Turning Point, The Cold War and the Bomb. Episode 3- Institutional Insanity
This begins with Volodymyr Zelensky in 2022 and Russian attacks on Ukraine, and Ukraine’s strong resistance. Author Garret Graff calls this first successful resistance “probably the turning point of the entire war.” So – it became a full scale war.
Now back to the 1950s. In the early years of the cold war, the USA treated nuclear war as something that could be survived. Public education programs. The message was that the Soviet Union was an existential threat, but that you could survive, with school training, with fallout shelter
Fear of communism led to developing bigger bombs against the communists.
The movement to the hydrogen bomb, the thermonuclear device. Scary film of testing this on Elugelab Island in 1952, horrifying many, including Robert Oppenheimer. Albert Einstein wrote “General annihilation beckons“. Eisenhower shocked and shaken – “the power to erase human life from this planet“. The Soviets feel that they must equal this – their first hydrogen bomb test August 1953. So the USA responds in 1954 with the super-large Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb test on Bikini Atoll – making a 4-mile wide fireball. The island populations were affected by the radiation – horrifying personal stories. A Japanese ship affected by the “death ash“. The fisherman’s dying message – “let me be the last person killed by this awful weapon”.
A series of nuclear tests in the USA and across the world. Daniel Ellsberg recalls how he worked with the very clever test designers – “It turns out that intelligence is not a very good guarantee of wisdom“. The movie Dr Strangelove has words directly taken from them, and Ellsberg describes that film as a documentary. “Everything in that film could have happened“. People other than the President could launch an attack. Ellsberg saw the war plans – “they were strange and horrible“. The plan was to hit every city in Russia and China with thermonuclear weapons- with 600 million deaths – one fifth of the world population then. The Soviets then followed with a similar policy. It opened up the world as the playground of the two powers.
Covert operations all around the world. The CIA was created in 1947 modelled on Britain’s MI6. The Soviets had the KGB, very repressive under Stalin. In the USA intelligence and operational planning, and action, were combined in the CIA. By 1949 the CIA were doing paramilitary operations against the nations of Central Europe that were Soviet satellites. They started with Ukraine, training Ukrainian exiles (graphic film here), creating and funding “Ukrainian resistance cells” from 1949 – 1953 . These were suicide missions, because the British counter-spy Kim Philby was informing the Soviets. Subsequent operations to Poland, Romania – were also disasters.
From 1953, U.S. foreign policy , as run by the Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles, brothers, saw communism behind every nationalist movement, happy to spread American democracy via any government, however vicious brutal and corrupt. The Dulles brothers also were dedicated to furthering the interests of multinational corporations, which meant controlling the countries that supplied resources.
They started with Iran and Guatemala, overthrowing the elected governments. The CIA used money and propaganda, controlling the Iranian media, flooding it with “fake news”, and created “communist thuggery”. They succeeded in reinstalling the Shah. Western oil companies now ran the oil business. Guatemala followed the same pattern, a highly repressive regime was set up.
The cold war was a battle for minds and hearts. The CIA from the late 40s to the early 60s had hundreds of “influence operations”, co-opting overseas and some American media.
The Soviet Union’s KGB used “Active measures” – set up to use disinformation, planting major stories in overseas news media to cause disruption and confusion, forging documents slipped to journalists. These were often accepted especially in developing countries as genuine proof of American conspiracies. In the Soviet Union, Stalin had complete control of the media.
Stalin’s death in 1953. Nikita Kruschev ushered in a new period – the Thaw. His story here told by his great-granddaughter. Kruschev released many innocent victims of Stalin’s gulags, revealed Stalin’s crimes, set the Soviet Union on a different course, opened up the possibility of liberal reform, lessened censorship. But Kruschev also believed that the Soviet Union must show its strength to the USA, boasted of its military strength, with a disinformation campaign to scare Americans about a 100 megaton bomb, and the number and reach of its missiles.
USA’s military thinking moved to plans to evacuate high-ranking officials, expecting that in a coming nuclear war most of America will die, but the government will survive in a mountain bunker.
Daniel Ellsberg reported on the secret doomsday machines, in the Pentagon Papers, and copied all his nuclear reports, published “Confessions of a nuclear war planner”. Now in 2022 we see him urging for cutting the defense budget, getting rid of ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) – to avoid armageddon.
The episode ends with the warning of how suddenly a crisis can arise, with the greatest danger to the world, as happened in 1962 – when the Russians placed intermediate range nuclear missiles on the island of Cuba.