Cold Dawn, Cold War

Script

TITLES HANDSHAKES ON THE ELBE
	Link up, April 1945: After four years of global, total war, American and Russian troops meet in eastern Germany.
MAP GRAPHIC	The Americans had slogged their way across Europe from Normandy. The Russians, invaded in 1941, had driven the Germans back across countless miles of occupied homeland. This handshake, here on the river Elbe, was to seal Germany's fate. But the smiles – like the spring weather – were not to last. Trust, too, was in short supply. When Germany was still fighting, the allies – America, Britain and the Soviet Union – had fought together to beat the common enemy. But now, with Germany in ruins, the friends who had fought on the same side began to fall out. Now, war between East and West, between the Soviet Union on one side and Britain, America and her allies on the other, began to seem a distinct possibility. As the war in Europe ended, attitudes hardened as East and West settled down to administer the divided ruins of Hitler's Empire that was planned to last a thousand years.
2/	The Russians feared America’s money, her economic strength, her intentions. The Americans thought the Russians wanted to spread communism across the free world. On March 5 1946, Winston Churchill put those divisions into words.
CHURCHILL 'IRON CURTAIN' SPEECH OF MARCH 5 1946	‘From Stettin in the Baltic…an iron curtain has descended across the continent…control from Moscow.’ World peace seemed to hang by a thread. The stakes were sky-high. High as mushroom clouds. PAUSE FOR EFFECT
THE ATOMIC BOMB EXPLODES OVER HIROSHIMA, NAGASAKI. MUSHROOM CLOUDS, THEN SCENES OF DEVASTATION BELOW	On August 6 1945, a single American aircraft had dropped a single bomb on a Japanese town. The bomb they called Little Boy. The town they called Hiroshima. Little Boy was an atomic bomb. At seventeen seconds past eight fifteen in the morning, Little Boy exploded two thousand feet above the city. There was a mighty flash. An explosion. Searing heat. The blast lifted buildings. Houses, shops and tramcars disintegrated. So too did people.
3/	A huge mushroom cloud of dust and debris rose into the sky, taking with it the atomised remains of seventy thousand people. Twenty thousand were children. Three days later they dropped another bomb on another town. Fat Boy killed another thirty-five thousand in Nagasaki. The war ended. The fear of push-button war did not. The fear of war did not because the face of war had changed. Now, the survival of mankind itself was threatened. The Cold War.
EAST-WEST BORDER	If it became hot, the world could end. In the years that followed, both sides raced to build the weapons that would win the war nobody wanted. There was Pershing and Sapwood, Thor, Atlas and Sandal – missiles built to attack Russian, British and American cities. Each year, the missiles became bigger, more powerful, longer ranging.
PROTEST MARCH IN LONDON, 1951	Despite public protest, despite marches and demonstrations, the building and the testing and the sabre-rattling went on. Fear had become a major growth industry.
ATLAS TEST FAILS	Often, those early missile tests worked. But not always. This is the West's Atlas missile, flaming to Earth.
4/	But despite the fears, the alarms, this new generation of weapons was never used in anger. Yet, like their warheads, they multiplied. Soon there would be not just intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of taking out whole towns, but antimissile missiles, aimed at the enemy silos, the missile bases themselves. As the public learned the meaning of such terms as First Strike Capability, Throw-weight, and Mutual Assured Destruction, so both sides perfected the business of moving their missiles, hiding them underground. But now there were few places left to hide for, if a missile could be detected, it could be destroyed. Civilians had few places left to hide either.
AIR RAID DRILLS	In sixties America, schoolchildren did air raid drills, prepared to face the reality of nuclear attack. In the eighties, commercial firms in Britain offered private nuclear shelters for the frightened family who thought they had everything. Survival pod or family cooker? We never had to find out. But it wasn't just missiles that drove civilians underground, heightened a nation's tension. Planes did, too. Planes with cameras.
GARY POWERS U2 SPY PLANE	In 1960, a US Air Force pilot, Gary Powers, had been shot down over the Soviet Union, paraded as a spy for taking photographs of Soviet military installations.
