In the early days of the Cold War, American children were taught to take shelter under their desks in the event of a nuclear attack. In reality, the desk only protected against the collapsing roof of the school, and then only if the school was far enough away from the epicenter of the explosion not to be instantly obliterated. The desk, of course, did not protect against the subsequent radiation either, but none of that seemed important in the 1950s, a time when the atomic danger was still viewed with a certain candor.
This image, apocalyptic in its innocence, can be seen in the documentary series Decisive moments: the bomb and the Cold Wardirected by Brian Knappenberger. A conspiracy theorist would think that the hidden powers at Netflix want to prepare us for the worst, because it is a very timely product at a time when Russian President Vladimir Putin likes to boast about his nuclear arsenal at every opportunity and the German army is preparing for war and even considering resuming military service. Times when different top European leaders, such as Donald Tusk or Emmanuel Macron, are resuming warlike rhetoric, encouraging the rearmament of Europe and want to convey to the population in all its crudeness what they consider to be a reality: that war on the Old Continent is once again a possibility. Although another reality is hidden from them: that a possible nuclear war is not won by anyone, but is lost by all of humanity, probably paying the price with its disappearance. The great beneficiary is the arms industry. It is a new Cold War.
Decisive moments It is full of horror, that is, full of the history of the 20th century. But it is worth watching it to remember that there was a time when the continuity of the human species was at stake and that, in fact, despite the thaw after the fall of the Soviet Union, it is still at stake, because an absurd number of nuclear weapons (thousands and thousands) remain in the hands of the great powers, mainly Russia and the US, despite the various attempts at disarmament. It is worth watching it to realise that sitting on the couch quietly watching a series on Netflix is not something we should take for granted in a future where a nuclear conflict is still possible.
War games
One of the most disturbing chapters, the one titled War gamestalks about the moments of the Cold War when Armageddon came closest. The best known is, of course, the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. But there are others just as chilling. For example, in 1980, an advisor to President Carter received a call in the middle of the night: he was warned that 200 Soviet missiles were heading for the US. The advisor asked for confirmation. He was called back, it was a mistake: it was not 200 but 2,000. The advisor preferred not to wake his wife, because Washington would evaporate in a matter of minutes. Why make her suffer? When he was about to call Carter, he received a third call. It turned out that it was all a false alarm: a chip had broken. If Carter had been warned and had decided to answer, a real apocalypse would have begun.
One problem with arming yourself to the teeth is that one mistake can bring about the End of the World, and there have been several occasions where we were on the brink. “If we have survived, it is because we have been very lucky,” says an expert in the series. Another case that is recounted takes place in the USSR, in 1983, a year considered the most dangerous of the Cold War after the Cuban conflict.
So, Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet air force, was at the OKO nuclear early warning centre when the system reported that the US had launched a missile, and then five more. Without being 100% certain, in fact, only 50% certain, as Petrov himself explains in the series, he preferred to think that it was a system error: he told his superiors that the alarm was false and thus avoided the start of a nuclear war. He was right. Thanks to this commitment to the survival of humanity, Petrov, who was also an engineer (perhaps that is where his intuition came from), has received numerous tributes and awards. The man who saved the world. His career, however, went down the drain, because his decision, which exposed his defence systems, did not please his superiors.
From Los Alamos to Berlin
The series, in nine chapters, takes a broad tour from the invention of the bomb in the Manhattan Project (now so popularized by the film Oppenheimer) leading to the typical tensions of the Cold War: the oppressive influence of the USSR in the eastern countries and the interference of the American CIA, through coups d’état, to impose dictatorships where it suited them, especially in Latin America. The wars between the great powers through proxy countries, as in Vietnam, Korea or Afghanistan. Finally, the fall of the Soviet Union, the expansion of NATO to the east or the arrival of Putin, whose biography is extensively analyzed. As with the war in Ukraine, which is the starting point of each chapter: the most sensitive point, for the authors, of this new Cold War, the one that could trigger a new war in Europe or a fateful nuclear conflict.
The background could be technological determinism, the philosophical idea that technology determines society and, moreover, that technology already evolves autonomously, without human control, because when an advance is possible somewhere it will be carried out. This is the case of nuclear technology: as soon as Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn discovered nuclear fission, it seems that technology took on a life of its own, even against human interests. The Americans developed the bomb to get ahead of the Nazis (who soon abandoned the project), the Soviets did so, through spies, so as not to be left behind, and so the nuclear escalation continued. World leaders were deeply horrified by nuclear weapons, but their development seemed inevitable, indifferent to human will, and that development conditioned world politics for decades, and still does.
The most important question that the series raises is whether a generation that has not lived through the horror of the world wars and the Cold War is sufficiently aware, in a (relatively) comfortable society of consumption, information and (shrinking) well-being, to avoid the final disaster. Because, when one watches these episodes, one cannot help but think about where one would flee if a nuclear war were declared, how public services, the electricity grid, the Internet would collapse, what it would be like to survive in a lawless society, whether it would be convenient to escape from the capitals to the provinces, whether it would be worth dying instantly and painlessly at the epicentre of an explosion or surviving in a world of rubble and radiation. What would our children do, how long would it take for the last human to become extinct. And, above all, why do we not seem sufficiently concerned for there to be a strong citizen movement against the war?
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