Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War

This new docuseries on Netflix might be the most important show you're not watching. We just finished last night and it's well worth your time; I loved it and learned a lot without much pain at all. It's a good compliment to "Oppenheimer" and the Einstein docuseries I previously posted about.

A gripping documentary with amazing archival footage, this gives a great macro-level presentation of how we ended up with a Russian invasion of a sovereign Ukraine. The documentary lays out a long cycle of events that began with the atomic bombings in Japan in 1945 and how the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the USSR in 1991 signaled a false end to the Cold War, which has led to Putin's attempt to rebuild the Russian Empire in the 21st century.

If you're any kind of history buff like I am, turn on this show. It really helped connect the dots, fill in many missing pieces, and frankly, made the current nightmare we're all currently living in more understandable, though no less tolerable. 😫

It's been a long emotional roller-coaster to watch all the 9 episodes of this captivating show. So instructive, even when you think you know it all already.

What strikes me the most is how some insanely small ego-related problems, personal feuds, even misunderstandings, have had such tremendous repercussions on the history of the world as we know it, the infinitesimal stories that made History.

And how many times did we unknowingly come so close to the precipice? Makes you dizzy just thinking about it.

Also, looking back on what happened since WWII, I'm flabbergasted by how everything we live today has its roots in what we refer to as long past.

The show does an incredible job at pinpointing how one thing literally led to another, in a never-ending chain reaction. Watching this is definitely time well spent.

It gives you a wide view of history narrowing down to the modern day as to why things are the way they are, and how by learning from this we can we prevent catastrophes from happening in the future.

It's really important to watch it for us, as humanity, to understand our need for the ability to choose and speak freely, and how suppressing that freedom leads to dehumanization, excess patriotism, and personal selfish ambition.

If you do disagree with something while watching it that's respectable, but in the end the best perspective the documentary can teach you is the understanding that in the end peace and freedom of choice is what humanity wants and needs.

Really recommend it, and I usually don't review movies, but I can't stress it enough - watch it to the end. Because it helps you to form an educated opinion about the present day. And most importantly, how we can truly influence the future.

This documentary covers pretty much all the major events that resulted in and from the Develpment of the Fission or Termonuclear bombs. With high quality footage, 1st person interviews with protagonists, or relatives who were 'there' when an event took place, some were even a key piece on it (journalists/activists) either on divided Germany, the Comunist Hunt in the US, the Cuba Missile crysis, the Bombing of Hiroshima/Nagazaki, Staline rise/rule to power, The Manhattan Project, the race to find how to split the atom and create a chain reaction during WWII. This doc series has it all, 9 hours of exquisite throughput of 80+ years of history and how close we were to face extinction with the press of a few buttons. A much see for both afficionados and everyone really, who seeks to understand the world we live in.

My overall rating is subjective and not that important. I'm writing this review because of one very subtle moment I noticed at Ep4 42:00.

The CIA officer Brian Latell says Fidel Castro wrote to Khrushchev: "You must strike preemtively with all of your nuclear forces against american targets. You must not wait for the Americans to fire." Yet he conveniently omits the true context of the letter (that in fact did urge the soviets to strike) but only IF the americans invade Cuba first.

This might not seem like a big deal and the interviewers opinion is not necessarily the one of the series.

But such subtle details (and there might very well be quite a lot more) completely shape what kind of worldview the viewer takes away. Just wanted to tell everybody to be careful with the statements and the possible lens through which the story is told.