"At the start of the 1960s" "Cold War tensions were heightening." "Confrontation threatened." "The two superpowers watched and waited, preparing for a nuclear holocaust." "The world's safety depended on mutual assured destruction - the treat of mutual suicide that came to be known as M.A.D. " "MAD." "It's not mad!" "Mutual Assured Destruction is the foundation of deterrence." "On the 1st of July 1960 an American RB-47 reconnaissance plane like this took off on a routine mission to probe the radar defenses of the Soviet border." "COL." "JOHN McKONE:" "We took off from Brize Norton Air Base in England." "That was our forward operating location on that particular date, and we were supposed to fly this quote-unquoted 'milk run'." "There were not supposed to be any particular problems during that flight and we thought that this would be a rather... rather simple flight, although it was a twelve-hour mission." "They flew in order to detect our radar stations." "The wanted to know the location of the air defense system of the Soviet Union." "They often flew close to our borders." "We started flying parallel to the Soviet coastline, which had Murmansk and the mouth of the" "White Sea and so forth up there, and we knew there was quite a bit of activity going on up there by the Russians at that time." "I was on combat duty to intercept, and I flew up to find the enemy." "I was guided from the ground." "When I saw the enemy plane, I identified it, and radioed my base." "The co-pilot said, 'Check, check, check, right wing', and the aircraft commander, Major Palm, said," "'Where the hell did that guy come from?" "'" "I signaled the plane to follow me." "He wouldn't obey." "I radioed my base, and asked what I should do." "An order came back "Destroy it"." "I opened fire and the plane started to burn." "As the MIG fighters returned to base," "John McKone and Co-pilot Bruce Olmstead parachuted to safety, and imprisonment in Moscow's Lubianka prison." "The four other Americans on board had died in mid-air." "On the front line, constant vigilance." "War, if it came, would soon 'go nuclear'." "American Titan missiles, each with a warhead that could destroy Moscow, were ready to be launched." "It would be done before we had time to stop and think about what we were doing." "It doesn't take all that long and it was just automatic." "There was no question in our mind that this was the thing to do." "If we had ever received a launch message over the PAS system," "I ha... would have had absolutely no doubt that my life expectancy was measured in probably less than a half an hour, and the only question was would we able to launch this missile before the incoming hit us." "Pearl Harbor was still a painful wound in the" "American psyche." "In Alaska, Greenland, and England," "Ballistic Missile Early Warning radars were in operation." "America did not want to be surprised again." "The Cold War was a war that went on 24 hours a day," "7 days a week." "We felt that they were trying to take over the..." "the world and actually we were one of their largest stumbling blocks in that effort and therefore we were one of their primary enemies, and their primary target was to take over our country." "They were banging it into our heads and we couldn't have imagined otherwise:" "the Americans were aggressors who wanted to conquer the whole world, and we had to protect the world." "In 1961, the new American President John Kennedy, had taken office in a tense nuclear world." "He inherited from Eisenhower, the doctrine of 'massive retaliation'." "The term "Massive Retaliation", as it was understood at the end of the 1950s, and the beginning of the 1960s, was a policy of responding to major Soviet conventional attacks - for example, in Western Europe," "should that have occurred, with a massive nuclear response." ""Massive Retaliation"" "had been conceived at a time of clear American superiority." "Now, the Russians were trying to catch up." "There was a syndrome to catch up and overtake, to try and show everyone that we weren't far behind the Americans, that we too had nuclear weapons." "There were those who said that we can only prevent a nuclear war if we oppose world imperialism with a force of similar strength." "Khrushchev sought a dramatic means to remind the West of the power of the Soviets." "He broke a moratorium on nuclear testing." "October the 30th, 1961:" "a Russian bomber crew were preparing to drop the largest bomb the world had ever seen." "The explosion was the equivalent of more than 50 million tons of TNT, more than all the explosives used in World War ll." "50 miles away, people were blown off their feet." "Khrushchev said he wanted the bomb to" ""hang like the sword of Damocles over the imperialists heads"." "Kennedy