The Cold War

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It's the 27th of October 1962.

A young Russian sailor strips off his uniform after another grueling 12-hour shift and climbs onto his bunk, sweat glistening on his skin.

This B-59 submarine was designed for deep-sea patrols.

But here, far below the surface of the Sargasso Sea near Cuba, it feels like a 300-foot-long oven.

The sailor struggles to get comfortable.

as the vessel creaks and grinds all around him.

It's been a month since they left their base on the Kola Peninsula in Russia, and it'll be some time until they're home.

Their top secret mission is to head to Cuba to aid the supply of ballistic missiles to their embattled communist ally.

But the Americans have blockaded the island with warships, so their new orders are to remain submerged.

For days now, they have been without communication with Moscow or the outside world.

The last report received was was an intercept of a broadcast from President Kennedy, warning of possible thermonuclear conflict.

Suddenly, an almighty explosion rocks the vessel, sending the sailor flying out of his cot onto the metal floor.

The emergency siren screams as he pulls on his uniform and scrambles down dark, narrow corridors, colliding into other crewmen.

The control deck is no less chaotic.

Amid operators calling out the sub's vital functions, Captain Savitsky rushes between consoles, demanding reports from all sectors.

So far, there are no indications of a direct hit.

Now, news arrives from the torpedo room that all 22 torpedoes, including the one with a nuclear warhead, are secure and undamaged.

Another jolt sends the crewman falling into a metal railing, face first.

He's barely got to his feet before the next blast causes the sub to tip violently.

The bombardment continues.

There can be little doubt that the U.S.

Navy has discovered their presence.

The question is, are they trying to sink the sub or force them to the surface?

And more importantly, should they retaliate?

Finally, Savitsky makes a decision.

It's time to ready the torpedoes.

But according to Soviet Navy protocols, in order to launch an attack, the captain must have the support of the two most senior officers.

He turns to the flotilla commander Vasily Arkupov.

But the way he sees it, after days of zero contact with the surface, nobody aboard this vessel has any idea if the USSR and the US are at war.

If they are not, the firing of their own missiles could well be the final straw that breaks the fragile peace between the nations.

Finally, Arkupov shakes his head.

Certain as he is that the U.S.

Navy is dropping small grenade charges to force them to the surface.

If the Americans want to sink us, he says, they would have done so already.

The captain is furious, but Arkhupov holds firm.

Finally, with no end to the bombardment in sight, Savitsky has no choice but to order their ascent.

As for Arkupov, by refusing to ratify his colleague's decision, he has likely just avoided a third world war.

For decades after the Second World War, The two global superpowers were locked in a conflict of ideology that took the planet to the brink of catastrophe.

Known as the Cold War, it was an era of paranoia, fear, and mutual suspicion, where the contest for supremacy spread across the globe in proxy wars that cost millions of lives.

So how did allies who came together to defeat the Nazis become sworn enemies for the next half century?

What was life like for the tens of millions of people living through the animosity?

And how close did we really come to nuclear apocalypse?

I'm John Hopkins from the Noiser Podcast Network.

This is a short history of the Cold War.

In February 1945, the dying months of the Second World War, three aging leaders in heavy coats sit for photographers outside a palace in Yalta, a Crimean city on the Black Sea coast.

With Allied forces advancing towards Berlin from the west and a Soviet army 2.5 million strong moving in from the east, there are few left who believe the Nazis can win this war.

So, Winston Churchill, Franklin D.

Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin have met to discuss what post-war Europe will look like.

But though they smile like like old friends for the cameras, with peace almost in their grasp, the fabric of this so-called grand alliance is beginning to fray.

Fredrik Logoval is a Swedish-American educator at Harvard University and a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author.

There had always been tensions in the relationship.

We sometimes forget that.

But really going all the way back to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, there had been mutual suspicion.

One could even speak of a kind of East-West conflict already then.

There are, in fact, some Cold War historians who want to say that the conflict really started in 1917.

But I think what also happens is that there is a post-war vacuum after the end of the Second World War.

And the geopolitical nature abhors a vacuum.

And so the two largest powers remaining after the end of the war, that is to say the United States, by far now the most powerful player in the international system, and the Soviet Union rush to fill that vacuum.

With fascism on its knees, Churchill is already concerned about communism.

Believing the ideology to be the next great threat to Europe, he is determined to curtail Stalin's influence on the continent.

