American History Tellers - The Cold War - Last Man Standing | 6

Episode Date: January 24, 2018

In the early 1970s, while trying to wind down the war in Vietnam, President Richard Nixon made overtures to Moscow and Beijing that would usher in a new era of the Cold War: Detente. But the thaw in relations didn’t last long - the Iran Hostage Crisis and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan set the old adversaries against each other once again. Throughout the Eighties, President Reagan took a hard line against the “Evil Empire,” ramping up military spending and rhetoric, and Americans were once again tense with nuclear anxiety.Until suddenly, it all changed.Support us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. It's the dead of winter, February 1975. It's cold where you live in suburban Philadelphia, and you're eager for some sunshine. But you're excited. For the next week, you're trading your scarf and boots for shorts and sneakers. You and your family are off to Disney World. Disney World is still new in the mid-1970s. When you arrive, you look around to get your bearings, and you hear an astonishing number of accents and languages.

It seems the whole world has come to Florida for a winter escape. The Cinderella Castle looms straight ahead, centering the entire park. Adventureland and Frontierland are off to the left, Fantasyland at 1 o'clock. With your crew of three boys, you're making a beeline for Tomorrowland to the right. The draw? Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, we proudly present Space Mountain. Your boys have been talking about Disney World's new space-themed roller coaster non-stop since it opened in January.

You hadn't realized that you were nearly as excited as they were until the lot of you encountered a set of barriers about 100 yards from the entrance. Hey, what's the story here? This is the main attraction. Why is it closed? We'll reopen in an hour or so, sir. We've got some special guests. In the meantime, you're welcome to check out the Grand Prix or the Star Jets, or if your boys are space fans, stick around. You might see something interesting. After a brief negotiation involving promises of a second ride and ice cream, the boys agree to wait. A small crowd is gathered when a man in a checked sports coat and sunglasses approaches. He's wearing a NASA pin. Sorry for the delay, folks, but we're just wrapping up. We at NASA

just want to make sure that our guests experience the best of American hospitality. There's a flurry of activity back at the entrance. Lots of men in suits. Now some NASA hats. There's laughter all around and snippets of Russian. Suddenly, you realize what's happening. Cosmonauts. Kids, those are cosmonauts.

Like astronauts, but from Russia. What are they doing here? Training. The space race is over. We won, remember? Now we're cooperating in space. Okay, but why do they get to jump the line for Space Mountain? I don't know. A consolation prize for the moon, I guess. Later that summer, your kids can't stop laughing when they see news reports covering the story of handshakes in space. They know this isn't the first time the crews of Apollo and Soyuz have met. You laugh with them. It is mildly ridiculous, after all. But you can't help but reflect on the historical moment. Even 10 years ago, it seemed like the United States and the

Soviet Union might destroy each other in a nuclear apocalypse. Now, the two countries' astronauts are riding roller coasters together. This is detente. You begin to think that humanity just might make it through the Cold War after all. I'm Sachi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the hosts of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns of the most infamous scams of all time, the impact on victims, and what's left once the facade falls away. Follow Scamfluencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Now streaming. Welcome to Buy It Now. app or wherever you get your podcasts. From Wondery, Stream free on Freebie and Prime Video. From Wondery, this is American History Tellers. Our history, your story. I'm Lindsey Graham. On the previous episode of American History Tellers, we talked about the sea change in American politics in the long 1960s. At the beginning of the decade, President Kennedy still hoped to inspire the world to follow the United States' lead.

By decade's end, it was all President Nixon could do to hold the country together. The United States was still fighting communists in Vietnam, but an increasing number of Americans opposed the fight. To most Americans in 1972, communism no longer felt like an existential threat. The United States faced enough problems at home in the form of poverty, racism, crumbling infrastructure, and environmental damage. In today's episode, we're looking at the endgame. For a brief period in the 1970s, it looked as if the United States and the Soviet Union might put their differences aside in favor of cooperation, in space, and maybe other things too. But when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979,

and the United States elected Ronald Reagan as president in 1980, the Cold War rushed back. Suddenly, that giant stockpile of nuclear weapons seemed very, very threatening. Yet somehow, remarkably, the Cold War didn't end with the world blown to pieces. In 1989, East Germans pulled down the Berlin Wall. Two years later, the Soviet Union collapsed. And then, just like that, the Cold War was over. But let's start at the beginning of the end. Detente. Imagine that it's the summer of 1971, July 15th to be exact. You like to make the most of long summer evenings, sometimes putting off dinner until 8 o'clock if it means you have the chance to use the grill after work. But not tonight.