took up the challenge." "In view of the Soviet Action, it will be the policy of the United States to proceed in developing nuclear weapons, to maintain this superior capability for the defense of the free world against any aggressor." "To Kennedy's anger, the super bomb was just one of a series of Soviet nuclear tests." "I remember counting down the seconds, then dropping the bomb." "We had to put on special glasses, and pull down curtains to protect us against the radiation." "We'd put on the glasses, but we'd forget to draw the curtains as we wanted to have a peek." "Suddenly, there would be something like a rising sun." "The clouds disperse and you see a beautiful, beautiful picture, like in a fairytale- a mushroom growing up and up." "It's on top of you and you are going underneath." "The instruments measuring the level of radiation went right off the scale, but of course we forgot about that." "Then suddenly there is a huge blow as the shock wave hits the plane, all the controls go crazy, and you have to grab the joystick, and quickly, quickly try and get it under control." "The plane was thrown from side to side." "We knew what a nuclear explosion was like." "It became obvious that the Russians just... there was no containing them, they were shooting hot just this big bomb, but lots and lots of them and we essentially did the same thing." "We went and, you know, we got bombs from wherever we could find 'em and took 'em to Nevada and shot them just in order to respond to these Russian tests." "It was a crazy period." "In the West, public opinion was turning against the arms build up, and the testing of the bomb." "In Britain, what started in 1958 as a march to the weapons centre at Aldermaston, swelled to an annual rally of tens of thousands of campaigners for nuclear disarmament." "We did seriously accept the fact that if a nuclear bomb was used in the London area the effect was going to be so massive over such a geographical area that even people living miles out would have repercussions." "And we were quite serious in our expectations that this could happen." "The scientists have made it, it's there and available, somebody's going to want to use it." "Kennedy and his secretary of defense, McNamara, were increasingly aware of the danger of relying on the strategy of "Massive Retaliation"." "Nuclear weapons have no military utility whatsoever, excepting only to deter one's opponent from their use." "Which means you should never never never initiate their use against a nuclear-equipped opponent." "If you do, it's suicide." "And that conclusion I came to very early." "As I say, when I came in I..." "I didn't know the difference between a nuclear weapon and a conventional weapon, but it didn't take me long to find out." "A few months, and I came to that conclusion." "The problem was, how to implement the conclusion." "McNamara presented the Joint Chiefs of Staff with an appealing alternative." "Soviet cities were no longer to be targeted." "They were to strike only at Soviet military forces." "This was known as No Cities/Counter-force." "And if both sides did that, then the casualties, in the unlikely and very undesirable prospect of a nuclear war, would be less." "This idea of a "No-Cities" plan, this striking only against military bases, rocket forces and submarines" "it was simply an attempt to make nuclear war morally acceptable." "It was an attempt to deceive oneself." "The Russians weren't the only skeptics." "The head of the Strategic Air Command General Power, was briefed on Counterforce by one of McNamara's assistants." "General Power insisted that the only way to deal with these barbarians was to blow them all up and I said," "'But who's going to win that?" "'" "And he said, 'I would be satisfied if there were just two Americans left and one Russian - that would be we would have won'." "And I said, 'Well there'd better be one of them a woman'." "October 1962." "Khrushchev, seeking to reduce American nuclear superiority, sent Soviet missiles into Cuba." "It was real." "You know, this was no joke." "They were moving mid-range missiles into Cuba and and I don't think there's any doubt about the fact they were moving." "They may have had some there already." "They certainly had the facilities to rapidly introduce them." "That was tense." "Kennedy ordered a blockade, and put his forces across the globe on the highest alert." "B-52s loaded with hydrogen bombs, were ready for war." "During the Cuban missile crisis, if the horn blew we shook like the devil." "I mean we were scared we said we're on our way." "So we simply ran to that airplane and fired up the ground carts to get get power to the airplane and air to start the engines and we cranked those engines as fast as we