Meanwhile, Roosevelt, who is by now seriously ill, is in no mood to take on the Soviet leader.

While the conflict in Europe is nearly over, the war in the Pacific continues.

The Japanese refuse to accept defeat, and Roosevelt's generals believe victory could be another two years away.

Little wonder then that Roosevelt's priority at Yalta is to secure Stalin's pledge to join his effort against Japan once Germany is defeated.

For his part, Stalin remains deeply wary of his supposed allies.

After all, it's only been a few years since his non-aggression pact with Germany ended unceremoniously with Hitler invading the Soviet Union in the devastating Operation Barbarossa.

Determined never to be caught off guard again, Stalin insists on creating a protective buffer of friendly states between the USSR and the West, though Churchill fears this will lead to Soviet influence dominating the region.

At Yelta, this leads to an agreement that countries freed from Nazi rule, above all Poland, should hold free and fair elections.

In return for his pledge to join the war against Japan, Stalin secures Western recognition of Soviet interests in Eastern Europe.

But despite agreement on these key issues, the fate of post-war Germany is more complex.

In a short-term compromise, the leaders pledge to divide the country and its capital, Berlin, into zones of occupation between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, and return to the issue once the Nazis are defeated.

By July, the European war is finally over, though Roosevelt doesn't live to see the victory.

His replacement, Harry Truman, now meets Churchill, and later his successor, Attlee, and Stalin at Potsdam, outside Berlin, to iron out the governance of post-war Germany.

But where Jalta had offered at least a façade of unity, Potsdam is markedly colder.

With the pro-Soviet regime already installed in Poland and communist influence tightening in Romania and Bulgaria, it is becoming clear that Stalin has little intention of honoring his pledge of free elections in Eastern Europe.

Churchill's suspicions are being realized.

The Soviet leader is intent on building a protective buffer zone of communist-dominated governments along his western frontier.

But the Potsdam Conference is about Germany.

It's now agreed that the country will be divided into four sectors to be controlled by Britain, the US, Russia, and France.

And Berlin, sitting deep in what will become the Russian zone, will also be divided into four sectors.

The stage is set for an uneasy peace between East and West, with the German capital at the very heart of that tension.

Now, Truman can focus on finishing up the war in the Pacific.

In August, atomic bombs are dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing over 100,000 people, overwhelmingly civilians, and demonstrating to the world the terrifying power of this new weapon.

Just days later, with the Soviet Union also declaring war, Japan finally surrenders and the Second World War comes to an end.

Later that year, the British writer George Orwell publishes an essay entitled, You and the Atomic Bomb.

In it, he imagines a world in which rival superpowers, armed with nuclear weapons too terrible to use, will impose what he calls a peace that is no peace.

He even speaks of a Cold War, using a phrase that quickly comes to capture the tense new reality of the post-war world.

And what Orwell foresees is already beginning to unfold.

While the late President Roosevelt thought it possible for the U.S.

and the USSR to coexist, his successor, Harry Truman, has no such illusions.

Since the close of hostilities, the Soviet Union and its agents have destroyed the independence and democratic character of a whole series of nations in Eastern and Central Europe.

It is this ruthless course of action and the clear design to extend it to the remaining free nations of Europe that have brought about the critical situation in Europe today.

In March 1947, with Europe still in ruins, Harry Truman sets out his answer to the Soviet threat.

In what will become known as the Truman Doctrine, he pledges American military and economic support to nations under pressure, beginning with Greece and Turkey.

Truman is determined that they learn the lessons from the 1990 Treaty of Versailles.

which left Germany so broken that it sowed the seeds of fascism.

His great worry is that leaving impoverished European nations to fend for themselves could deliver the entire continent to communism.

Just three months after the launch of his doctrine, Truman Secretary of State George Marshall goes even further.

He unveils a vast multi-billion dollar recovery program to help Europe rebuild and modernize.

On paper, The Marshall Plan offer is open to every European country, even the Soviet Union itself.

But Stalin dismisses it as dollar imperialism and orders his satellite states to turn it down.

He offers nothing in return.

The divide is stark.

While Western Europe, fueled by American money, begins to recover, Eastern Europe, cut off from investment, sinks deeper into stagnation.

The line between East and West is starting to harden.

Meanwhile, deep inside Soviet-controlled East Germany, Berlin itself is divided into four sectors.

Over time, the French, U.S., and British zones begin to operate together, forming what becomes known as West Berlin.

