Ponto de Virada: A Bomba e a Guerra Fria

I lived this Cold War as a child in the US who learned to duck and cover, and now living as an adult in east Berlin, and as father to a Berlin child whose mother is from the DDR. I have heard the family stories directly, from Oma explaining propaganda in WW2 through the resistance against the STASI by my family and friends here in Germany.

This is a documentary masterpiece of complicated truth and history.

Every American and European must watch this series and as one who knows Ukrainians, I am a better person to now understand this complicated would view leading up to this very misguided and unjust war in Ukraine.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905.

I nearly wrote my review at the halfway point, before deciding to see it through and ensure I was balanced. Unfortunately that didn't improve my impression of the series. There is a lot of great footage and history covered off - some fantastic insights and great scientific information too. But unfortunately they opted to inject some old fashioned propaganda into the final couple of episodes, after foreshadowing this in the earlier ones.

In short, what was predominantly a "nuclear paranoia drove the world wild with fear and led to idiotic levels of armaments at the expense of cultural, scientific, and social advancement" (on both sides to varying degrees - Soviet citizens suffering considerably more) has an underlying message of "orange man bad, Putin bad, Zelensky good, Government narrative on war is true, etc" There's no question that the aforementioned personalities are fraught with issues - but having covered the propaganda, subterfuge, and shadowy behaviour from the cold war, it is hard not to question the way they glossed over how widespread certain actions from the 50's through the 70s were, along with the way they tried to paint current situation.

I'm sure the military industrial complex overlords loved the "war is for peace" message that it felt like it ended on.

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.

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.

I'm old enough to remember when all documentaries were made this well . The chronological facts are masterfully done , even when it leaps back and forward through time . In fact it has to on several occasions to make a very salient point . What surprised me , was the factual gaps in my own personal recollections going back to , as early as , the Sixties . Every day is a school day , as they say. We see the folly of armed conflict and its lasting repercussions , we see people in power who should be nowhere near , man's inhumanity to man but, most importantly, why we never seem to learn from our mistakes and repeat them again and again . I was left with the over arching conclusion , that there are no "good guys" or "bad guys", we're all as bad as each other.