Turning Point: L'arme nucléaire et la guerre froide

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.

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.

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.

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. 😫