Secrets & Spies: A Nuclear Game

This is on MAX/HBO in the US without any ads. Modestly sitting there, but what dynamite. Maybe the most superb documentary ever on how the tension built and built, late in the Cold War, and how the spying actually helped to keep it in check.

From post WWII Cold War leaders had a choice: it was either nuclear equilibrium, or first strike. Induced paranoia was one of the weapons of war on both sides (we still pay for that) and bomb shelters were dug under many a house.

In the early sixties, Kennedy placed McNamara in the Pentagon and deterrence was gamed out. Dr Strangelove came out in 1964 suggesting it was not fail-safe. Kissinger was at Nixon's elbow just several years after that. SALT talks began in 1969. Thatcher arrived in 1975, about the time neutron bombs were deployed (small bang, vast radiation - mass killers, seen by some as feasible battlefield weapons).

Finally, Reagan and Gorbachev (and Thatcher) in the 80s are clued up enough to ratchet it all back, with the help of a growing economic divide. For a while, Russia was chummy to NATO and the European Union, but was pushed back out into the cold and Putin was the result.

High praise to all the well-chosen BBCs ringsider explainers and actors, their images mostly show on this IMDB page; they were extremely good, and I will not forget them in a while.

So, were the spies a plus? My vote is yes, unconditionally, even if rogue spies on both sides did great harm - there was almost certainly one never nailed at the top of the UK's MI5. And those numerous film snippets from those days.... tanks pouring into Red Square! Dramatic times. One can miss them now and then.

The defection of Oleg Gordievski, former KGB agent, to the United Kingdom was a big story in the 1980s. This series puts this event in the wider context of East-West relations, as well as telling the fairly remarkable story of his final escape from the Soviet Union. As usual in this sort of series, there are a range of talking heads to guide us through the story, most of whom were actively involved in it; as such, they can tell it like it is, although there's a lack of variety in their perspectives as a result: this is not a programme that is heavily critical of the intelligence services. Unusually for me, I am willing to give some credit to Thatcher and Reagan, who departed from their normal bellicosity when they saw, with the advent of Mikael Gorbachev, the potential for diplomatic rapproachment and did not allow it to be derailled by the espionage drama. Whether the spies really served our interests is another question.

The supposed "experts" who were interviewed spoke so informally and injected so much hyperbole and conjecture that so much of what they said was dubious. This could've been fixed in script or editing (but it wasn't). I found myself exclaiming aloud incredulously innumerable times and, frankly, this was a difficult series to finish watching. The reenactments are the only redeeming part of this series-most everything else (aka the facts) were presented so informally and almost anecdotally, which is not how you want to present a documentary series about history. Just when I thought it couldn't get worse, it did. Oh, and if you're going to make your narrator a diversity hire, do make sure they can pronounce words that are germane to the subject matter, like "politburo."