- [Voiceover] Hi, Dr. Kutz.
- [Voiceover] Hello, David. How are you doing?
- [Voiceover] I'm doing well. I'm excited to learn
about this thing we call "the Cold War."
What is a "cold war" and what makes it
different than a "hot war"?
- [Voiceover] So, a cold war, and in this case
it's really,
it might be a term that we could debate.
is a war where the two major combatants
never actually fire bullets at each other
or drop bombs on each other.
So never in the course of the Cold War did the
US ever meet the ground troops with the USSR.
- [Voiceover] But people still died in combat.
- [Voiceover] Right.
- [Voiceover] So the Cold War is kind of fought
through proxy wars. And these are wars that are
taking place in other nations, developing nations
of the world where the US is supporting one side,
generally the pro-capitalist side,
and the Soviet Union is supporting
the other side, a communist side.
So this is the case in the Korean War
in the 1950s, and then definitely
the case in the Vietnam War in the 1960s.
- [Voiceover] So the US and the USSR aren't fighting
directly but they're kind of betting on boxing matches,
betting on different fighters in the same boxing match.
- [Voiceover] Yeah, but they're not just betting,
they're also putting money and arms
where their mouth is.
- [Voiceover] So now if there are two different
fighters in the ring, the US is given
the capitalist fighter...
feeding him...
- [Voiceover] So you've got the capitalist fighter
in one corner and he's sweaty and he's beaten,
but the US is behind him with a towel and one
of those water buckets, splashing water in his face,
like "Get in this fight! Get in there!'
- [Voiceover] Right. And if necessary,
tying up his boxing gloves,
maybe giving him a new pair of shoes.
- [Voiceover] Sure.
- [Voiceover] Doing whatever they can... - [Voiceover] Paying his rent...
- [Voiceover] Right. Doing everything that they can... - [Voiceover] Buying him meals, probably,
like at the Marshall Plan.
- [Voiceover] Exactly!
- [Voiceover] Okay, so tell me about these two
combatants. In this corner...
- [Voiceover] Laughs.
- [Voiceover] Wearing a suit...
- [Voiceover] (laughs) Is Harry Truman.
And Harry Truman is the President of the
United States, starting in 1945.
He was Vice President to Franklin Roosevelt,
who had been the US's president since 1932,
and who tragically died in 1945.
So Truman is really in charge of ending
World War II for the United States and also
kind of setting up post-war plans.
- [Voiceover] So he prosecutes the end of the war.
He makes the decision to drop the atom bomb
on Nagasaki and Hiroshima,
and he ends the war in both theaters.
- [Voiceover] Right.
- [Voiceover] Okay.
- [Voiceover] And...
- [Voiceover] And in the other corner, wearing a
very fine mustache...
- [Voiceover] (laughs) Is Joseph Stalin.
And he's the Soviet premier.
He's been in charge since the 1920s.
And for him, I would say the most important
thing that Stalin wanted after World War II
was security, shall we say.
- [Voiceover] Okay.
- [Voiceover] So if you remember your history,
in World War I
Germany invaded Russia.
In World War II
Germany invaded Russia.
- [Voiceover] Oh, I'm seeing a pattern.
- [Voiceover] And if there's anything that Stalin wants
in the post-1945 era,
it is not to be invaded by Germany anymore.
- [Voiceover] Sure.
- [Voiceover] So he is very anxious to make sure
that the world is safe for communism.
He thinks that
the best way to make sure that
Russians can continue the experiments and the
revolution of communism
is to have a buffer zone,
shall we say, between Russia and the rest of Europe.
- [Voiceover] Okay.
- [Voiceover] And if he does that by kind of shoring up
some puppet governments, in what we now call the
Eastern Block,
these nations that had been
taken over by Hitler
and then when the Soviet Union joined the
war on the side of the Allies,
then were retaken over
by Russia as they fought Hitler back.
- [Voiceover] Okay. So a lot of those central European
countries like Hungary, and Lithuania, and the former
Czechoslovakia, and the former Yugoslavia.
- [Voiceover] And he had the advantage of having
boots on the ground there because he'd beaten
back Hitler's invasion, eventually White Russian
troops were fighting against Hitler, and American
troops who were fighting against Hitler.
You know, they meet in Berlin
at the fall of Hitler,
and kind of shake hands in Berlin.
But the advantage that Russia had was
that they've got a lot more people here.
They've got most of Europe now,
at least east of Berlin,
has Soviet troops on the ground.
- [Voiceover] Sure. So you've been telling me
that the Soviet Union did yeoman's work
in containing and basically prosecuting the entire
Eastern Front during World War II.
- [Voiceover] Yeah, and the Soviet Union actually
lost 20 million people during World War II.
That's just a ludicrous number.
