The Worst Cold War Documentary Ever Made

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, March 21, 2024

 

Netflix’s new documentary series, Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War, opens with a captivating premise: Vladimir Putin’s war of conquest in Ukraine has imposed on the West unenviable conditions akin to those that pertained during the Cold War. Indeed, the series posits that Putin’s war cannot be understood without a study of the rivalry between the superpowers. But that pretense is swiftly abandoned. The series’ real purpose is to push a revisionist history that manages to render the Soviet Union a bit player in a Cold War narrative that might as well have been lifted from Howard Zinn’s fevered imagination. Though this could not have been the documentarians’ intention, the series might even convince some viewers that Putin has a point.

 

Within the first few minutes of episode one, the audience is confronted with the documentary’s true objective. “We were so good. We were the country that finally was so virtuous, in addition to being powerful,” says Overthrow author Stephen Kinzer in a blithe summary of the post-war American ethos. “And it was logical that we would then be threatened by a hostile, evil force that wanted nothing but destruction and nihilism.” The documentary then sets out to prove these two presumptions wrong.

 

According to the series, the Cold War begins not with Winston Churchill’s observation in Fulton, Mo., that an “Iron Curtain” had descended across the European continent but with the atomic bombing of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These were not the first civilians wantonly murdered by the United States through nuclear warfare, of course. The first casualties were American citizens, who were poisoned by their proximity to the Trinty test and lied to about their condition by the U.S. government.

 

That digression aside, the film maintains that racialized caricatures of the Japanese made the atomic bombings that ended the Second World War thinkable. It was an unnecessary act of violence aimed not at ending the war — the Japanese were willing to negotiate, and the U.S. wasn’t really seeking “unconditional” surrender as advertised — but at keeping the Soviets from invading Japan. “We didn’t need to use the bomb. Japan would have surrendered. We didn’t need a land invasion in order to be victorious,” one of the documentary’s interviewees postulates.

 

It’s a tidy narrative, but it elides the extent to which industrial war-making facilities in Japan, unlike in Germany, were interspersed within residential areas. Harry Truman’s advisers did seek relatively intact urban targets to demonstrate the weapon’s power, but neither city subject to atomic bombing was purely civilian. Hiroshima hosted the 2nd Army Headquarters, the command in charge of the defense of southern Japan (where Operation Olympic would have begun). Likewise, Nagasaki was home to manufacturing facilities producing ordnance, naval assets, and weapons platforms.

 

The notion that the Japanese high command would have eagerly surrendered if they had been informed of U.S. amenability to retaining the emperor is not supported in either the historical documents or America’s contemporaneous experience with the average Japanese fighter’s refusal to surrender even “in the face of insuperable odds.” There were members of the Japanese high command who favored surrender. “These elements, however, were not powerful enough to sway the situation against the dominating Army organization, backed by the profiteering industrialists, the peasants, and the ignorant masses,” Karl T. Compton, a physicist who served on the Interim Committee that approved of the atomic bombing of Japan, wrote in 1946. That is an assessment with which Truman concurred, but the documentary lets him off the hook by suggesting he was hoodwinked by his more callous advisers into believing these two populated urban centers were “purely military targets.”

 

Just what any of this has to do with the Cold War, much less Putin’s war in Ukraine in 2024, is a mystery. Still, it dominates the first episode of this unilluminating documentary, and subsequent episodes somehow manage to be worse. To judge from the dominant theme in Turning Point’s second and third chapters, the Cold War in the late 1940s and early 1950s was a primarily domestic affair.

 

Episode two devotes several minutes to the pre-1945 political conditions that produced the Soviet Union as we know it — a perversion of the ideal sought by the “visionary” Vladimir Lenin, in the author Masha Lipman’s formulation. Lenin was a “very good politician” inspired to pursue a state “with no exploitation, where everyone was equal,” Lipman says. Joseph Stalin’s crimes are pertinent to Cold War politics insofar as they are illustrative of the mentality that led the victorious USSR to strip East Germany to the bones and deny sovereignty to the satellite states in orbit around Moscow.