could and we would listen for a message" "from Strategic Air Command to give us instructions on what type of exercise it was, if it was a practice or if it was the real thing." "You know, you literally swallowed because you didn't know what it was going to be." "Confronted by Kennedy's nuclear superiority," "Khrushchev turned the missile ships back." "Both Khrushchev's government and Kennedy's government proved to be wise enough to find their way out of this situation." "The Cuban missile crisis was very important." "It showed just how close to the edge of the nuclear precipice the world was standing." "Moscow and Washington realized that direct communication between the two capitals must be improved." "They installed the "hot-line" between them." "The following summer, shocked at how close they'd come to nuclear war, the Soviet Union," "America and Britain agreed a Limited Test Ban Treaty." "There would be no more 'atmospheric' tests." "Nuclear testing would continue, but underground." "In Russia, the Kremlin had learnt a lesson." "Never again did it want to confront America from a position of weakness." "Lack of nuclear armaments and the weakness of the Soviet Union came as a shock to the Soviet leadership." "It was like a cold shower for the Government, who realized that these weaknesses had to be overcome." "The Soviet Union built up their nuclear forces." "They added hundreds of missiles to their arsenal." "The Americans had to accept that, realistically, they could no longer destroy all the Soviet forces." "it became clear that if you said that your main approach was going to be to target the other side's military capability, what would happen is that those targets would proliferate to the point where there would be no limit to the amount" "that you would spend on strategic forces." "The military on both sides accepted that they could no longer protect their own country from destruction." "The superpowers had discovered they had one thing in common;" "an interest in avoiding nuclear war." "It is an ironic, but accurate fact, that the two strongest powers are the two in the most danger of devastation." "All we have built, all we have worked for would be destroyed in the first twenty-four hours, and even in the Cold War which brings burdens and dangers to so many countries, including this nation's closest allies," "our two countries bear the heaviest burdens." "For we are both devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could be better devoted to combat ignorance, poverty, and disease." "A grim logic was beginning to emerge." "Nuclear disarmament was not achievable, yet nuclear war was unthinkable." "By 1964," "McNamara had concluded that his 'No Cities' plan was a dangerous illusion." "War would only be avoided, he now thought, by the threat of mutual suicide." "McNamara in particular became totally convinced that the only strategy was... what is known as Mutually Assured Destruction," "MAD for short." "And what that meant was that the only way to have stable deterrents in the world was for both sides to be able to kill twenty-five to fifty per cent of the other's population." "It's not mad!" "Mutual Assured Destruction is the foundation of deterrence." "Today it's a derogative term, but it's those who denigrate it, don't understand deterrence." "If you want a stable nuclear world- if that isn't an oxymoron, to rephrase it, to the degree one can achieve a stable nuclear world - it requires that each side be confident that it can deter the other, and that," "that requires that there be a balance and the balance is the understanding that if either side initiates the use of nuclear weapons, the other side will respond with sufficient power to inflict unacceptable damage." "Submarines now played a crucial role." "3, 2, 1, Fire!" "For MAD to succeed, each side needed to be able to retaliate, even after it had suffered a surprise attack." "The Polaris system to begin with was really a city killer." "It was an extremely survivable assured destruction capability that the" "Soviets knew, they could not destroy and knew that if they conducted a first strike, that system would some day be available to retaliate." "It might take some time to get the message to them from a destroyed national headquarters, but at some day the missile warheads would come raining in and they would pay the price." "I don't think that there would have been hesitation on the part of any commanding officer to launch." "Did we think about what was back home?" "Sure we did, but you didn't let that control your actions." "Time to think about that after you'd done your duty." "The fact that very tense people were close to nuclear weapons, ready to use those weapons, presented a huge danger to the world." "And of