'Turning Point' looks at decades-long conflict between the U.S. and Soviet Union

in the summer of 1980 the National Security advisor brazinski who worked for President Carter got this call at home in the middle of the night it was briny's military assistant Colonel Bill odm he said we've just gotten an alert that there are like 200 Soviet missiles headed toward the United States brazinski says well get better confirmation odm calls him back and he says I was mistaken it's not 200 it's like 2,000 in later years binski talking about it said he chose not to wake up his wife Was

hington would be gone in a matter of minutes he thought she was better off dying in her sleep and he gets ready to wake up the president of the United States and say you have a choice to make and just before he does that he gets another call from his military advisor saying uh it's a false alarm wow it was remarkable hearing your father talk about that story you can hear a pin drop he was yeah the story talking about being downstairs and said his wife and his children were upstairs and he just s

at there knowing that the end was going to come in the next 10 matter of moments 15 minutes and he said he was just sitting downstairs in the dark letting it happen and I said well what would you have advised what would you advis the president and he said well if they were going to get us then there's no way we were going to allow those Sops to get away with it we're going to do the same to them you know when I um heard him tell that story I used to get sort of tortured inside because I was 14 s

o that would have made my brothers 16 and 17 Maybe and we were we were so terrible like I we had no idea what kind of stress he was under and I just all the time wish I could have been a little nicer that's oh please I was a horror a horror show but can you imagine that like everybody has a bad day and you know and you come home and you don't want to tell your kids about the bad day they that happened in the middle of the night yeah well that was a bad night Hey Dad how did you sleep last night

yeah I we probably were fighting like my brothers and I the next morning while he's sitting there trying to process what happened the night before but that was a clip that you just saw uh from the new Netflix docu series entitled Turning Point the bomb and the Cold War we just started it last night the nine-part series gives an inside account of the tents and sometimes precarious US and Soviet relations from the Manhattan Project and the Advent of the nuclear bomb to the rise ing tensions betwee

n America and Russia since the end of the Cold War and through Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine just yesterday Putin said in an interview that Russia was ready for nuclear war with the West if the conflict escalated to that point and the Emmy nominated director and executive producer of the series Brian nappen Berger joins us now uh Brian so far it's incredible I feel like everybody needs to watch this to understand what's happening today well I mean Brian what's so fascinating is it's not j

ust what we grew up in not just what we experienc going through the Cold War but as you point out very uh importantly the top of of the whole series uh it's important because it helps us understand better what we're going through right now yeah well that was definitely hitome with us when we started this I mean we started this uh I guess we were like two or three months into creating this series when Putin invaded Ukraine and we were just glued to the to the televisions and you know of course th

at was a very dramatic moment tanks were rolling into keev and there was an assassination attempt on zelinsky's life and uh you know at the time Putin is telling a version of the Cold War Story himself he famously said that the breakup of the Soviet Union was the worst geopolitical tragedy in history um and you know but Putin's version was riddled with all sorts of error so it became immediately apparent that we were telling both a current modern story about about what was happening in Ukraine a

nd just using that to kind of set the stage and go back and tell this broader um history of the Cold War which includes harrowing moments like that uh that that we just saw yeah I mean extraordin talk about having a a bad night Joe is right um can you unpack that a little bit more for us because I know that you say that everything that you'll seeing in Ukraine is Echoes of is kind of an echo of the Cold War period spell that out a a little bit more for us well um Putin is famously a child of the

Cold War he was a KGB agent in uh Dresden uh before the Berlin Wall fell um he there's a famous uh line that he says in a book that that was written about him with an extended interview where he talks about calling Moscow this is when protests are gathering the the fall of the Berlin Wall is eminent uh people are taken to the streets and he remembers calling Moscow and trying to look for a direction what he wants to do is he wants to use for against these protesters and the famous line is Mosco

w was silent and he sort of vowed not to be silent again and if you look at him and his history and particularly you know through the 90s uh and the conditions that set the stage for his um coming on the world stage um it's it's very very consistent and it and it he often talks about old um Soviet borders even uh borders of the Russian Empire um in a kind of nostalgic way uh certainly Ukraine has been mixed up with that right from the very beginning as soon as he takes becomes leader uh so you k

now he uses a lot of Cold War tactics we see we see a lot of uh you know misinformation disinformation nuclear saber rattling I mean we we are still very much uh feeling the tensions of the Cold War and certainly we had new reporting just in the last week or so that uh us officials were concerned that pu would use a tactical nuke on the battlefield in Ukraine about a year ago um congratulations on the series you we we played in the the the moment there from 1980 there is of course also the Cuban

Missile Crisis yeah what other moments did you explore and get to the question of just how close did we come well how close did we come I mean the the clip that you just saw is just unbelievable because that that could have been the end of the world I mean you really have to stop and think that that could have been it because once those missiles are launched should that decision have been made it's very difficult to get those our system is built so that you don't get to call them back back real

ly so uh but but I guess even more frightening than than that scene is it's not isolated there's lots of scenes like that there's lots of things that happen and by 1983 there's so many sort of Mis uh uh misunderstandings uh mistakes human error uh and of course the rhetoric is so Amplified at that point you know Reagan had called uh the Soviet Union evil empire that by 1983 um you have things like Able Archer exercise which is everybody really believed the Soviets really believed that that was r

eal uh had armed their nuclear weapons um you have the shooting down of the Korean airliner uh a lot of people in hindsight uh look at 1983 as maybe the the uh most dangerous year in all of human history I mean we we knew about the and we go through the Cuban Missile Crisis too but some of that at least the last half played out in public we didn't know about this stuff until until much later and it's pretty pretty disturbing what was it like interviewing survivors Japanese survivors of the bombi

ng of Hiroshima uh for me that was the most I think emotional part and maybe um you I've done a lot of documentaries I think maybe some of the most uh emotional interviews I've ever done um I didn't realize how many people had had still had memories of that day uh there was still a living memory of that day um we talked to one person whose brother had actually seen seen the actual bomb come out because the skies were clear there were no other airplanes in the sky and he was watching the the bomb

er and so uh he says he had seen he actually saw it come down so going through those uh days those uh after that and the and and what happened I mean it's just it's incredibly incredibly moving and I think it you know look we've we've forgotten how dangerous nuclear weapons are I think at the end of the Soviet Union uh the collapse of the Soviet Union I think we all kind of thought maybe that this sort of receded in our minds but uh nuclear weapons are very much still with us uh it's something w

e need to take very seriously uh we're at the cusp of you know Trump let one of the the INF treaty lapse slow roll the new Star treaty so uh we're at a point now where in the next two years or so we may be looking at for the first time in 50 years not having any treaties that govern uh the deployment of nuclear weapons wow for the first time in 50 years well highly recommend that uh you see all nine episodes of Turning Point the bomb and the Cold War streaming right now on Netflix director and e

xecutive producer Brian nappen Berger thank you so much uh for coming on the show this morning and and for this work thank you thank you very much thanks thanks very all right take care coming up