After work, you swing by your favorite takeout joint and head home in a hurry. The president's addressing the country at 7.30, and you do not want to miss it. No one seems to know what the address is about. The only information the news reports have is that Henry Kissinger just got back from Vietnam. You and your wife settle into the couch, click on the TV. You're a few minutes early. You're restless, tired of the war, but also tired

of all the grousing. You've been a Nixon supporter for years. Consider yourself a member of the silent majority that put him in the White House. College kids protesting in the streets, disrespecting veterans. The country's gone to hell in a handbasket. I know, I know. But maybe Kissinger's finally figured it out this time. Nixon's been promising to wind this thing down since 68. Right now, here comes the president. Good evening.

I have requested this television time tonight to announce a major development in our efforts to build a lasting peace in the world. Well, it's about time. You and your wife lean back a bit, relieved. But this speech doesn't go where you think it's going. There can be no stable and enduring peace without the participation of the People's Republic of China and its 750 people. Red China? What the hell? Hush, the president's Republic of China and its... Red China? What the hell? Hush, the president's talking.

The announcement I shall now read is being issued simultaneously in Peking and in the United States. What on earth? Premier Zhou Enlai, on behalf of the government of the People's Republic of China, has extended an invitation to President Nixon to visit China at an appropriate date before May 1972. Dick Nixon's going to red China.

What does that even mean? He's going to Peking? Where's he going next? Moscow? He must have a plan. We just don't know what it is yet. Nixon would never go soft on communists. If an American president has to go to communist China, I can think of no better than Nixon. But our hypothetical Nixon supporter was right to be confused. Nixon had built his career on anti-communism. But as promised, Nixon went to China in February 1972. Live news coverage showed him and Pat Nixon descending the steps of Air Force One, with Chinese Premier Zhu Enlai waiting at the bottom.

After standing through performances of the Star-Spangled Banner and the Chinese National Anthem, the two men reviewed an honor guard of the People's Liberation Army. Pictures from Nixon's trip showed the president laughing with Chairman Mao. And that's not all. Three months later, Nixon did go to Moscow. By 1972, Nixon needed both Beijing and Moscow on his side. Or if not on his side, exactly, at least not in his face.

As the negotiations in Vietnam dragged on with no end in sight, Nixon hoped to isolate the North Vietnamese from the leading communist powers, China and the Soviet Union. Nixon also hoped to play China and the Soviet Union off one another to press his advantage with each. And so, in 1972, Nixon signed a series of diplomatic agreements with the two countries that America had been sparring with since the end of World War II. Nixon encouraged the press to refer to his time in China as the week that changed the world, and the long-term effects of his visit were, in fact, transformative.

Until the moment that Nixon shook Zhou's hand, the United States had no official communications with mainland China since the Communists won victory in 1949. But by the time Nixon left, the United States and China had started down the path of normalizing their relationship. Full diplomatic relations would take another seven years, but the door to trade and other kinds of exchange had cracked open. In Moscow, Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev signed a series of agreements that brought tensions between the two countries to their lowest point in the entire Cold War. I've already mentioned one outcome of this meeting, a joint mission in space to take place in 1975. But space was just the beginning. Nixon and Brezhnev signed a series of bilateral exchange agreements for science, technology, and culture.

The two leaders agreed to work together to tackle problems that crossed national borders like pollution. The most important agreements at the Moscow summit involved nuclear weapons. The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty limited each country's ability to deploy nuclear defense systems. The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks Agreement, better known as SALT-1, froze the number of strategic missile launchers and limited the number of ICBMs. The arms control agreements reached in Moscow were far from perfect, but they marked a major turning point in U.S.-Soviet relationships. For the first time since the Cold War began, American and Soviet leaders agreed to limit

the other's ability to respond to a nuclear attack. Just think about this for a moment. Here were two countries that had thousands of nuclear warheads pointing at each other, agreeing that enough was enough. What's more, the two leaders agreed to keep talking in hopes of actually reducing the number of weapons in the nuclear stockpile. Historians and political commentators refer to this period of the Cold War as détente, a French word that means loosening or relaxing. Here, it means the thawing out of the U.S.-Soviet relationship. Détente implied the possibility of mutual coexistence. Back in the first episode of this series, we talked about how the ideologies