course, we felt uncomfortable, but we still had to accomplish our task, like the Americans had to accomplish theirs, and we would have accomplished it." "What would it have ended in?" "It would have had very sad consequences for the world." "I thought from the beginning it was morally bankrupt, decrepit, morally dis..." "I mean, I..." "I just do not accept war..." "that the primary objective to war is to kill people." "The primary objective of war is to win the bloody thing with as... as few losses to er..." "first of all to your own side and second to the other side." "Always you want to minimize losses on both sides, but first of all yourself:" "but you want to win the thing and get it over as soon as possible." "If the first day had involved attacks on cities then it would have been just unbelievably catastrophic:" "tens of millions of deaths and enormous destruction." "Even one thermonuclear weapon on a large city would be destructive on an almost unimaginable and unprecedented scale." "World War ll killed 50 million people, but it didn't do it in one day." "In 1963, Peter Watkins, a British film-maker, made a drama documentary to show what a nuclear war would mean." "9:16 am." "A single megaton nuclear missile overshoots Manston Airfield in Kent, and air bursts six miles from this position." "At this distance the heat wave is sufficient to cause melting of the upturned eyeball, third degree burning of the skin and ignition of furniture." "12 seconds later the shock front arrives." "The blast wave from a thermonuclear explosion has been likened to an enormous door slamming in the depths of hell." "The film was called the 'War Game'." "The BBC banned it." "It wasn't seen on television for twenty years." "There was, for a period of a couple of years - at least a year - a strong effort to persuade the American public that it was worth investing in and practicing civil defense." "That campaign fell flat;" "the public wasn't very interested." "I think the public concluded that if a thermonuclear war were to take place, civil defense, although it might preserve some lives, would not preserve most lives, and what came afterwards would have made life not worth living." ""Whether you're sitting in your desk next to the window, or standing in the elevator shaft, it wouldn't be of any great significance if the bomb were dropped in this area within a radius of 25 miles."" ""I assume you're supposed to go to a shelter, but in a city like New York there's not much chance that a person would survive if there was an attack or something..." ""In the case of a real attack, nobody would know what to do I'm quite sure."" "Officially the Russians took Civil defense more seriously, but the reality was not encouraging." "When people began to realize how dangerous these weapons were, they used to joke that if a nuclear bomb was dropped nearby all there'd be left to do was to cover yourself with a white bed sheet and crawl to the cemetery." "If you could make it to the cemetery that is." "The leaders were guided by the idea that as there might not be a nuclear war, why spend money which we were so short of?" "On the other hand, if there was a war, civil defense would not help." "It was a very sensible, purely pragmatic Russian attitude." "Even short of total war, deterrence carried its own dangers." "In 1966 over the coast of Spain, a B-52 was due to attempt a routine refueling, mid-air from a tanker." "In the village of Palomares," "Simo Orts was setting out for the day's fishing." "I was fishing opposite Villaricos, and the planes were flying overhead." "We always used to watch the planes." "There were two B-52s refueling, and the ones at the back must have brushed against each other and the planes exploded." "I remember all this fire in the air and pieces of airplane falling to the ground." "I remember all the neighbors running to the place where the smoke came from." "We thought that what had fallen there was still burning." "As the planes broke up, 4 hydrogen bombs were scattered over the coast." "Three hit the ground, one was lost at sea." "I saw it very clearly:" "the bomb fell into the sea very close to me." "And then, I saw how much interest the Americans showed... the whole Sixth Fleet came." "There were 5,000 soldiers living on land in tents - generals, colonels, so many important people from North America." "The American fleet searched the ocean for the missing bomb." "Those on dry land had different problems." "When the bombs hit the ground, safety devices prevented a thermonuclear explosion." "But the conventional high explosives, used to trigger a nuclear blast, had gone off, scattering radioactive plutonium." "They started doing medical check-ups here in the town with a Geiger counter." "Some