There's no question that Berlin becomes the symbol, the symbol, I would say, of the East-West division.

You know, at Potsdam in 1945, which is really the last of the great wartime conferences among Allied leaders, They came to a sort of final agreement about the division of Germany, and that included Berlin, which of course existed within East Germany.

And it's the setting for a number of these dramatic crises of the Cold War.

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West Berlin now exists in a strange, half-isolated world.

With Stalin tightening his grip on the Soviet zone of Germany, West Berliners are surrounded by Soviet forces on all sides, with all supplies arriving via train, canal and autobahn from over the border in Western Germany 100 miles away.

Movement from one side of the city to the other is tightly controlled by military checkpoints and patrols.

Allied soldiers are permanently stationed in West Berlin, providing some law and order to a city decimated by bombings and suffering from endemic unemployment and poverty.

By now, the Reichsmark, Germany's shattered currency, is almost worthless.

Inflation is rampant, with a week's wages buying little more than a loaf of bread, and cigarettes serve as the only real currency.

The Soviets exploit this instability by flooding their zone with extra notes to keep the Western-backed economy weak.

The black market thrives, and many desperate locals are forced into prostitution to survive.

For the Western Allies, rebuilding under the Marshall Plan also requires a new foundation, a stable currency for West Germany and West Berlin.

In June 1948, they introduced the Deutsche Mark.

To Stalin, this is more than just reform, it is a direct challenge to his control.

He has long sought to force the Allies out of Berlin, or at least make their half of the city dependent on Moscow.

A stronger Western currency now threatens that ambition.

So, he retaliates by hitting them where he knows it will hurt.

In what becomes known as the Berlin blockade, Stalin cuts every road, rail and canal route from West Germany into West Berlin.

At the same time, the electricity supplies from the Soviet sector are shut off.

The city's western half is left with enough food to last for just over a month.

and sufficient coal for only a little longer.

Truman now has a stark decision to make.

Britain and France are at his side, but exhausted by years of war, they cannot act without Washington.

Only the United States has the resources to keep West Berlin alive.

If Truman yields, the city will be lost, and Stalin's dominance cemented.

If he orders tanks to smash through the blockade, it could trigger a new war with the Soviet Union.

But is there a third option?

Truman consults with his generals about the feasibility of keeping the citizens of West Berlin stocked with basic amenities, not via land routes, but using aircraft.

According to their calculations, the city needs 4,000 tons of food, fuel and goods per day.

A monumental challenge.

But these are desperate times.

So, on June the 26th, two days after the blockade begins, the first British and American aircraft fly through the narrow air corridors in Soviet-controlled airspace towards the airfields of the isolated west of the city.

The gamble Truman takes is in his belief that Stalin will not shoot down a military aircraft on a humanitarian mission, knowing that it would be an act of war.

He proves to be right.

At first, the airlift delivers only a fraction of what the city requires.

But as larger aircraft are drafted in and the operation streamlined, it transforms into a vast round-the-clock supply system that becomes West Berlin's lifeline in its hour of need.

It is March 1949.

An American pilot and his two crewmen are nearing the end of their third mission of the day.

flying in from Rhine Main Air Base near Frankfurt, 250 miles to the southwest.

Their C-54 Skymaster is one of hundreds of aircraft forming the lifeline into Berlin.

Held in a stacked formation of planes circling the bombed-out city, the pilot waits for clearance.

Not long ago, he was tasked with bombing the city that now stretches out beneath him, turning its districts into ash and ruins.

Now his job is no longer to destroy these streets, but to keep the people in them alive.

As they bank for descent, the co-pilot slides open his side window.

Small bundles of candy, each tied to a handkerchief parachute, flutter into the air, tiny gifts drifting down to the children waving from the rubble below.

As he settles back into his seat, the co-pilot notices a flicker on the fuel gauge.

He taps it, frowning.

The needle is lower than it should be.

Not critical, but enough to make the landing tense, especially given they only filled up before starting this mission.

He signals with two fingers to the pilot.

Watch the fuel.

As the Tempelhof Tower clears them in, the pilot throttles back, bringing the lumbering Skymaster down onto the short runway with a heavy jolt, and taxis to the nearby cargo hangar.

With no time to lose, German civilians in shabby coats jog across across the tarmac, carefully extinguishing their cigarettes before swarming the cargo bay.