 

That backdrop also guides viewers to understand why U.S. policy-makers began to view the Soviets as a menace. But the film makes no note of the Soviet-backed coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948 or the Soviet-provoked Greek civil war of 1946–49. It only briefly notes that the fall of China to communist rebels consigned half the world to Soviet-style domination, which renders the widespread impression at the time that the West was losing this nascent ideological conflict entirely rational. The episode doesn’t touch on Soviet infiltration of the U.S. labor movement in the 1940s. The name Alger Hiss is featured nowhere in this work. Soviet penetration of the State, Treasury, and War Departments in the mid-war and immediate post-war periods receives only a cursory mention. Instead, the series portrays the U.S. government’s hyper-vigilance toward communist infiltration of American and Allied institutions as pure hysteria.

 

This episode does, however, spend plenty of time discussing the espionage conducted by Klaus Fuchs, who provided the Soviets with detailed information on the Manhattan Project’s work. The point of this exercise isn’t to justify concerns about Soviet intelligence-gathering operations in America but to establish the basis for a moral panic — one that culminated in a great crime against the Rosenbergs. Fuchs’s trail leads to Harry Gold, a pro-Soviet information courier. Gold leads to David Greenglass, a machinist at Los Alamos and brother to Ethel Rosenberg, who subsequently gives up Julius. The documentary portrays the couple as naïve fellow travelers inspired by Moscow’s anti-fascism and its alleged hostility toward antisemitism, which isn’t a true portrait of the Soviet Union’s posture toward Jews but provides the filmmakers a chance to indict the antisemitic Bund movement in pre-war America.

 

Ultimately, the film concedes that, at the very least, Julius Rosenberg was engaged in “military–industrial espionage” for the Soviets. “The atomic information that he’s able to pass on is by all accounts negligible because that’s not the information he has access to,” says Lori Clune, the author of Executing the Rosenbergs. The U.S. government put the screws to Julius, and it threatened to arrest Greenglass’s wife unless he gave up his sister, Ethel. Greenglass did so, culminating in Ethel’s indictment. The pair were convicted and sentenced to death, in the episode’s telling, but only to extract information from them that would otherwise not have been forthcoming. Prosecutors even went so far as to emotionally blackmail the pair by confronting them with their despairing children. They said nothing and were executed, brutally in Ethel’s case, in what the documentary portrays as a grave injustice.

 

And yet, “their guilt has been confirmed by Soviet documents made available after the fall of communism,” according to the Eisenhower Library. Indeed, as Ron Radosh observed in 2015 of a confession by the late Morton Sobell, one of the Rosenbergs’ co-defendants unnamed in the documentary, their espionage on the Soviets’ behalf was not so negligible. “Not only did they try their best to give the Soviets top atomic secrets from the Manhattan Project,” he wrote, “they succeeded in handing over top military data on sonar and on radar that was used by the Russians to shoot down American planes in the Korean and Vietnam wars.”

 

The case against the government’s handling of the Rosenbergs helps the filmmakers introduce one of the villains in this story — the anti-communist prosecutor Roy Cohn — and the instrument of his malevolence, the House Un-American Activities Committee. HUAC and Senator Joseph McCarthy, respectively, hounded entertainment figures, journalists, and academics — blacklisting them within their professions and terrorizing them to the point that one of them, the character actor J. Edward Bromberg, succumbed to cardiac arrest as a direct result. This all has the feel of a digression until we get to “what happens to Roy Cohn,” as one interviewee relates. A “half a century later, when a young Donald Trump” needs some “schooling in hardball politics,” the future president seeks it out from “Joe McCarthy’s protégé.” Thus, the early Cold War serves as an illustration of what the author and presidential historian Timothy Naftali calls America’s “traditional vulnerability to demagogues.”

 

The third chapter in the series chronicles not the “Red Scare’s” subsidence in the mid to late 1950s but its institutionalization. Viewers are treated to the psychological torture imposed on schoolchildren, who were steeped in traumatic civil-defense orthodoxy and the paranoia that culminated in the atmospheric testing of thermonuclear weapons. The Soviets, lacking any other recourse, then tested their own hydrogen fusion weapon, which in turn compelled the U.S. to engage in even more thermonuclear tests — some of which produced more radiation-related fatalities among exposed Japanese, whose torment at American hands had not yet abated.