5/ CUBAN MISSILE SITES	Two years later, it was again photographs – these photographs – that brought the world, once more, to the very brink of war.
CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS
AERIAL PIX	Cuba lies 150 kilometres off the American coast. In 1962, Castro, a communist, was Cuba's leader. And pro-Soviet. If Soviet missiles could be based on Cuba, then the threat of nuclear attack from America's own doorstep would be like a dagger held to America's throat. On October 16, US aerial photographs showed Cuba was getting ready to receive Russian missiles. They were on their way, by sea. President Kennedy gave the Russians this stark warning – and the world held its breath:
KENNEDY NEWS FOOTAGE Oct 22 1962	‘It shall be the policy of this nation…requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union…’
CUBA CRISIS FOOTAGE	President Kennedy and Soviet Leader Nikolai Kruschev took the world to the edge of the nuclear abyss. And stepped back.
6/ RUSSIAN SHIPS/NEWS FOOTAGE	The Russian ships turned round. The missiles never landed in Cuba. To the West, John Kennedy – the boy-President who would soon become a legend because of his assassination thirteen months later – entered history books as the man who hadn't blinked. If it was pictures from high-flying aircraft that trigged the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was the use of space itself that was to be of decisive influence in the seventies, eighties and nineties. Space. The New Frontier.
SPUTNIK	Both East and West raced to get rockets round the world, put a man into space. But more was at stake than just a prize for coming first. Space had military uses, too. It was the ultimate high ground from which to look down on your enemies. Soon there were listening satellites and watching satellites, satellites with cameras and satellites with infra-red heat sensors. There were satellites ready to act as electronic tripwires to give warning of missile attack, communication satellites to relay radio messages, even anti-satellite satellites. By the early seventies, pictures from orbiting satellites could tell whether the can of Coke you held was open or closed, could identify the Russian Generals on their May Day podium in Red Square by the hats they wore.
7/	From 400 kilometres out in space. If missiles could no longer hide from satellites on land, where else might they hide?
POLARIS AT SEA	Here. The sea. In the seventies and eighties, the deep oceans of the world became the new hunter-killer playgrounds for the superpowers.
LAUNCH: HMS RESOLUTION	Russia, Britain and America all launched their own nuclear-powered submarines, each armed with long-range, nuclear missiles, each with multiple warheads targeted at an enemy city thousands of miles away. They could stay under the sea for months without surfacing, hidden from satellites high above.
VIETNAM DOMINO THEORY	In the late 1950s, peace had been shattered on the far side of the world. North Vietnam was communist. South Vietnam was not. Attempts by the north to unite Vietnam had to be resisted, decided America, otherwise communism might cascade across the Far East, like a row of dominoes. They even called it that, the Domino Theory.
8/ US TROOPS INTO VIETNAM/ HO CHI MINH TRAIL	By the sixties, America was sending troops to prop up the failing South Vietnamese regime. While regular soldiers from North Vietnam carried supplies down south to their supporters along something called the Ho Chi Minh trail, a secret supply route from north to south that ran for 15,000 kilometres through mountain and jungle.
B-52s BOMBING	The Americans bombed it. And still they came. America sent more troops to combat the Vietnamese. The North Vietnamese paraded their American prisoners, sent more troops from the north to fight the Americans.
US ADVISORS	The war escalated. Huge resources on the American side were supported by a massive bombing campaign called Rolling Thunder. It dropped more bombs on Vietnam than all the bombs dropped in World War Two.
GIRL RUNS FROM NAPALM AGENT ORANGE	They didn't just drop bombs. They used napalm too – sticky gasoline – and something called Agent Orange, a chemical sprayed from planes that showed what was underneath the tree canopy by stripping the jungle bare. People too were caught in the jungle. Napalm stripped them bare, too. And, everywhere in this war – the Huey helicopter: the workhorse of the war.
