, uh, screening of it,
and it it bothered him.
Um
Reagan kept diaries,
which I think surprises a lot of folks
because he sort of had this genial,
not very thoughtful way about him.
And yet every night, he would sit down
and actually write in a diary that he kept
as president.
And he wrote in that diary,
"It disturbed me greatly."
He had spent most of his life
in entertainment and movies,
and that night, he wrote that this
is something that really stayed with him.
[poignant music playing]
Just suppose with me for a moment,
that an Ivan and an Anya
could find themselves,
say, in a waiting room,
or sharing a shelter from the rain
or a storm with a Jim and Sally,
and there was no language barrier
to keep them from getting acquainted.
Would they then debate the differences
between their respective governments?
Or would they find themselves
comparing notes
just about their children
and what each other did for a living?
If the Soviet government wants peace,
then there will be peace.
Together, we can strengthen peace,
reduce the level of arms,
and know in doing so,
that we have helped fulfill
the hopes and dreams
of those we represent,
and indeed, of people everywhere.
Let us begin now.
Thank you.
[applause]
[dramatic music playing]
[Gates] Reagan, from the beginning,
had the view that he would
use his first term
to right the balance of power
and make it clear that the United States
was superior to the Soviet Union
in military power.
People would have laughed
at this notion at the time,
but Reagan's writing made clear
that what he wanted to be as president
was a peacemaker.
And he had a duality of intent.
On the one hand,
he wanted the Soviet Union to disappear.
And he thought
that could happen on his watch
if he followed the right policies.
But at the same time, he also wanted
to avoid a conflict with the Russians,
even as he was trying to bring them down.
[reporter] The White House's
desire to start the thaw,
comes after three years
of a Reagan administration
for whom countering what is seen
as the Soviet threat to world peace
has been the central plank
of all foreign policy.
[inaudible]
I was, I guess, the most senior
foreign service officer
with extensive experience
in the Soviet Union.
I was Ambassador to Czechoslovakia
at the time.
They brought me back,
telling me that the president
had decided that it was time to negotiate.
He thought he had, you might say,
enough chips on the table
to start negotiating.
[Naftali] Reagan was trying to find a way
to set up a meeting with Andropov in 1984.
Andropov would die
before Reagan could meet him.
But he finally gets a partner
that he can talk to.
Mikhail Gorbachev.
[atmospheric music playing]
[Dan Rather] Mikhail Gorbachev,
the Kremlin's new number two,
and heir apparent to the top job.
He opened a diplomatic
and public relations offensive
in Britain over the weekend.
[reporter] At 53,
this rising star of the politburo,
exudes charm, smiles easily,
has a keen sense of humor,
and an attractive wife.
[Pavel Palazhchenko] Margaret Thatcher
came to the conclusion very early,
that Gorbachev was for real.
I like Mr. Gorbachev.
We can do business together.
He represented a different generation.
He wanted real change.
Mikhail Gorbachev was born during
Stalin's time in the region of Stavropol,
which is the south of Russia rather close
to the borders of the Soviet Union.
[evocative music playing]
[Palazhchenko] His father
was a combine harvester.
There were victims of injustice
in Gorbachev's own family.
His grandfather on the father's side
never accepted the collectivization.
So he was arrested and exiled to Siberia,
where they worked
in tremendously difficult conditions.
His other grandfather on his mother's side
was one of the leaders of the collective
farm movement imposed by Stalin.
Despite the fact that he was a communist,
a dedicated communist,
he too was arrested.
But then he said, "Do not blame Stalin.
Stalin is good."
"It's the bad people who have done this."
So Gorbachev had this experience
of seeing the complexity
of life in the Soviet Union.
[Richard Rhodes] Mikhail Gorbachev
won a four-year scholarship
to the best university
in the Soviet Union,
Moscow University,
by harvesting more wheat
than any other 17-year-old
in the entire Soviet Union
with his family.
[David Remnick] So Mikhail Gorbachev
makes his way to Moscow University,
which is a big thing
for a country boy to do.
He meets his future wife there, Raisa,
and he enters in the stream
of the Communist Party.
[Palazhchenko] Gorbachev was
a relatively young leader
when Khrushchev
made his famous speech against Stalin,
and he saw that the perfection
that the ideology promised
was not there.