of the Cold War assumed that the world was not big enough to contain both capitalism and communism. Détente changed that calculus. United States, Soviet Union, and China now all acknowledge the other's right to exist. In effect, by agreeing to detente, Richard Nixon recognized communism as a legitimate form of government. Which isn't to say exactly that the United States stopped opposing communism, or that the Soviet Union stopped supporting revolutionary governments. In the 1970s, the Cold War mostly moved to the Third World. The United States finally extricated itself from Vietnam in 1973,

but that didn't mean the era of containment was over. After the debacle of Vietnam, U.S. politicians proved reluctant to send U.S. troops abroad. Instead, in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, the United States worked behind the scenes. Sometimes, the United States influenced events abroad through covert action. In Chile, the CIA opposed the government of democratically elected President Salvador Allende. Historians continue to debate exactly how involved the CIA was in the coup that installed dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1973, but we were there. More frequently, though, the United States supplied arms, advice, and money to parties it wanted to see in charge. The Soviet Union did

the same thing with its own client states. The result was a series of proxy wars across Africa and the Middle East. The United States supported Israel and Iran The Soviet Union supported Iraq and Syria The United States supported South Africa The Soviet Union supported the African National Congress The United States supported the Portuguese authorities in Angola and Mozambique And the Soviet Union supported nationalist insurgents Over and over again, partisans fought their civil wars with U.S.

and Soviet weapons. Ordinarily, at this point in the show, I might ask you to imagine yourself in the shoes of a typical American learning of these proxy wars. But in truth, most Americans knew next to nothing about them. American newspapers and television networks aren't known for their in-depth coverage of civil wars in Mozambique or Ethiopia. But that did all change on November 4, 1979. The American embassy in Tehran is in the hands of Muslim students tonight. They stormed the embassy, fought the Marine Guards for three hours, overpowered them, and took dozens of American hostages. United States Marine Corps guards used tear gas to try to disperse the mob of Islamic students.

But that wasn't enough. Hundreds of Iranians finally overran the embassy compound, seizing about 90 people, mostly Americans. This picture tells it all. This flag was apparently taken from someone's office

inside the United States embassy. It was burned outside the embassy's gates. To the Iranian demonstrators who set fire to it, this was a symbol of victory. The Iranian hostage crisis lasted 444 days. It almost certainly cost Jimmy Carter a second term in the White House. But the crisis also marked an inflection point in 20th century American history. The Shah had come to power in 1953, the victor in a CIA-backed coup. For most of the 1960s, Iran was one of the largest recipients of U.S. military aid. The United States considered Iran and its oil strategically important. In 1979, Iranian revolutionaries deposed the Shah and installed a new Islamist government.

The United States lost a close ally, not to communism, but to radical theology. The irony in this situation was that the Soviet Union was facing a similar challenge in Afghanistan. In 1978, communists seized control of the Afghan government. They faced an immediate challenge from radical Islamist insurgents known as Mujahideen. Back in Moscow, Brezhnev made the same calculations that Carter did for Iran, but reached a different conclusion. Carter and the United States realized it could not win a fight against a popular nationalist movement, so we didn't attempt to stop the Iranian revolution. But Brezhnev made a different choice. In December 1979, the Soviet army invaded

Afghanistan to support the communist government. To absolutely no one's surprise, the Mujahideen fought back with American guns. And with that, the time was over terrorizes Victorian London. Blood and garlic, bats and crucifixes. Even if you haven't read the book, you think you know the story. One of the incredible things about Dracula is that not only is it this wonderful snapshot of the 19th century, but it also has so much resonance today. The vampire doesn't cast a reflection in a mirror. So when we look in the mirror, the only thing we see is our own monstrous abilities. From the host and producer of American History Tellers and History Daily comes the new podcast, The Real History of Dracula. We'll reveal how author Bram Stoker raided ancient folklore, exploited Victorian fears around sex, science, and religion, and how even today we remain enthralled to his strange creatures of

