Turning Point: L'arme nucléaire et la guerre froide

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.

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.

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.

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 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. 😫