[Sirens]
-This is not a test.
The United States is under nuclear attack.
In the 1950s and 60s,
a government campaign
made sure
that Americans were prepared
for the possibility of a nuclear attack
from our main adversary,
the Soviet Union.
-Enemy jet bombers
carrying nuclear weapons
can sweep over a variety of routes
and drop bombs on any important target in the United States.
-When danger threatened him,
he never got hurt, he knew just what to do.
There were even cartoons aimed at children,
-Duck
and cover.
-We must be ready
all the time
for the atomic bomb.
-Duck and cover!
-Duck
and cover.
-When I teach my class at Stanford,
invariably some student will ask me,
how in the world
did we end up with 70,000 nuclear weapons
during the Cold War?
Former Secretary of Defense
William Perry
tells his students
that the massive arsenals
help deter the two sides
from using them.
-We believed
the other country was planning
to conduct a surprise attack on us
and therefore
we had to
have enough weapons to survive
that surprise attack.
-A payload larger
than any of the Russians have launched.
-We saw their weapons going up
and we responded to that.
There was a back and forth cycle.
-At this moment,
we could explode
11,500 nuclear weapons on the Soviet Union
and they can explode
9,500 weapons on us,
beginning 30 minutes from right now.
But Perry says
Americans were worrying about the wrong thing.
-The danger
was not
that one side would deliberately attack the other side,
a surprise attack,
a bolt out of the blue,
but that we would blunder into a nuclear war.
-Will it be bad?
-It'll be a holocaust,
it will be hell, it will be the end of everything we know.
For decades,
the looming nuclear threat
permeated American culture.
-They will not reach their targets
for at least another hour.
I am,
I am positive, Dimitri.
-If the Soviets launch a surprise attack,
there's no time.
-23 minutes from warning to impact.
But the fear was tempered
by the fact that,
even as their rivalry grew,
the Americans and Soviets were meeting regularly.
-During the Cold War,
we realized the level of danger
of nuclear war,
and we
sat down with the Soviets
and worked out agreements
that would reduce the risk of nuclear war.
-The first agreement ever
to eliminate an entire class
of U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons.
-We were talking very closely,
so we created an atmosphere
of low uncertainty,
high predictability
and stability.
-Tonight,
the red flag was taken down from the Kremlin.
Then,
with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991,
more than four decades of cold war
came to an end.
-The Cold War is over.
The arms race has been stopped.
-By the grace of God,
America won the Cold War.
-And after that happens,
the amount of tensions go down
so dramatically that,
by the early 90s,
people don't think nuclear war is on the table at all.
We stop preparing for it,
we stop, uh, uh,
talking about it for the most part.
-When the Cold War ended,
I breathed a huge sigh of relief because I understood
at least as well as anybody
just how dangerous it was,
how close we had come several times
to a nuclear confrontation
that could have ended our civilization.
And
I believed we would never be so foolish
as to restart the Cold War.
But the danger
has come back again.
-Russia rolls out a new missile
nicknamed the Satan II.
Adding to the danger,
nations in unpredictable parts of the world
have acquired nuclear weapons.
-In the last 20 years,
we've added
North Korea,
India,
Pakistan,
and as the world proliferates nuclear weapons,
the risks increase dramatically.
A lot of these countries
have very poor safeguards
on their nuclear weapons.
-Which means
rogue states,
probably terrorist groups over the next decade.
We've got to determine what we're going to do about it.
-We need to learn the lessons of the Cold War,
that when the danger,
the risk of nuclear war
becomes high,
that we need to talk to each other
and figure out together how to reduce those risks.
-Let us recognize
the threat to our way of life.
During the Cold War,
Americans were alert
to the threat they faced.
-Let’s face it.
Today,
some worry the public has become complacent,
as hugs and handshakes
mask the dangers of a new
nuclear arms race.
-I want people to think of them
as actual things that exist in the world,
actual things that might be used in their lifetime.
They're not
fictional creations,
they're not
cultural metaphors.
They're real.
They're real devices
and they're waiting in silos for the signal.
-I have come to believe
that the danger of some kind of a nuclear catastrophe today
is actually greater than it was during the Cold War.
Greater than the Cold War.
[Explosion]
We believed
that the danger of nuclear annihilation had gone away
and we've never been quite able to re-grasp
that it's come back.