the night. You can binge all episodes of The Real History of Dracula exclusively with Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus and The Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. For years, American Scandal has taken you deep inside the biggest controversies and shocking events in U.S. history. And now you can listen to exclusive seasons on Wondery Plus. Go beyond the headlines with jaw-dropping stories and immersive reporting that unveils the complex truth behind these scandals. In our exclusive season, The Hare Krishna Murders, dive into the twisted world of a

rogue sect of Hare Krishnas. When devotees mysteriously disappear, the trail leads to a dark web of deceit, greed, and even murder. Or explore the sordid tale of Enron as we reveal the shocking depths of corporate fraud that led to one of the biggest bankruptcies in American history. From political conspiracies to corporate corruption, these in-depth investigations will keep you on the edge of your seat. Experience American scandal like never before, with exclusive seasons that you won't find anywhere else. And on Wondery+, you can binge entire new seasons before they're publicly available. Start your free trial of Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify to start listening today

and uncover the real story behind America's most notorious scandals. Imagine that it's early February, 1980, a weekend afternoon. A bright winter sun streams in through the picture window of your host's home. There's a pleasant aroma of coffee drifting in from the kitchen and little platters of cookies scattered throughout the room. You've gathered here today with 15 like-minded souls for a letter-writing campaign. Since 1977, you've been getting together once a month to learn about what's happening to political dissidents around the world.

Collectively, you've sent hundreds of letters to foreign leaders, members of Congress, and your local newspapers. You don't consider yourself an activist, but the human rights movement speaks to your sense of justice and humanity. Your host claps her hands to get everyone's attention. Can folks take a seat, please? I'd like to get started. You make a quick dash to the kitchen to top off your cup of coffee.

This might be a long meeting. As I'm sure all of you already know, it's finally happened. Andrei Sakharov was arrested in January. This was international news, so we don't need to worry about raising awareness. The question is, what do we do about it? Everyone starts talking. One at a time, please. One at a time. Sakharov's being sent to Gorky, not to prison, so he may be able to have visitors.

If someone's sending a delegation, we can help fundraise. Why do we have exchanges with a country that arrests human rights leaders? Cut them off. Detente isn't worth it. We need to isolate the Soviet Union. I think we should write to Congress. Nothing bad's going to happen to Sakharov and Gorky. His Nobel Prize will protect him. We need to keep the focus on the more obscure people.

Like, what's his name? Sharansky? I still don't understand why we're focusing on the Soviets. Have you heard about what's happening in Chile? Jimmy Carter's such a hypocrite. All this talk about human rights while we're still working with Pinochet. You sit back and listen. It's hard to know the right thing to do. Would isolating the Soviet Union hurt or help the dissidents? Is Congress actually interested in protecting human rights everywhere or just in places where it's politically convenient? Similar scenes unfolded in church basements and living rooms across the country in the late 1970s and early 80s. The human rights revolution was one of the more surprising outcomes of detente. You might even call it one of the

most remarkable instances of unintended consequences in political history. In August 1975, leaders from 35 countries, including the United States and the Soviet Union, signed the Helsinki Accords. Brezhnev considered the accords a triumph. By legitimizing post-war borders in Europe, the agreement effectively recognized Stalin's 1945 land grab. But the Accords pledged signing countries to adhere to certain principles of conduct. This included a commitment to human rights, with participating states agreeing to, and I quote, respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion, or belief, for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion. Now, the Helsinki Accords were not legally binding,

but they included provisions for follow-up studies and meetings. According to at least one account, Brezhnev believed he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in negotiating the Helsinki Accords. Instead, the 1975 prize went to Andrei Sakharov, the most prominent human rights activist in the Soviet Union and possibly the world. For dissidents like Sakharov, the Helsinki Accords presented an opportunity for legitimacy. Imagine their surprise and delight when the Soviet government distributed more than 20 million copies of the text in multiple languages throughout the Soviet Union. The Accords raised the profile of the small

but dedicated community of Soviet human rights activists. They immediately formed partnerships with other human rights activists in Europe, the United States, and Canada. The global response to their work rattled Soviet leadership in the late 1970s and early 80s. While it would be a stretch to say that the human rights revolution caused the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost, or openness, made no sense without it. But I'm getting ahead of myself. In 1976, fresh off of the Watergate scandal, American voters selected Jimmy Carter as their next president. To Carter, an evangelical Christian, it seemed obvious that the United States should embrace human rights. Here he is proclaiming his