9/	Rescue missions, fire missions, casualty evacuation missions, media liaison missions – it flew them all. It was everywhere. Something else was everywhere, too: The Vietcong. Travelling light without tanks, armour or helicopters, hiding in underground tunnels, these were the under-equipped soldiers who took on the might of America – and won. They won because they were prepared to endure great suffering to win victory. They wanted to win, to regain their homeland. The Americans, after a while, just wanted to go home. Unable to trap an elusive guerrilla enemy in the jungle and bring him to decisive battle that could be dominated by firepower, American troops burned Vietnamese villages instead.
US TROOPS TORCH A VILLAGE	They called these Zippo raids after the lighters they used to burn the homes of those they thought might be the enemy. Sometimes, they were. And, sometimes, they weren't. Fifty-eight thousand Americans returned home in coffins and bodybags, many marked Do Not View Contents. Three thousand were aged eighteen or under.
10/	Your age. The war that was caught on television and beamed back direct to American homes was to traumatise a generation. Until then, Americans had only been used to winning. Now, images on television could sway public opinion, erode the resolve of a nation. Television too, had become a weapon of decisive influence. A weapon of war.
US PULLS OUT FROM SAIGON	In 1975, America pulled out of Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital. Those who had collaborated with the Americans fought desperately to get away before the Vietcong arrived. In the panic and fear of what would happen when their recent enemies became their new masters, many died. America at least, got what she wanted – a way out; a way home; an end to involvement in a foreign war she could never win.
NATO/EUROPE	America might pull out of Vietnam, but she didn't pull out of Europe. For almost fifty years American troops manned the European front line where NATO troops faced soldiers from the Warsaw Pact.
11/	Here, in the 1980s, soldiers from a dozen western nations manned a new generation of tanks and personnel carriers, exercised their anti-tank weapons and waited for the Soviets to attack westwards across the flat plains of northern Germany. Troops on both sides trained not just for conventional war – for tank and house-to-house fighting – but for nuclear, chemical and biological warfare, too.
IRAN-IRAQ WAR	In April 1988, Iraq's Saddam Hussein used chemical warfare – the nerve agent Sarin, a chemical that attacks the central nervous system – on whole villages of men, women and children during the Iran-Iraq war. World opinion was outraged. And did nothing. Perhaps because the villages of Iran did not pose much of a threat to world peace. Something else, however, did. This.
STAR WARS	It became known as Star Wars: America's Strategic Defence Initiative. Plans, in effect, for a lazer shield to be built around America to protect her from incoming Soviet missiles. It wasn't reality. But it was something America was planning. And said she could afford. At home too, America campaigned to win Star Wars support.
12/ STAR WARS TV PROMO	Until then, East and West had existed in what was known as a Balance of Terror, of Mutual Assured Destruction. With both sides equipped with enough long-range, intercontinental nuclear warheads to destroy the planet they shared several times over, East and West had been locked into nuclear stalemate. That in itself offered stability. Of a kind. Until Star Wars. In theory at least, Star Wars could alter the balance; give America the end-game advantage. Star Wars, however, did not come cheap. US Defence spending was already a trillion dollars a year; the creaking Russian economy was crippled by their defence spending: one rubel in five went on defence of the homeland. Both sides wanted to spend less on weapons. It was time, at last, to talk. Talks were spurred, not just by the concept of Star Wars, but by America's decision to base medium-range nuclear missiles – Cruise and Pershing – in Europe, so close to the Soviet Union that they'd be invisible to Soviet radar.
13/	What changed the weapons posture of both superpowers, however, was not ultimately weapons, or the fear of weapons, but people. In 1984, President Reagan was returned for a second term in one of the biggest victories in American history. The following year Mikhail Gorbachev became the new Soviet leader. He really was new. He was open. He was also realistic. Unlike previous Soviet leaders, he was more concerned about his country's people and its economy than he was with keeping up with American armed might. He cut Soviet weapons – and dared the Americans to follow him. Together, these two men, the one-time Hollywood film star and the former KGB official, set about first cutting the number of offensive weapons by fifty per cent, then by banning all medium and short-range nuclear weapons. Cruise and Pershing missiles went home to America. In return, the Soviets started dismantling their medium-range missiles. Swords, at last, were turning into ploughshares. And the fear of war was receding. Or so it seemed. ENDS. Tom Keene, Longbow Productions.