Cold war. Vol. 6. Episodes 21-24: Final countdown

The final volume of the six volume television series “Cold War” features episodes 21 to 24 and covers the period from 1944 to 1994. KGB spying began in Los Alamos where scientists worked in secrecy to develop America’s first atomic bomb and by the 1940s they had successfully infiltrated the heart of Western intelligence. The CIA counter attacked with their own espionage operations. Between the 1940s-1960s, there was intelligence and counterintelligence, spies and double spies, names such as Philby, Burgess and Maclean, but gradually human spies would be replaced by technology by means of photography and electronic eavesdropping. Satellites would be able to intercept radio communications and the Soviets began to fear they were losing ground to American technology. The 1980s represented a time of change in the Cold War and particularly in the disarmament of nuclear weapons, with Ronald Reagan as the US President and Mikhail Gorbachev as leader of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev introduced “perestroika” (restructuring) and “glasnost” (openness) and in 1985, the two leaders met in Geneva for the first superpower summit in six years. In 1986, the Chernobyl disaster rocked the Soviet Union and six months later, Gorbachev and Reagan agreed to the complete withdrawal of intermediate range missiles in Europe and a 50% reduction in ballistic missiles over a five year period. However, during all of this negotiating, Reagan persisted with his “Star Wars” theory, or Strategic Defense Initiative through to the end of his presidency in 1989. Gorbachev’s perestroika began filtering through the Soviet bloc, including Hungary and Poland, but the most dramatic moment came when in 1989 the Berlin Wall came down, opening up East and West Berlin. However this epic event also signalled the crumbling of the Kremlin and its control over Eastern Europe as well as leading to the demise of Gorbachev, the Soviet Communist Party and the end of the USSR and the rise of Boris Yeltsin and the newly created Commonwealth of Independent States. Bush, on Christmas Day, 1991, announced to the world that the Cold War confrontation between the two superpowers was now over. Narrated by Kenneth Branagh. (For more information see www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war)