Within minutes, the great doors swing open and crates of food and sacks of coal are sliding into waiting hands.

They have just 30 minutes to empty the 10-ton load before the plane must lift again.

The co-pilot keeps glancing at the fuel gauge.

It's too low to risk the return flight.

He waves down at the mechanics on the ground, jabbing his finger at the wing.

Despite the language barrier, they understand immediately.

Maybe it's a good thing they don't speak each other's language and have to rely on hand gestures.

After all, only a few short years ago these mechanics were working on Luftwaffe planes.

A crew sprints across with tools, clambering up to the fuel line.

For a moment, the pilot wonders if they'll have to stay overnight, stranded in the middle of a besieged city.

But the Germans work fast.

A clamp, a quick patch, a thumbs up.

The pilot returns it, and the engines roar back to life.

Minutes later, the Skymaster is thundering down Tempelhof's runway again, climbing into the grey March sky, bound back for Frankfurt.

Another run completed, another 10 tons delivered.

As they rise, the co-pilot watches children chase more of those little parachutes of candy, drifting down between the wrecked buildings.

Day and night, in snow and rain, a plane touches down in Berlin every three minutes in an unbroken chain of flights that will last for almost a year, keeping two million West Berliners alive.

The blockade continues until May 1949.

By that time, an estimated 8,000 tons of supplies are being airlifted into the city every day, twice what was initially considered the minimum that could keep West Berlin going.

Along the way, West Berlin's defiant citizens have become a symbol of freedom for millions around the globe.

For Stalin, not only has the siege failed, but the propaganda war has been lost too.

On the 12th of May, the Soviets abandoned the blockade and reopened the land routes.

The first great test of this new Cold War is over, over, and it is the West that has won.

A little earlier, the Western powers had already resolved to bind themselves more closely together.

Twelve nations sign the North Atlantic Treaty, creating NATO, a defensive alliance against the threat of Soviet aggression.

For the first time in its history, the United States commits itself to a permanent peacetime alliance in Europe.

Now the Western Allies push ahead with plans for a new democratic West German state.

On the 23rd of May 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany is born.

That August, West Germans go to the polls for the first time since Hitler's rise to power.

The Christian Democrats emerge as the largest party and form a coalition government.

Though unable to take part in the election themselves, West Berliners send non-voting representatives to the new parliament.

It's another reminder that their city remains a special, precarious case, caught on the front line of the Cold War.

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Although Stalin has been outmaneuvered in Berlin, he consolidates his own position by establishing the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany.

with East Berlin as its capital.

Then comes the news that the Soviets have been quietly working on their own nuclear nuclear weapon program.

On the 29th of August 1949, they carry out their first successful nuclear test at Semipalatinsk test site in northeast Kazakhstan.

The test is conducted in absolute secrecy.

It's not until scientists detect radioactive fallout in the North Pacific that America discovers it is no longer the world's only nuclear superpower.

I think that nuclear weapons were absolutely central to the Cold War, and in a sense came to define what the conflict was all about.

Both the United States and the Soviet Union built up over a period of time massive nuclear arsenals, which led to a kind of nuclear policy or a condition, a period of nuclear deterrence, where mutually assured destruction, or in that wonderful acronym, MAD, prevailed.

Basically, this means that any use of nuclear weapons would inevitably lead to a counterattack, and that would result in a devastating destruction for all involved.

That's basically mad in a nutshell.

Orwell's warning of a peace without peace seems prophetic.

But this fragile standoff is no longer confined to Europe.

In October 1949, Ma Zedong proclaims the People's Republic of China.

Stalin has long been wary of Mao and has at times even supported his enemies.

But with communism now triumphant in the world's most populous nation, Stalin cannot ignore the advantage of an alliance with his vast neighbor.

America responds to the rise of communism in the East by recognizing the old adage, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

It offers financial aid and support to its old adversary, Japan.

But as it does so, Japan's former colony of Korea finds itself a pawn in the battle of the superpowers.

At the end of the war, the Allies drew an arbitrary line across the peninsula at the 38th parallel.

Soviet forces took control in the north, with American forces moving into the south.

But by 1950, what was intended as a temporary measure has hardened into a crucial battle line of the Cold War.

Bolstered by Stalin and soon reinforced with support from China in a bid to reunify the country under a communist regime, in June, the North launches an attack on South Korea.

What follows is the first hot war of the Cold War.