commitment to human rights in his inaugural address. Our commitment to human rights must be absolute. Our laws, fair, our natural beauty, preserved. The powerful must not persecute the weak. And human dignity must be enhanced. Carter used the power of his office to move considerations of human rights to the mainstream of U.S. foreign policy. This was a dramatic shift, and with immediate effects. Congress considered sanctions for human rights violators

and linked the highly desirable, most favored nation trade status to human rights performance. So many Americans rushed to become members of Amnesty International that the group briefly considered limiting its membership. Historian Barbara Keyes explains Americans' rapid embrace of human rights as a response to the shame and guilt of Vietnam. Her book on the topic is appropriately named Reclaiming American Virtue. In American politics, human rights offered something for everyone. Keyes explains,

By focusing attention on abuses elsewhere, conservatives found a potent tool to resurrect anti-communism, and liberals found a way to restore their faith in America's fundamental benevolence. And in this odd way, the mantra of human rights contained the seeds of destruction for detente. By the late 1970s, both liberals and conservatives alike questioned why the United States was working so hard to restore its relationship with the Soviet Union when that country had such a dismal record on human rights. This particular dynamic helped explain why the

Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was such a breaking point for detente. Soviet citizens, like Americans, were tired of foreign interventions on behalf of Cold War ideologies. Dissidents like Sakharov spoke out against it, and the Soviet government cracked down with a series of arrests. American liberals decried the arrests, arguing that the United States needed to take its commitment to human rights seriously. And conservatives shook their heads, asking why Americans expected anything else from communist dictators. In this conservative reading, the focus on human rights had made the United States weak. It's a narrative that gained traction as the Iran hostage crisis became an American media sensation.

Walter Cronkite adopted a new sign-off for the duration of the crisis, counting the number of days that the hostages had been in captivity. According to these critics, Carter was weak. He was weak on communists, weak on extremists, and weak in the face of a crisis. And then, this happened. A U.S. effort to rescue the hostages in Iran was aborted by President Carter after an equipment failure forced a change in plans. Eight Americans were killed when two U.S. aircraft collided as the American volunteers were being pulled out of a remote area of the Iranian desert. We now know the rescue attempt... The botched attempt to rescue the American hostages in March 1980 cost Carter re-election. Republican

presidential candidate Ronald Reagan made Carter's supposed weakness a central plank of his campaign for the presidency. You couldn't miss this message if you turned on your television in the fall of 1980. Here's a clip from one of Reagan's famous Peace from Strength campaign ads. Jimmy Carter's weak, indecisive leadership has vacillated before events in Angola, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan. Jimmy Carter still doesn't know that it takes strong leadership to keep the peace. Reagan sounded this theme over and over again on the campaign trail. Here he is at a rally in late summer. We know only too well that war comes not when the forces of freedom are strong.

It is when they are weak that tyrants are tempted. Reagan suggested that Carter had squandered American power, exposing the country to new threats. Here's another part of an ad. Peace is made by the fact of strength, economic, military, and strategic. Peace is lost when such strength disappears, or just as bad, is seen by an adversary as disappearing. Reagan had been fending off communist aggression since his days in Hollywood. As president of the Screen Actors Guild in the late 40s and early 50s,

Reagan tried to keep the communists out of the union and cooperated with the FBI. Forty years later, with his lean, craggy face and cowboy hat, Reagan looked the part of a tough, vigorous American. And so, Reagan won the 1980 presidential election in a landslide. Incumbent Jimmy Carter took only five states, including his home state of Georgia. Carter spent his last weeks in office racing against the clock. Neither the president nor the Iranians trusted Reagan to negotiate for the release of the 52 hostages still being held in Tehran. A breakthrough came in the last days of Carter's presidency. On the morning of Inauguration Day, Carter waited and waited for the call to say that the hostages had been freed. He put off leaving the White House until the last possible moment. Finally, after the inauguration, a Secret

Service agent let Carter know that the first plane carrying the hostages had left Tehran at 12.33 p.m., 33 minutes into the first day of the Reagan administration. The hostage crisis humiliated Carter, arguably ruining his presidency. But Reagan, not Carter, would get to announce their release. From the first hour of his presidency, Reagan projected strength. Reagan benefited from a similar combination of timing, luck, and image for the rest of his presidency. The Cold War might have had a very different ending without it. In November 1991, media tycoon Robert Maxwell mysteriously vanished from his luxury yacht in the Canary Islands. But it wasn't just his body that would come to the surface in the days that followed.