They lost more than anyone except
for China and Germany.
So they feel like they have a real stake
in the outcome of World War II.
- [Voiceover] So, at the end of this, what is the
situation in the USSR?
Like they've conquered all of this territory
but are they strong enough
economically to hold all of it
and feed everyone?
- [Voiceover] No, not really.
In fact, most of Europe is in pretty dire straits
if you think about it.
All of World War II was really kind of fought,
right, in Europe...
- [Voiceover] Right in the European bread basket.
- [Voiceover] And so there is serious economic
trouble in the aftermath of World War II.
People don't have enough to eat.
They certainly don't have any cash,
and they don't have any fuel,
which is very worrisome
in 1946 because of the terrible winter.
So people are cold and they are hungry.
And when people are cold and hungry there is
a lot of fuel for a possible revolution, right?.
Even in the 1930s, in the United States, there's
a lot of different political ideas that come up
during the Great Depression.
Because when your political system isn't working well,
you consider other kinds of political systems.
- [Voiceover] So the United States is worried that,
because of the cold winter of 1946, and scarcity
across western Europe, this blue part of the
map will turn much redder.
- [Voiceover] Right. So for the United States, they're
worried that communism is kind of the child
of hunger and poverty.
And they're afraid that because Stalin has so much
territory in Europe, that he is really well poised
to become "Hitler, part two."
- [Voiceover] Okay. And that is a sequel the
United States does not want to see.
- [Voiceover] No. Absolutely not.
And if they really learned anything from World War II,
it's that appeasement doesn't work, right?
During the 1930s, many people in the West,
the prime minister of England, Neville Chamberlain,
kind of felt like they didn't want to go back to war
because World War I is still very much on
people's minds during the 1930s.
And so they figured, let's not confront Hitler
head on because we're not up for that right now.
We're also in the middle of worldwide depression.
And that helped nothing because it just meant that
Hitler could gain a whole lot of territory
and World War II was much worse than it might
have been if they hadn't gone after Hitler earlier.
- [Voiceover] And stopped the Anschluss.
- [Voiceover] Yes.
- [Voiceover] If you stop the Anschluss, you stop
the "onschlaught."
- [Voiceover] (laughs) Exactly.
So they're really trying
to say, all right, Stalin, if he wants to, could probably
just run his way through the rest of Europe, right,
with very little resistance,
because the only nation in the world
that has the military and economic
power to stop the Soviet Union is the United States.
- [Voiceover] Because their factories and fields
were not bombed to cinders during the
European theater.
- [Voiceover] Right. So if they wanna stop
"Hitler, part two, the Stalin years,"
then they're going to have to really
stand up for capitalism
and also for the kind of material comforts and
democratic, what we call, self-determination.
This is one of the most important ideas to come
out of the alliance between the United States
and Britain, which is that the citizens of a region
should have the right to decide their own
form of government.
- [Voiceover] And they think of the Soviets as being
totalitarians. And that's not a wrong assessment
because there is a very strong totalitarian control
coming out of Moscow and the Soviet Union.
So they say, If we're going to keep Europe
from turning all red, all communist,
then we're going to need to kind of shore up Europe.
They think of communism as kind of being a little
bit like a flood, shall we say,
that you gotta, you gotta put sandbags
around the edges of communism.
Otherwise, it's gonna leak out.
- [Voiceover] So is the United States and their allies
also interested in creating their own kind of
light blue buffer zone, also next to the Eastern Block?
Or are they interested in...
Is this when we get into the creation of NATO?
- [Voiceover] NATO really comes out of an
understanding that World War II has not created peace
and so the US is going to have to
forego their more than a century-long
commitment to being isolationist
and take a stronger role in the world.
- [Voiceover] So, okay, for the folks at home, what
does NATO stand for? North Atlantic Treaty Organization?
- [Voiceover] North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
And this is a defensive alliance
between, at first, 12 nations,
which say that an attack on one
will be treated as an attack on all.
- [Voiceover] Gotcha! Well, that sounds like they're
maneuvering their boxers into position
and rubbing the shoulders and getting them ready.
- [Voiceover] Yes. Very much so.
And I think one of the tragedies
of the post-war era
is that maybe things didn't have to be like this?
Right after the US and the USSR had worked
together to defeat Hitler,
it might have possible for them
to coexist peacefully?
But I think they both had the idea that the other
economic system, and we're talking about
communism and capitalism, were just kind of
riddled with internal inconsistencies and that
eventually the world would be all capitalist
or all communist.
And they were going to have to really
marshal all of their resources behind
their chosen boxer or they were gonna lose.
- [Voiceover] Sounds like a fight that's gonna
take a long time.
- [Voiceover] And it did.
- [Voiceover] End round one!