Cities are reduced to rubble and millions of Koreans perish alongside tens of thousands of American soldiers.

And yet, When an armistice is finally signed after three years of fighting, the border between the two has barely shifted.

It is the death of Stalin that helps make that ceasefire possible.

When he dies in March 1953, a power struggle follows in Moscow.

Nikita Khrushchev eventually emerges as the new Soviet leader, hinting at reform and speaking of a new policy of peaceful coexistence with the West.

The new U.S.

President, Dwight D.

Eisenhower, senses the shift.

A few weeks after Stalin's death, he gives what becomes known as the Chance for Peace speech.

This is one of those times in the affairs of nations when the gravest choices must be made if there is to be a turning toward a just and lasting peace.

It is a moment that calls upon the governments of the world to speak their intentions with simplicity and with honesty.

It calls upon them to answer the question that stirs the hearts of all sane men:

Is there no other way the world may value?

The optimism, however, doesn't last.

A few years earlier, Truman created the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA, tasked with gathering foreign intelligence and executing covert operations.

In 1954, Khrushchev responds by overseeing the establishment of the KGB.

the USSR's own security and espionage service.

These rival agencies soon come to symbolize the shadow war of the era.

By running spies and double agents, orchestrating surveillance and dirty tricks, and meddling in government affairs across the globe, they feed the paranoia and distrust between the superpowers.

The confrontation hardens still further in 1955.

When West Germany is admitted into NATO, to Stalin's successes in Moscow, the prospect of German troops once again stationed on their frontier is intolerable.

Khrushchev retaliates by creating the Warsaw Pact, which is a mutual defense alliance binding the Soviet bloc together.

Europe now stands divided between two heavily armed camps.

Any remaining hope that Khrushchev will be a force for liberal change is extinguished by 1956.

In Budapest, students and workers take to the streets to demand democracy and radical reform.

But Khrushchev isn't interested in a compromise.

Soon, his tanks roll into the city, crushing the uprising, leaving thousands dead or wounded.

And while Soviet power is enforced on the ground, another frontier is opening in the skies.

In May 1960, An American U-2 spy plane is shot down deep inside Soviet territory.

Its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, is captured alive.

President Eisenhower is eventually forced to admit that the U.S.

has been flying covert surveillance missions over Soviet soil.

Just months later, the Soviets score another victory when their Sputnik 1 becomes the world's first artificial satellite.

And the humiliation deepens even further for America when in April 1961, the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human in space.

President John F.

Kennedy now vows to land a man on the moon and bring him home safely before the decade is out.

I think the space race becomes centrally connected to the Cold War really in the 1950s.

And it kind of makes sense when you think about it, if the competition between the superpowers is so intense for really you know, the entire globe, all four corners of the world, as they say, really becomes the setting for potentially at least conflict.

It kind of makes sense that next the two superpowers would say, well, what about beyond this globe on which we all live?

But back on Earth, another blow to America's sense of superiority and security began at the start of 1959 when a guerrilla fighter named Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba.

He declared his nation, just 90 miles from Florida, a socialist state and aligned his new government with the Soviet Union.

In 1961, Kennedy authorizes backing for a unit of renegade Cuban exiles to secretly invade at the island's Bay of Pigs, oust Castro and retake their country.

However, Castro is well prepared.

and after three days of heavy fighting, the rebels are comprehensively defeated.

But from there, the stakes rise exponentially.

Khrushchev, who believes Kennedy is too young and inexperienced to be taken seriously, makes a secret deal to provide Castro with ballistic missiles.

On the 14th of October 1962, an American U-2 reconnaissance spy plane photographs missile launch sites being built in Cuba.

For Kennedy, the risk of his neighbor preparing missiles so close by is unconscionable.

So he orders the U.S.

Navy to prevent Russian vessels from entering Cuban ports.

Both sides refuse to back down, and for 13 days, the world holds its breath.

Some historians have said, maybe tongue-in-cheek, that the nuclear weapon deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, because, according to this view, the existence of these weapons kept the Cold War from becoming hot.

It is Khrushchev who blinks first.

A deal is reached in which the USSR will remove their missile sites and missiles from Cuba, if America agrees not to invade the island.

In secret, the US also agrees to remove its nuclear missiles from the Turkish border, where they threaten the Soviet Union.

A global catastrophe has been diverted, but only just.