 

Enter Daniel Ellsberg, who in 1973 was charged with espionage for his role in releasing the so-called Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg tells the filmmakers of his time at the Rand Corporation, where he was privy to some of the U.S. government’s Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) for nuclear war-fighting. That experience imposed a crisis of conscience on Ellsberg, and he resolved to do something about it some years later. Meanwhile, because nuclear war-fighting was so impractical, war by other means was necessary. “That’s when you see this explosion around the world of covert operations and these massive intelligence and defense conglomerates,” says author Scott Anderson.

 

Episode three does note the degree to which the “repressive” Soviet KGB was deeply intertwined with the Kremlin, but Soviet intelligence agencies are portrayed as inward-looking. The CIA, by contrast, is far more extroverted. At this point, the series finally touches on Ukraine, but only inasmuch as the CIA recruited, trained, and infiltrated expatriate Ukrainians into the Soviet Union to conduct paramilitary operations. Those activities were interdicted by the Soviets with the help of Kim Philby, leading to the summary arrest and execution of those unwitting Ukrainians (no wonder Putin is so paranoid).

 

But that was just a foretaste of what the Dulles brothers — CIA director Allen Dulles and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles — would be up to under Eisenhower. The two are portrayed as bloodthirsty, neurotically mistrustful, and reckless in their meddling in foreign affairs.

 

The first government they topple is Iran’s. The coup that ousted Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran is described as a “comical and Byzantine” series of events, which is fair insofar as his ouster was accidental. “Operation has been tried and failed, and we should not participate in any operation against Mossadegh which could be traced back to U.S.,” the CIA wired to its Iranian station chief in a recently declassified cable. But the inertia of the CIA’s efforts to destabilize the Mosaddegh government continued with the commitment of disgruntled Iranian military officers. The second unfriendly government the Dulles brothers felled was Jacobo Arbenz’s regime in Guatemala. Like Mosaddegh, Arbenz was overthrown with CIA help, ushering in what Kinzer describes as “a holocaust” of retributive violence in Guatemala.

 

“To my mind, John Foster Dulles is really one of the great villains of the second half of the 20th century from the standpoint of the American standing in the world,” Naftali opines. These coups — in Iran on behalf of British Petroleum and in Guatemala in support of the United Fruit Corporation, which was reluctant to consent to the government’s reappropriation of its holdings — were an outgrowth of what Kinzer calls the Dulles brothers’ “lifetime of dedication to protecting the interests of multinational corporations.”

 

Episode three concludes with Ellsberg describing the motivations that led him to divulge not just American intelligence relating to the Vietnam War but also America’s nuclear secrets. He is subsequently quoted in a 2022 interview suggesting that it is the threat posed by the United States that destabilizes the international environment. “The defense budget should be cut more than in half rather than being increased right now, but starting with the most dangerous weapons, the ICBMs,” Ellsberg avowed. Surely, Vladimir Putin would not object to unilateral American disarmament. By scoring his interview with soft strings and interspersing a montage of images of him engaging in peace activism, the series makes Ellsberg the closest thing to a hero in its narrative.

 

And that is all the series has to say about the 1950s. There is no mention of the Suez crisis of 1956, nor of the forceful dismemberment of Imre Nagy’s government and the Soviet effort to put down Polish labor riots that same year. The Berlin crisis of 1958–59 is not covered. There is no discussion of the Korean War, the Soviet boycott of the Treaty of San Francisco, or the Chinese artillery assault on Taiwan — a brief but bloody war to which the U.S. deployed naval assets. No time is devoted to the communist guerillas active throughout the world, some of whom murdered Sir Henry Gurney in Malaya, nor to Fidel Castro’s Moscow-backed revolution in Cuba. Sputnik and the so-called missile gap get no attention, save a cursory reference to Nikita Khrushchev’s efforts to dupe the West into believing the Soviet missile program was unrealistically advanced.

 

To assess the Cold War from the perspective of Turning Point’s filmmakers, the only narratives that merit consideration are those that the Soviets and their allies retailed. How this relates to the war in Ukraine is anyone’s guess. If each episode didn’t begin by recentering the narrative on footage of the ongoing war in Europe, a viewer could forget the supposed point of this exercise. By now, however, we can deduce that the premise was a smoke screen — a ruse aimed at lulling an unsuspecting audience into a prolonged exposure to communist-flavored historical revisionism.

 

But perhaps the filmmakers will make this bait and switch worth the immense frustration in the next six episodes. Stay tuned.