people had to throw away their clothes because they were contaminated." "The houses were washed down with detergent or water." "At no stage did the Americans tell us anything." "People were scared, because no one knew what was happening - all you knew was that you were forbidden to eat things, that you couldn't go out on the street, you couldn't touch anything - everything but everything was permanently prohibited." "Over four and a half thousand barrels of contaminated soil were shipped back to the United States for burial." "At sea, the search continued for the missing bomb." "The Spanish feared that the Mediterranean was contaminated." "American Ambassador, Biddel Duke, went swimming for the cameras." ""Ambassador do you detect any radioactivity in the water?"" ""if this is radioactivity, I love it."" "Eighty days after the accident, an American mini submarine," "Alvin, found the missing bomb, intact." "The Pentagon called a lost nuclear bomb a 'Broken Arrow'." "Palomares was the 14th Broken Arrow since 1950." "More were to come." "The number of Soviet Accidents' is still unknown." "The Russian military were unconvinced by McNamara's notion of 'Assured Destruction'." "They saw it as their first duty to protect their homeland." "They worked to develop anti ballistic missiles " "ABMs, which could destroy American missiles in flight." "First there used to be sword and then a shield, then a tank and anti-tank gun;" "now it turned out that a missile was not invulnerable." "Science and technology was developing so fast." "It had become possible to fight the most dangerous, the most invincible weapons." "To the United States," "Russia's ABMs came as a blow." "It was a terrible paradox." "By building a 'defensive system, Russia had put the delicate nuclear balance at risk." "We thought of it as an umbrella." "Would an umbrella harm anybody?" "If it rains, you open it up." "That was how we saw the ABM system." "It was an umbrella to protect our population against a possible missile strike." "In terms of MAD, if you believe in Mutual Assured Destruction, anything that interferes with the... with..." "with both sides, see, it's mutual, Mutual Assured Destruction." "It must be mutual, and it must be assured." "So anything on either side that it would interfere with both sides, either or both sides, capability to kill twenty to fifty per cent of the population of the other side is, by definition, destabilizing." "The introduction of ABMs destabilized MAD, the balance of terror." "We were both so afraid of nuclear armaments." "We knew that you wouldn't strike and we wouldn't strike." "But, now if one side could counter the other's ability to respond, then they had the advantage." "America too, had been developing an ABM System, but McNamara was reluctant to authorize production." "The system was easy to beat, and the sums just didn't add up." "The ratio of cost to the defender, as against the offense, was very unfavorable, in that it would cost say, like, five dollars to the defense to counter every dollar that the offense spent." "And therefore the..." "the economics just strongly favored the offense." "McNamara convinced President Johnson to abandon ABMs." "But only if the Soviets agreed to do the same." "In 1967, war in the Middle East raised international tension to boiling point." "America supported Israel." "The Soviet Union supported Egypt, Syria and Jordan." ""The Israelis have released these dramatic aerial pictures to support their claim to have shot down six MIG fighters of the Syrian Air Force."" "Israel swiftly inflicted a crushing defeat." "America, fearful that the Soviet Union might come to Egypt's aid, prepared the Sixth fleet for action." "The Six Day War between Israel and and Egypt" "And as a part of that, the hotline was used for the first time and one of the messages from Kosygin to President Johnson was," "'If you want war, you'll get war'." "These were very very tense times." "To reduce the tension President Johnson" "Soviet Premier Kosygin agreed to meet at Glassboro, New Jersey." "In spite of the Middle East crisis," "ABMs were high on their agenda." "The President and the Premier had a meeting, and the President started speaking." "He said, "Let's come to an agreement, let's each not build such expensive ABM systems."" "Kosygin said, "I am against this..." "Why do you object to a system that protects people?" "Defense is something moral, and aggression is immoral." "Missiles mean aggression." "If you agreed to reduce the number of aggressive missiles, then I could speak about reducing our defense system..." "Whilst the arguments over ABMs continued," "American scientists were preparing a countermeasure;" "Multiple Independently Targeted Re-Entry Vehicles" "MIRVs for short." "One