It soon emerged that Robert's business was on the brink of collapse, and behind his facade of wealth and success was a litany of bad investments, mounting debt, and multi-million dollar fraud. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show Business Movers. We tell the true stories of business leaders who risked it all, the critical moments that define their journey, and the ideas that transform the way we live our lives. In our latest series, a young refugee fleeing the Nazis arrives in Britain determined to make something of his life.

Taking the name Robert Maxwell, he builds a publishing and newspaper empire that spans the globe. But ambition eventually curdles into desperation, and Robert's determination to succeed turns into a willingness to do anything to get ahead. Follow Business Movers wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. This is the emergency broadcast system. A ballistic missile threat has been detected inbound to your area. Your phone buzzes and you look down to find this alert. What do you do next? Maybe you're at the grocery store, or maybe you're with your secret lover, or maybe you're robbing a bank. Based on the real-life false alarm that terrified Hawaii in 2018, Incoming, a brand-new fiction podcast exclusively on Wondery Plus,

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Imagine that you're a college student, 1983. It's a Sunday night before Thanksgiving, and several of your friends have already left town. You grab a bag of chips and head over to a friend's place off campus where pizza and beer await. Truth be told, you'd rather stay in tonight. You've got a lot of reading to do before break, and TV movies aren't usually your thing. But your friend is insistent. Hey, you're here. I was this close to calling you. Come on, grab a beer. It's just about to start. You do as you're told and squeeze into the couch with three other guys. Your friend has assembled you for the unlikely purpose of watching The Day After, an ABC movie special about total nuclear war.

Hello, I'm John Cullum. In this evening's ABC Theater presentation of The Day After, I play a father in a typical American family who experienced the catastrophic events of a full scale nuclear war. Before the movie begins, we would like to caution parents... When the show starts with a warning about unusually

disturbing content, you let out a nervous laugh. What are you getting us into, Mike? They're showing it on network TV. It can't be that bad. The movie opens in Kansas, and it turns out to be a slow burn. A farm family argues over premarital sex. A doctor and his wife mourn the fact that their adult daughter is moving to Boston. A college student tries to sign up for a class he needs for graduation. But as the characters go about their business, they're occasionally interrupted by news reports about some sort of crisis in West Berlin.

The Soviets are sealing off the borders and lining up tanks, but no one's taking the threats seriously. It's not going to happen now. Nah, people are crazy, but not that crazy. Okay, we get it. No one's ready for nuclear war, including the writers. Would you all stop? Everybody said this is supposed to be big. They just have to set it up, that get it. No one's ready for nuclear war, including the writers. Would you all stop? Everybody said this is supposed to be big.

They just have to set it up, that's all. Finally, 40 minutes in, all hell breaks loose. Suddenly, this movie is tense. Roger, copy. This is not an exercise. Roger, understand. Major Reinhardt, we have a massive attack against the U.S. at this time. ICBMs. Numerous ICBMs. Roger, understand. Over 300 missiles inbound now. By the time the hydrogen bombs hit Kansas City, no one's breathing.

For a solid five minutes, the screen shows terrible images of destruction, fireballs, building collapses, and repeated freeze frames in neon orange of humans x-rayed by the nuclear blast. No one says anything for the rest of the movie, and no one finishes their pizza. More than 100 million Americans join these hypothetical college students in watching the national broadcast of The Day After. President Reagan wasn't watching it that night because he had already seen it. ABC sent him a screener a month earlier. He watched it at Camp David and then recorded his response in his diary. It's very effective and left me greatly depressed. When it came to communism, Reagan was a hardliner. That spring, he referred to the Soviet Union as an evil empire. And just a few weeks after that, he introduced plans for a far-fetched space-based

missile defense system that the press derided as Star Wars. Nuclear strategists were appalled. By calling the Soviet Union an evil empire, Reagan was repudiating detente. He was saying communism was not something the Americans could live with. It was evil and had to be destroyed. The nuclear strategists also warned that building a nuclear defense system actually made a nuclear attack more, not less, likely. They warned that Star Wars probably violated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Nuclear deterrence depended on mutually assured destruction, a mutual suicide pact. If one party had the ability to survive, it threw all the calculations out of whack. But what's important to understand is that Reagan also maintained a healthy fear of nuclear weapons.