After Khrushchev's speech,
he was asking more questions.
TO THE SUPREME SOVIET OF THE USSR
MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH GORBACHEV
[Remnick] Gorbachev goes back to Stavropol
and becomes the local party chief.
And eventually Yuri Andropov
takes a liking to Gorbachev.
And Gorbachev is elevated to Moscow,
which is the center
of the political universe
in the Soviet Union.
[funeral march playing]
[Rachmaninov's "Vocalise, No. 14" playing]
[Palazhchenko] Many people expected
that when Andropov died,
he would be succeeded by Gorbachev.
But that did not happen.
He was succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko,
a Brezhnev loyalist and associate
who, again, died in '85.
[Gates] I saw Brezhnev in Vienna in 1979
when I was there with Carter,
and the KGB guys next to him
are basically holding him up.
And then Andropov, who was dying.
And then you got Chernenko,
who was also ancient.
I mean, when Reagan was criticized for not
meeting with his Soviet counterparts,
his response was,
"How can I? They keep dying on me."
[Ted Koppel] Another Soviet leader,
who was too old and too sick
when he took power to hold on to it,
has died.
And now a 54-year-old has taken over.
Someone who, theoretically, at least,
will be around for a generation.
Get used to the name Mikhail Gorbachev.
[speaking in Russian]
[Gates] Gorbachev represented
a totally different, more vigorous,
energetic, smart leader.
[crowd cheering]
[Palazhchenko] When Gorbachev came in,
the overall number
of nuclear warheads on both sides,
American and Soviet, was enormous,
from nuclear mines
to intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Nuclear weapons are expensive
and, for the Soviet Union,
it was the kind of burden that distorted
the structure of the Soviet economy.
A lot of money, a lot of resources,
a lot of expertise,
a lot of human minds went into that.
[Mary Elise Sarotte]
We in the United States,
spend roughly 4 to 5% of GDP on defense.
By the time Gorbachev came to power,
the Soviet Union was spending
around 20% of its GDP on defense.
And meanwhile,
there were all kinds of shortages.
[introspective music playing]
[Gates] The Soviets were under
increasing economic pressure
as early as the late 1960s,
because they invested so much in military.
[reporter] Low growth
has left officials freely acknowledging
that the Soviet economy is facing
its worst crisis since the war.
[Rhodes] He saw,
"If we can get rid of the weapons,
if we can get rid of the Cold War,
that money will become available
to restore the countryside
to what it should be,
and people will once again be able
to feed themselves in this country."
[Palazhchenko] In addition to that,
he really believed that nuclear war
was totally and absolutely inadmissible.
When he was secretary
of the Komsomol organization in Stavropol,
he and his colleagues were shown
a documentary of a nuclear test.
[soldier counting down in Russian]
[blast]
[Palazhchenko]
They also said in that documentary
that even though nuclear weapons
were enormously devastating,
it's not kind of the end of the world.
That civil defense and certain steps
to be taken can provide protection
even in case of nuclear attack.
Gorbachev didn't believe that.
When he saw that documentary,
he said to his friends,
"Well, folks, this whole thing is wrong.
Such weapons should not exist."
[atmospheric music playing]
Mikhail Gorbachev comes to power
in March 1985.
Ronald Reagan is going
into his second term.
And they decide to meet.
[Matlock] But Reagan didn't know whether
the new Soviet leader, Gorbachev,
would be a reformer or not.
I said, "Let's push the envelope."
"Let's test him.
Let's see how far he will go."
Reagan wanted to learn
about Gorbachev most of all,
and, in effect, "How can I deal with him?"
He spent a lot of time
really learning about the Soviet Union.
He would read enormous amounts of material
before he first met Gorbachev.
I wrote a few of the chapters myself,
and he would comment on them.
And what struck me was how often
he would underline something and write,
"Thanks, Jack, for pointing this out."
He was a man who knew very well
that he didn't know everything,
and he was quite willing
and grateful to be instructed.
[compelling music playing]
[Garton Ash] The first time the two meet,
it's autumn 1985.
Freezing cold in Geneva.
There's immense tension,
and nobody knows how this is gonna go
because Reagan is the old
cold warrior, isn't he?