I would say that there's no question in my mind that the Cuban Missile Crisis of late 1962 was the most tense moment we've had in international affairs, arguably ever.

You can make an argument in the whole history of humankind.

This was the moment of greatest tension, the greatest potential catastrophe.

And if you're not going to go that far, you would certainly say in the post-World War II era, I would say that the Missile Crisis has that status.

I was not yet in this world, but my parents tell me, and this is in Sweden, that Swedes, certainly my parents, but also their friends and others, were incredibly nervous, not knowing if they would wake up the next morning.

Though there is another dawn after the de-escalation of the Cuban missile crisis, a new emergency is brewing on the European front.

While the Marshall Plan has helped West Berliners rebuild their portion of the German capital, much of the eastern half is still in ruins.

Every day, 60,000 East Berliners commute over the divide to work for their rich neighbors.

What is more worrying for East Germany is that by the early 1960s, almost 3 million of its citizens have crossed into the West for good, including many of its educated professionals.

Perhaps half of these are under the age of 25, leaving in search of better prospects.

This alarming drain of manpower and economic potential adds up to an embarrassment that Khrushchev will no longer tolerate.

So it is that in the early early hours of the 13th of August 1961, without any warning, the streetlights are switched off across East Berlin.

Tens of thousands of soldiers move into position.

They unload cement posts and over 150 tons of barbed wire from their vehicles and set to work erecting a boundary.

Train stations above and below ground are boarded up.

And by 6 a.m., nearly 200 streets have been closed off.

Berliners on both sides of the border wake up to the shocking new sight of a barbed wire fence splitting their city in half.

Next-door neighbors find themselves on opposite sides, unable to visit each other, while some homes have front doors in the Soviet sector and back doors and windows open to the west.

Soon the division is reinforced.

The fence becomes a concrete wall.

complete with watchtowers, anti-vehicle trenches, and patrols operating a shoot-to-kill policy.

In In just a few months, it becomes near impossible for Berliners to travel or visit their neighbors, friends and family on the other side of the boundary.

The wall makes the division of Europe brutally visible.

But the rivalry between East and West is now being played out across the globe.

Wherever communism threatens to spread, America and its allies are drawn in.

In far-off Vietnam, the USSR has been providing support for the North Vietnamese communists in their efforts to seize control of South Vietnam.

For more than a decade, America has responded by sending military trainers and advisors to the South Vietnamese.

Though Kennedy increases non-combat personnel in the territory to 17,000, after his assassination in 1963, his successor, Lyndon B.

Johnson, is given a reason to escalate further.

In August 1964, the destroyer USS Maddox reports coming under attack in the Gulf of Tonkin.

What began as an advisory mission now turns into full-scale U.S.

military involvement.

Combat soldiers are deployed in ever-growing numbers, drawn into a bloody war that will ultimately prove unwinnable.

As the conflict drags on, it becomes deeply unpopular at home.

Many Americans are soon asking why their sons are sent to die in jungles 10,000 miles away in a war that seems to have no end.

I think we should think of the Cold War as a zero-sum game, meaning that a gain for one side is automatically a corresponding loss for the other.

And I think it's in this way, in terms of the zero-sum game nature of this conflict, that you can see how the whole world becomes potentially a setting for the competition.

So all of a sudden, areas that again before might have been seen as peripheral, not that important, are going to matter a lot.

And outstanding examples, I would say, in terms of the American position would be first Korea and then even more so, Vietnam.

It takes the arrival of Richard Nixon in the White House in 1969 to end America's involvement in Vietnam.

Without U.S.

support, the South falls, and Viet Cong forces take the capital, Saigon, in 1975.

During his his presidency, Nixon sets about de-escalating the arms race with the Soviet Union.

By opening dialogue and negotiating arms control, he helps usher in a short period of detente.

And those in the West have other things to be thankful for.

With living standards rising for most since the end of the Second World War, they have better housing, better healthcare, higher wages, superior access to education.

Even their cars are bigger and faster.

There is an explosion in mass consumerism and pop culture, as well as more time for travel, entertainment, and adventure.

Meanwhile, their counterparts in the Soviet bloc countries have had to put up with everything from stagnating economies to food shortages and systematic corruption.

I think many Eastern Europeans came to understand, maybe through word of mouth, maybe if they were among the lucky few who had gotten a chance to travel to the West, even briefly.