He ordered the Star Wars program because he simply could not believe that the United States had no way to defend itself from an incoming nuclear attack. There's a reason mutually assured destruction is abbreviated as MAD, and Reagan thought the whole system insane. Reagan was genuinely disturbed by the day after. That fall of 1983, tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union were unusually high. In September, the Soviets shot down a commercial South Korean airliner when it crossed into Soviet airspace. All 269 passengers were killed, including a congressman from Georgia. Meanwhile, the United States was preparing to deploy a new series of missiles across Western Europe. So when NATO forces started annual war game exercises meant

to prepare for a nuclear attack, the possibility for misunderstanding was high. The Soviet Union put its forces on high alert, higher than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. This was scary stuff. So even while Reagan was plowing money into Star Wars and the Pentagon's budget, he kept pressing his advisors for ways to reduce or possibly even eliminate nuclear weapons. The historian John Lewis Gaddis goes so far as to call Reagan a nuclear abolitionist. Reagan did not want to continue the limitation aspect of the SALT talks that Nixon had started back in Moscow. Instead,

Reagan wanted a START treaty, the Strategic Arms Reduction. Reagan was acting like both a hawk and a dove. The problem was that no one, either in the White House or in Moscow, believed him. But in 1985, Reagan got a new negotiating partner in Moscow, one who shared his dreams of a world without nuclear weapons, Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union on March 10, 1985, and he inherited a country in crisis. Dissidents continued to draw attention to the country's dismal human rights record. The war in Afghanistan was expensive and unpopular. Store shelves were empty, and corruption was rampant. And Reagan's

saber-rattling forced the country to spend money it did not have on defense systems it could not afford. Then, on April 26, 1986, a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded. The resulting disaster sent a radioactive plume across half of Europe and exposed the decay that was rotting the Soviet Union from the inside. Gorbachev was ready to negotiate. That fall, the two leaders met in a stark white house that sits on the edge of a windswept harbor in Reykjavik, Iceland. The air in Reykjavik is cold and salty, the October skies heavy and gray. The Reykjavik summit was inconclusive, and yet it was a moment of hope and one of the crucial final turning points in the Cold War.

Gorbachev and Reagan put everything on the table, including the possibility of completely eliminating ballistic missiles. When the leaders next met in December 1987, they agreed to remove intermediate-range ballistic missiles from Europe. By the late 1980s, the ideological foundations of the Cold War were crumbling. In the wake of Chernobyl, Moscow experimented with glasnost and perestroika, openness and reform. Beijing began to experiment with market reforms, allowing and even encouraging private ownership. And all across Eastern Europe, new social and political movements

pushed up against the limits of communist control. And then, in 1989, global communism just collapsed. It wasn't always peaceful. In Beijing, authorities crushed protesters who had been occupying Tiananmen Square. China would keep its one-party political system, even as it instituted economic reforms. But on the same day that an image of a man facing down Chinese tanks sparked global outrage, voters in Poland participated in a partially free election.

By June, Hungary was opening its borders to the West. The changes happening across Europe were electrifying. Imagine that you're a high school freshman in the fall of 1989. It's late in the afternoon of November 9th, and you're headed to your favorite class, German. Guten Tag, wie geht's? Wo ist die Toilette? It's fun to try to talk to your classmates with your limited vocabulary, but what you really like about this class is the focus

on German history. Your instructor has had a lot to say about Berlin, the divided city that symbolizes the Cold War. President Reagan asked Gorbachev to tear down this wall two years before, but that appeal sounded like politics, not reality. The wall was a fixture of the Cold War, the fixture of the Cold War. It was the totem of the time. We were over here, and they were over there, and in between us, the wall. Herr Wieden isn't there when the bell rings. But a few minutes later, he comes in wheeling the AV cart, holding a hefty TV and VCR. Guten Tag! Regular class is cancelled. We've got a revolution to watch. This seems unlike Herr Wieden. But then you see what's happening.

