Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Turning Point: The Bomb And The Cold War’ On Netflix, A Decades-Spanning Docuseries On How Nuclear Weapons Helped Start The Cold War

In a new docuseries, director Brian Knappenberger argues that the Cold War, which is generally considered to have ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, continues to this day. It’s hard to argue his point, given the state that the world is in today. But Knappenberger backs up his argument by showing how the development of nuclear weapons created the Cold War, and the two things are intertwined.

TURNING POINT: THE BOMB AND THE COLD WAR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A field with a military vehicle rolling over it. “NATO IRON WOLF EXERCISE. PABRADE, LITHUANIA. OCTOBER 22, 2022.”

The Gist: Turning Point: The Bomb And The Cold War is a nine-part docuseries, directed by Brian Knappenberger that discusses the Cold War in terms of how the development of nuclear weapons started it and defined it through the decades.

But before Knappenberger goes back to where things started, he takes a few minutes to discuss how, even though the Cold War as we knew it ended in the early 1990s with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine points out that the “cold war” in a lower-case sense never ended. One of the people interviewed on this is Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whom we’ll also hear from in the later episodes.

Then the narrative goes back to 1938, when two physicists and a chemist split an atom for the first time. The chain reaction that resulted led to the idea that it could be used as a weapon, which Adolf Hitler was eager to use against his European enemies. In the U.S., President Franklin D. Roosevelt continued to be neutral while things escalated in Europe and Japan aligned itself with the Axis powers of Germany and Italy. But after Pearl Harbor was attacked and the U.S. entered World War II, FDR knew it was imperative to beat the Germans to create a nuclear weapon.

The first part goes into details about the factors that led the U.S. to develop the bomb, via the Manhattan Project, and deploy it in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945, killing over 200,000 mostly civilian residents. Through expert interviews and archival footage, we get a thorough overview of how Harry Truman had to be brought up to speed on the Manhattan Project when he took over as President after FDR’s death, and how there is still an open debate over whether the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan helped end the war in the Pacific much sooner, despite the fact that the Japanese were in a vulnerable position.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Knappenberger used the same thorough production style in Turning Point: The Bomb And The Cold War as he used in Turning Point: 9/11 And The War On Terror.

Our Take: Unlike his treatise on 9/11 and the War On Terror, Knappenberger has done a good job of contextualizing just how the nuclear arms race got started. The first episode of this docuseries is almost 80 minutes long, but it’s riveting because it doesn’t just recite the history you might have learned in class or while watching countless History Channel docuseries on World War II. It couches the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the motivations the US government had to develop the weapons and deploy them to begin with.

But the idea of this first episode is also to show that, whether the U.S. government’s motivations were geared towards victory or it was something less pure than that — like keeping the Russians from getting involved and trying to claim pieces of Japan like they did with Eastern Europe — there really seemed to be a lack of forethought on the part of the military, Truman and his war cabinet about just what they will unleash with the use of these weapons.

Though Knappenberger does discuss some details about The Manhattan Project, and includes footage of J. Robert Oppenheimer giving the Bhagvad Gita quote “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” he is more interested in how the propaganda the U.S. issued during the war made the Japanese look less than human, setting up a situation where both Truman — who thought Hiroshima was a military installation — and American citizens wouldn’t think twice about leveling a city and killing hundreds of thousands. He talks with survivors of the bombings to show how horrific things were.

What we’re fascinated with here is that Knappenberger isn’t just going to take viewers into the meat of the “classic” Cold War, where we narrowly avoided mutually-assured destruction a few times and created a culture where proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam stood in for direct conflict with the Soviets. He’s going to go well beyond the end of the Soviet Union and democratization of Eastern Europe and talk about how Putin came to power, how he’s been fueled by notions of rebuilding the Russian Empire, and why things are as cold between superpowers as it ever was.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: As we see some classic Cold War scenes — Vietnam, the McCarthy hearings, Ronald Reagan saying “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”, all the way through Putin — one expert mentions that all of this was fueled by fear, on both sides.

Sleeper Star: While watching the remembrances of the survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all of whom were children at the time, we were not only fascinated that their memories were so vivid and descriptive, but that they even managed to survive almost 80 years after being exposed to that intense amount of radiation.

Most Pilot-y Line: None.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Turning Point: The Bomb And The Cold War isn’t going to make you feel better about the fate of the current world, but it does a good job of showing just how we got here and what might be in store.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.