I think they came to understand that next to the well-stocked shelves of stores, of shops in Western Europe, their own shops, often barren and often with just a few items on those shelves, that contrast I think was both distinct and I think really aggravating.

But as the 80s begin, the days of detente seem to be over.

Just as Cold War paranoia led the U.S.

into a futile war in Vietnam, the Soviets make a similar mistake in Afghanistan.

When the Soviet-backed Afghan government comes under threat from the anti-communist Mujahideen, Moscow takes the decision to invade.

In response, Jimmy Carter's U.S.

government covertly supports the rebels with weapons and aid.

Under Ronald Reagan, that support expands into hundreds of millions of dollars.

including the delivery of Stinger missiles that hand the guerrillas control of the skies.

Faced with an endless conflict draining his resources and credibility, in the mid-1980s, the Kremlin's new leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, is looking for a way out.

And it's not his only concern.

Gorbachev has inherited a Soviet Union that is stagnant, corrupt, and increasingly unable to compete with the United States.

There were deep structural problems in the Soviet Union.

I think the CIA, it's really interesting to go back and look at CIA analysis.

analyses of the Soviet Union.

And from an early point, the agency is basically saying that the Soviets are going to have real difficulty sustaining this thing.

And yet, the vast majority of Sovietologists, that is to say, specialists in American academia and also in American government circles, specialists on the Soviet Union, the vast majority of them thought that the Soviets will plod along for a long time, maybe for decades longer.

Gorbachev begins a withdrawal from Afghanistan, as well as a raft of radical shifts in policy.

It begins with what he calls perestroika, a strategy of political restructuring intended to modernize and reinvigorate the economy.

In an unprecedented break from the communist orthodoxy that has run through the veins of the Soviet machine since its inception in 1917, he introduces market reforms and multi-candidate elections.

But perestroika seems only to increase instability, with prices rising and shortages worsening.

Undeterred, Gorbachev moves on to a new project of openness, or glasnost, allowing greater free speech, reducing press censorship, and confronting corruption.

I think he was not trying to eradicate the Soviet system.

He wanted to save it through reforms, and he proved unsuccessful.

Despite Gorbachev's efforts, the creeping decrepitude of the Soviet Union becomes everyone's problem with the Chernopolis disaster of 1986.

A botched test of a poorly designed reactor leads to a catastrophic explosion at the Ukrainian plant.

Dozens die within weeks, and thousands suffer over the longer term.

But though the cleanup will eventually cost many billions of pounds, and the exclusion zone will stretch to thousands of square miles, the Soviet response is slow, inadequate, and secretive.

When the fallout is detected way beyond Soviet borders, the international community has had enough.

Sensing the moment, Ronald Reagan visits West Berlin in June 1987.

Standing at the Brandenburg Gate in front of a crowd of thousands, he delivers a provocative challenge to his Soviet counterpart.

General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace,

If you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek seek liberalization, come here to this gate.

Mr.

Gorbachev, open this gate.

Mr.

Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

1989 becomes the year of change.

Whether Gorbachev intends it or not, his policies start a ball rolling that leads to real political change.

For example, in Poland, where freer elections force the communists to share power.

By November, despite plenty of hard liners within the party, the pressure to do as Reagan demanded and reunify Berlin becomes impossible to ignore.

Eventually, a decision is made to allow a gradual relaxation of travel restrictions between the sectors.

But when it comes to announcing that to the wider world, things don't go quite to plan.

It is November the 9th, 1989.

In an apartment in an anonymous block in East Berlin, a woman is watching a news bulletin from the West German public service station.

It's a press conference of East German politicians.

A journalist stands to ask a question of a cabinet member.

When, he wants to know, do these new rules about East Germans being allowed to freely travel to West Berlin and West Germany come into place.

The woman calls her husband in, and they both watch on, glued to the screen.

The politician glances down at the piece of paper in his hand, looks up, and says the changes are to take place with immediate effect.

The couple turn to each other, stunned.

Then, without speaking, The woman rushes to the hallway, pulls on her coat and hat, and opens the door.

Her husband catches up with her on the street.

Walking so fast they're almost running, they head to the Bornholmerstrasse border crossing.

When they reach the checkpoint, there's already an excited crowd of hundreds gathered.

Last time the woman was here, a few months ago, it was her cousin's wedding day.

They'd come at a prearranged time to catch a glimpse of the newlyweds and blow kisses across the barriers.