The TV is broadcasting live coverage from the Berlin Wall, where thousands of East Germans have gathered. Those who pass through the checkpoints look bewildered, cracking nervous smiles at the television cameras waiting for them on the other side in the West. Herviden explains, So here's what we know. German television networks announced that the borders are now open, but no one really knows what that means. East Germans are starting to cross the border, but no one knows if they're going to be safe or if someone will stop them. There are too many people. There's no way the guards can hold them back, not unless they shoot everyone, and it doesn't look like that's going to happen.

Not much changes during your class period, but it's starting to by the time you're home from school. When you turn on the TV, you see Germans pouring across the border, delirious in celebration. Good evening, everyone. From the west side of the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate, I'm Tom Brokaw. The Brandenburg Gate, of course, is in East Berlin, and the sound that you hear and what you're seeing tonight, not hammers and sickles, but hammers and chisels as young people take down this wall bit by bit. You spend the entire evening with your family,

watching the wall come down right in front of you. By the time you go to bed, East and West Germans were dancing together on what remained of the wall. How did the Cold War end? It was very unexpected. All those freedom movements in Eastern Europe that took place in 1989, this wasn't the first time that the citizens of Hungary and Czechoslovakia had attempted to stand up to communist oppression.

But this time, instead of sending in tanks, Moscow stood down. By not responding, Soviet leaders made clear that they would allow its former satellites to determine their own political path. The thing about the former Soviet Union is that its relationship to its republics was always somewhat tenuous. The Soviet republic's relationship to Moscow wasn't like American states' relationship to Washington. Some of the republics, like Lithuania, had been separate countries prior to the war. Others, like Georgia, had long resented the rule of the Tsars. So in the late 1980s, nationalists in the Soviet Republic started demanding their own independence.

In 1990, at Gorbachev's insistence, the Soviet Union allowed republics to hold multi-party elections. And over and over again, the Communist Party lost. In the fall of 1991, ten of the former Soviet republics declared their independence. And later that month, the Soviet Union dissolved. On Christmas Day, 1991, Gorbachev officially resigned as president of the now-defunct Soviet Union. The flag was lowered for the last time. The Cold War was over. From the perspective of 1991, the United States seemed to be the unequivocal winner of the Cold War. The globe's only superpower with political and military might unchallenged and unchallengeable. American leaders

were optimistic about what this meant for the future. Liberals wondered what the United States could accomplish with its peace dividend, all the money and resources it would not spend fighting the Soviet Union. And free market conservatives pointed to the triumph of capitalism over communism. Historians like Francis Fukuyama called it the end of history, a period when ideologies were unchallenged. Capitalism ruled, and people everywhere, all over the globe, could finally be free. President George W. Bush famously referred to the era as a new world order. Today, with the benefit of hindsight and the opening of the archives, historians are still debating what caused the end of the Cold War.

Many historians, especially those outside of the United States, suggest that the Soviet Union simply collapsed under its own weight. The Soviet Union was huge. At its height, it occupied one-sixth of the Earth's landmass. The country simply lacked the wherewithal to govern such a diverse, widely distributed population, and it didn't help that the Soviet Communist Party was notoriously corrupt. Others, especially American historians, have suggested that the United States more or less spent the Soviet Union into oblivion.

Reagan's approach to missile defense was phenomenally expensive, and the Soviet Union's command economy simply could not keep up. There are other ideas. Some say that telling the story of the post-World War II era through the lens of the Cold War misses some pretty big historical trends that happened independent of the U.S. and the USSR, like decolonization or the rise of global capitalism. American and Soviet leaders saw the Cold War as a big, bipolar struggle, but a lot of the rest of the world saw it as a day-to-day fight for self-determination and survival. Like a lot of history, the story can vary according to who you ask and where they're standing as they watch global events unfold.

But on New Year's Day, 1992, one thing looked certain. America had won the Cold War. What we'd do with that victory would become the next chapter of the American story. From Wondery, this is Episode 6 of The Cold War from American History Tellers. On the next episode, I speak with two fascinating historians. We'll learn more about the Cold War's lasting impact on society, and how the standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union

compares to another, much earlier rivalry all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. American History Tellers is hosted, sound designed, and edited by me, Lindsey Graham, for Airship. This episode is written by Audra Wolfe, PhD. Executive producers are Ben Adair and Hernán López for Wondery. Are you in trouble with the law? Need a lawyer who will fight like hell to keep you out of jail? We defend and we fight just like you'd want your own children defended.

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