https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-worst-cold-war-documentary-ever-made-part-2/
I jumped the gun near the end of my review of the first three episodes of Netflix’s documentary series Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War. As I wrote in “The Worst Cold War Documentary Ever Made,” the series did not address the Korean War, the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, the Berlin Crisis of 1958, a brief Chinese–Taiwanese war, or the global communist guerrilla insurgency. But the series’ coverage of the 1950s did not end with episode three, as I suspected it had. The series pivoted in episode four to the so-called missile gap and Fidel Castro’s 1959 Cuban revolution, introducing both phenomena to establish the backdrop against which the Cuban Missile Crisis took place. Unfortunately, the film did so only to promote further the narrative that it had established in its first three episodes, which are organized around the notion that the United States was the foremost belligerent in the Cold War.
“The Russians were not on a crash program to build missiles,” the Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg said of the discovery unlocked by the launch of America’s first spy satellites. The Soviets were “not trying to be superior,” which meant that they “weren’t trying to dominate the world militarily.” Nefariously enough, American policymakers declined to internalize the conclusion that was so intuitive to Ellsberg. That was motivated reasoning designed to perpetuate the “fraudulent belief” that the Soviets represented a military threat to the West only because it was “very profitable.”
With this, Turning Point’s audience is treated to a Marxian theory of everything that explains the Cold War as an outgrowth of the fact that the American economy was “increasingly oriented around defense, and security, and nuclear weapons,” in the author Audra Wolfe’s formulation. “It’s sort of in everyone’s interests to keep building toward this world-ending moment because it’s good business,” the journalist Garrett Graff posits. Indeed, the arms race was a game, and “both sides played it,” said author Scott Anderson, by which he meant Democrats and Republicans, not the Americans and the Soviets.