The guy who's called the Soviet Union
an evil empire.
Gorbachev has privately described Reagan
as a dinosaur.
Reagan born in 1911.
Gorbachev a young man, dynamic.
The first meeting between the leaders
of the two most powerful forces
in the history of civilization
in more than six years now,
and it will be a dramatic opening session.
The two men will meet one-on-one
with only their translators present.
[inaudible]
[Palazhchenko] I participated
as an interpreter in that summit.
I think both of them did their best
to establish an atmosphere
of a frank discussion.
[speaking in Russian]
[Palazhchenko, translating] Everything's
going on in a very careful way
while looking at all the problems
that are of concern
both to the Soviet people
and the American people.
The people of other countries.
[Palazhchenko]
But it was not without problems.
Reagan began the first conversation
with a kind of anti-communist diatribe,
where he criticized very sharply
Marxism-Leninism as an evil doctrine
that spreads problems around the world.
Gorbachev took it on the chin, so to say.
He didn't want to continue
an ideological discussion, and he said so.
He said, "Mr. President,
there are so many problems in the world
and between our countries."
"Let us discuss those problems
and let us see what we can do
to bring our countries
closer together and, in particular,
to end the nuclear arms race."
[inaudible]
[Garton Ash] And it emerges
that they've actually got on really well
and actually understood each other.
And that really is the beginning
of the great turn in the relationship
between the United States
and the Soviet Union.
I leave Geneva today,
and our fireside summit,
determined to pursue every opportunity
to build a safer world
of peace and freedom.
General Secretary Gorbachev,
we ask you to join us
in getting the job done,
as I'm sure you will.
[Palazhchenko] Then you can use
the word "turning point."
Gorbachev said,
"There's a line that divides my life,
and that's before Chernobyl
and after Chernobyl."
[speaking in Russian]
[woman, translating] Official announcement
from the Council of Ministers.
There has been an accident
at the Chernobyl Atomic Power Station.
One of the atomic reactors was damaged.
[Serhii Plokhy] I learned
about the Chernobyl accident
three days after it actually happened
from a very short,
terse announcement from the Soviet media.
THE COUNCIL OF MINISTERS OF THE CCCP
I lived in the major city in Ukraine,
roughly 500 kilometers downstream
on Pripyat River from Chernobyl.
I immediately knew that something
really significant happened
because the Soviet media
normally didn't report on any accidents.
[somber music playing]
[Palazhchenko] The initial situation
was enormously confusing.
Extremely confusing.
A group of scientists and military people
was sent to Chernobyl.
GOVERNMENT COMMISSION
SENT TO DISASTER SITE
The information that they sent to Moscow
was very scant.
[men speaking in Russian]
[Palazhchenko] The extent of what happened
and some of the mechanics
of what happened,
became clearer as time went by.
[reporter] The worst that can happen
involves a loss of cooling water
around the fuel rods.
Even if the plant operation
is immediately shut down,
the uncovered fuel rods
would reach an extraordinary heat,
soon melting themselves
right through the reactor vessel,
the beginning of a total meltdown.
[alarm blaring]
[tense music playing]
[Plokhy]
A very important part of the story
was how unprepared the leadership
of the country, the society as a whole,
was for nuclear accidents
like the one that happened at Chernobyl.
[helicopter blades whirring]
[Plokhy] The Soviet Union
and the party apparatus
could do nothing to control
the radiation released by Chernobyl.
[radiation static]
[Plokhy] I had small children
at that time. We kept them inside.
It-it was for for some time,
uh, really an impression
that the world was coming to an end.
[somber music continues]
[Plokhy] The Soviets tried to keep
the whole accident under wraps,
but the direction of the wind
that was blowing across the Baltic Sea,
toward Norway, toward Finland,
activated the nuclear alarms
at the nuclear power plants
in Sweden, in particular.
[reporter] In Sweden, about 600 people
were evacuated from a nuclear plant
north of Stockholm.
Authorities there thought at first
the radiation levels must be coming
from a leak in their own reactor.
Some Western scientists suggest
the type of pollution detected
could indicate a nuclear meltdown.
[Plokhy] So the world learned about
the accident in Chernobyl from Sweden,
before it learned about the accident
from the Soviet Union.