Now she grabs her husband's arm and pulls him into the crowd, weaving a path through the mass of bodies.

People at the front are arguing with the guards who stand in great coats, rifles across their chests.

It's clear these soldiers are just as confused about what is happening as the civilians.

Emboldened by their swelling numbers, the crowd starts shouting, waving passports, demanding that the gate is lifted.

The tension couldn't be higher.

All it would take is for one of those guards to panic, cock his rifle, and fire into the crowd.

But now, a senior officer comes out of the sentry box and motions to a few citizens holding passports to come around the barrier.

After stamping their documents, they are allowed to progress onto the Bosebrücker Bridge towards West Berlin.

Their hopes raised, The growing throng becomes even more animated.

Time passes.

And then, the impossible happens.

The guards step to one side and the gates open.

The ecstatic crowd surges forward, pouring past what had only moments ago seemed an impenetrable barrier.

The couple are carried onto the bridge where on the other side the West German guards have already lifted their gates.

Behind the soldiers is a mass of West Germans cheering, clapping, crying,

them on.

As she passes through the deep ravine between the two walls, the woman takes in the trenches, spikes, barbed wire, and searchlights that have kept her from half of her family all these years.

Then she cheers with the rest of them and continues her journey.

A journey that, if she had attempted it a few hours earlier, would have almost certainly cost her her life.

Not everyone in Germany is celebrating this monumental event.

A hundred miles away, in the cramped KGB offices in Dresden, a minor KGB official by the name of Vladimir Putin silently watches the scenes from Berlin on a small black and white TV set.

In the years to come, he will describe this as the worst day of his life.

I think for a great many people, it was a cause of celebration.

I think for others, including, by the way, officials in the West, officials in Washington, it was a cause for maybe to some degree celebration, but also a source of concern because the wall had been a source of stability, had provided a certain constancy, if I can use that word, to this competition.

And so I think there were officials in the West, including in Washington, who wondered what was going to be happening next.

What does happen next is a summit between Gorbachev and President George H.W.

Bush in Malta a month later.

The discussions go well, crowned by a joint press conference before the world's media.

Gorbachev talks about a future in which NATO and the Warsaw Pact are no longer military alliances, but merely political ones.

It's a seismic moment, the point at which, to many observers, the Cold War ends.

In 1990, the two Germanies are reunited.

And across Eastern Europe, regimes fall like dominoes.

With Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and others celebrating the fall of their communist governments.

It's indeed striking the degree to which the Soviet system, the Eastern Bloc, collapsed.

And one is reminded, I think it might have been Ernest Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises, when a character is asked how he went bankrupt.

And the character says, gradually and then suddenly.

And I think we could speak of the Soviet system in the same way.

On December the 26th, 1991, the Supreme Soviet, the highest governing body of the Union, meets for the last time.

It votes itself out of existence, formally recognizing the end of the USSR.

The red Soviet flag.

has been lowered for the final time.

For For more than four decades, the Cold War saw paranoia and distrust consume the planet's leading powers.

It upended governments, decimated nations, and led to millions of deaths in proxy wars.

For many people across the globe, it was a period of real and constant fear that the planet was on the brink of destroying itself.

Now, 30 years have passed since the sun finally set on the project set in motion by the revolutionaries of 1917.

But hindsight leads some to wonder if, despite its moments of terrifying brinkmanship, in some ways the Cold War did impose a perverse sense of order on global affairs.

The question of how to think about the Cold War now, given the era that we now live in, is a really interesting one, and I think an important one.

You know, the end of the Cold War saw the demise of a system.

a bipolar world order, which had been dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union.

We've seen a rise in national populism over the last decade or two with hugely important implications.

One result of all of this, I suppose, is that we might begin to look back somewhat wistfully at the Cold War.

That it was now, it seems, a kind of stable period.

I would also offer, I guess, a word of caution.

We should remember that there were close calls, there were tense moments.

In the proxy wars, there was tremendous bloodshed.

and so i guess i wouldn't want us to get too carried away with nostalgia for that moment

next time on short history of we'll bring you a short history of the great smog of london

the particle testers that would test the amount of pollution in the air at the time.

And I read the report

and what it kept saying over and over again after the smog was nil, nil, nil, nil.

And I thought, what does that mean?

And what it actually meant was the pollution was so high that it was unreadable by these little machines.

I think about London and I think about why there aren't memorials.

It's just been brushed under the rug.

That's next time.

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