single missile could now carry ten separate warheads, each capable of destroying a city." "Once you got into the MIRV era, the problem of strategic defense became infinitely more complicated, infinitely more expensive, because you had to devise ways of going after a multiplicity of warheads and all kinds of junk that would be put" "into the atmosphere to mislead the defense." "One anti-ballistic missile is enough to shoot down one ballistic missile." "But now imagine that a ballistic missile has 10 separate warheads." "In order to shoot down one of those missiles, you would need at least 10 anti-ballistic missiles." "Here are two figures for you to compare." "The United States of America had, on their land based launching sites alone," "1,054 ballistic missiles." "To counter that, we would have needed over 10,000 anti-ballistic missiles." "That would be madness." "The Soviet Union realized that unless we stopped the arms race, then the Americans, who were financially better off, could out-do the Soviet Union." "The leadership began to understand that now we had to choose between building socialism and communism," "or making missiles." "By 1969 the super powers were, between them, spending more than 50 million dollars a day on nuclear armaments." "It was a burden both sides were finding intolerable." "At last, they agreed to meet in Helsinki to try to halt the arms race." "The negotiations came to be known as SALT." "SALT stands for" "Strategic Arms Limitations Talks." "It was an..." "an effort, er, in the light of later events, a... a rather modest effort to try and put some kind of a cap on the accumulation of strategic delivery systems." "The bargaining was not going to be easy." "It was like diving into a swamp with your eyes closed." "There were a lot of doubts and difficulties in organizing these things." "Particularly because before going to the talks, the members of the delegation were called up by Brezhnev and very seriously warned not to say too much." "He reminded them that the KGB was listening, and the Lubianka prison was watching." "The Soviets were even more were far more hesitant about doing anything that might involve some sort of intrusion into their society, because inevitably anything to do with real arms control would involve inspection, verification and so on and so forth." "And this, for the Soviets, remained anathema." "Negotiations dragged on throughout 1970 and 1971, as each side tried to come to terms with the other's philosophy." "The Soviets really had it in their gut, in the marrow of their bone, this... this right, this inherent right of a nation to defend itself and there wasn't really any argument in those days," "early days of a technical nature, of a... of a strategic analytical nature." "It was just the God given- they wouldn't have said God- right of a nation to defend itself." "The Soviet Union felt naked, unprotected, surrounded everywhere by American nuclear forces." "It was very difficult to protect the Soviet Union." "When we had developed our own ballistic missiles, although we had very few, we realized that it had acted as a counterbalance." "But when we started the talks, we remembered all the kinds of weapons that could reach us." "Behind the scenes, Henry Kissinger," "Nixon's national security advisor, arranged private meetings with" "Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin." "These meetings made it possible to introduce corrections, or amendments without losing face." "Using the back channel with Kissinger, we could first state the official point of view, and then talk more freely." "I would say, "Henry, mind you, or you should realize..."" "I was really just thinking aloud, and then he would say," ""Well, Anatoly, why should we get stuck on this?" "Why don't we do it in a different way?"" "Face to face across the table, the two sides made progress on ABMs." "But they barely touched on the most destabilizing of the new technologies- multiple warheads" " MIRVs." "The subject was not really discussed because by then the Americans already had this technology and Russia didn't." "We believed that we should have it too." "Finally, in May 1972, after almost three years of negotiations," "President Nixon arrived in Moscow to sign the" "SALT agreements with Premier Brezhnev." "ABMs had now been discredited and the two sides agreed to limit them." "But all they could agree on 'offensive' weapons was a temporary freeze on missile launchers." "The superpowers were learning to cooperate." "Yet, their failure to control MIRVs meant that, in the next decade, Russia and" "America would add 12,000 nuclear warheads to their arsenals." "Preparations for global annihilation continued." "Subtitles ripped and converted by Juan Claudio Epsteyn"