[Archie Brown] The fact that it was
from the West this was first reported,
this showed the disadvantages,
to put it mildly,
of Soviet cover-ups and Soviet secrecy.
[reporter] In an unprecedented step,
the Kremlin acknowledged
there's been an accident,
but only after Scandinavian scientists
had picked up high radiation levels.
[Plokhy] The government succeeded
in getting away with proverbial murder
when it comes to control
over the information.
[reporter] On May 6th,
Soviet television presented coverage
of the first official news conference
about the Chernobyl accident.
The conference began with prepared
statements from government officials.
[Plokhy] It took Gorbachev
more than two weeks
to address the public
about what happened at Chernobyl.
[Gorbachev speaking in Russian]
[man translating in English]
We were recently stricken by a disaster.
The Chernobyl nuclear power accident.
It deeply affected the Soviet people,
and disturbed world opinion.
[somber music continues]
[Palazhchenko] While the situation
was not really clear about what happened
and the extent of the medical
and other damage,
he has said that it would have been
irresponsible for him
to talk about these things.
He was the top leader of the Soviet Union.
So everything that a top leader says
in such situations,
has to be very carefully weighed
and has to be very fully informed.
RADIATION LEVELS HAVE DROPPED
So you always have to bear in mind
that in such situations,
there is always a danger of panic.
IT DOES NOT POSE A DANGER
TO THE HEALTH OF THE PEOPLE.
[men speaking in Russian]
[men continue speaking in Russian]
[Plokhy] Mostly men, but women as well,
were mobilized to deal
with the consequences of the disaster.
[man speaking in Russian]
[Plokhy] Cleanup workers.
The people whom I knew,
who went to Chernobyl,
continue to have all sorts
of health issues
related to being present
in the exclusion zone
during the first days,
weeks after the accident.
[Palazhchenko] There is no question
that quite a few people,
particularly those who were
involved in the cleanup operation,
and then the response to that accident,
lost their health, even in my family.
There is a person
who was very closely involved
in the cleanup operations who was
in the immediate vicinity of the reactor.
[Plokhy] There is very little agreement
on the medical consequences
of the irradiation
except of one particular issue,
and that issue is the thyroid cancers
among children.
[plaintive music playing]
[Plokhy] Children turned out
to be the most affected category
as the result of those explosions.
[Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya] I remember
children had annual check-ups in hospitals
but I think that I was too young
to understand anything.
We didn't understand
the horror of this disaster.
A lot of children had bad diseases.
In my classroom,
children died because of cancer.
[Palazhchenko] I interpreted
some of his discussions
with doctors from the United States
and Japan who volunteered to help
in dealing with the medical consequences
of that accident.
And so I saw that it really touched him
very deeply, in a very emotional way.
Even though, at that time,
nominally, we were still in a Cold War,
the United States, Japan, other countries,
were quite willing to help.
Ultimately, it linked in his mind
with the idea that nuclear weapons
were just wrong,
and that the problem
of reducing them radically,
needed to be addressed.
[Brown] Chernobyl was very important
for Gorbachev.
It strengthened his belief
in greater freedom of information
because there was a real cover-up
after Chernobyl.
[Palazhchenko] The conclusion
that Gorbachev drew was,
that the government has to be more open,
that one of the reasons
for that technical failure
was that the government agency
that was involved,
was totally insulated
in terms of giving out any information
LENIN
and therefore glasnost began
to happen right after Chernobyl.
GLASNOST NOW
[Palazhchenko] Glasnost means
not just freedom of the press,
but the accountability of the government.
And the government,
including the Communist Party
and the various government agencies,
had not been accountable to the people
for years and decades before Chernobyl.
But things can change.
[clamoring]
[Gates] A lot of people predicted
that the Soviet Union was gonna collapse.
The tough question was when.
[applause]
[Gates] The one thing nobody anticipated
was that a Soviet leader himself
would begin to tear apart
the Soviet Union.
[Condoleezza Rice] The hard decisions
that Kennedy had taken,
and that Reagan had taken,
they were finally now coming to fruition.
Are these the beginnings
of profound changes in the Soviet state?
[applause]
Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
[crowd cheering]
[Rice] We were about to see
the end of the Cold War.
[dramatic music crescendoes]
[music fades]
[closing theme music playing]