TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/013089/01308900.006

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 4KB | 64 lines

VIDEO, Page 59

The History of the Bomb

By Strobe Talbott


    WAR AND PEACE IN THE NUCLEAR AGE
    PBS; Mondays; 8 p.m. on most stations

    As though in penance for its sins, television occasionally
tries to promote literacy in the sense of both knowledge and
reading. Such megasubjects as science, art, mythology and
civilization, as well as the hot and cold wars of the 20th century,
have been creditably presented in public-TV documentaries, usually
with what are called in the trade "book tie-ins."  Now the history
of the Bomb is traced in a masterly 13-part PBS series, War and
Peace in the Nuclear Age, and in a comprehensive, highly readable
companion book of the same title (Knopf; $22.95). The book,
published last week, is by John Newhouse, a veteran diplomatic
historian who writes for The New Yorker. The TV series begins this
week.

    Both works live up to their Tolstoyan title. Under executive
producer Zvi Dor-Ner, the series freshens the emblematic images of
the nuclear age with rare footage and ironic juxtapositions, so
that the viewer is more likely to look, and think, twice. Yet
another mushroom cloud, at first almost a cliche, becomes surreal
as Communist Chinese cavalrymen are shown charging toward ground
zero as part of a training exercise, riders and horses wearing
special masks to protect them against the blast.

    The Cuban missile crisis, which seemed done to death on its
25th anniversary less than two years ago, is skillfully re-created.
The show combines interviews with participants (including, thanks
to glasnost, an aide to Nikita Khrushchev and another official who
was the Soviet ambassador to Cuba at the time) and excerpts from
secretly recorded tapes of John F. Kennedy's deliberations with his
top advisers. In contrast to the traditional version of the
episode, one of the leading hawks, at least initially, is the
President's brother Bobby. He is heard suggesting that it may be
necessary to "sink the Maine again or something" as a pretext for
a U.S. invasion of Cuba.

    J.F.K.'s Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, emerges as the
principal spokesman for the overarching theme of both the TV series
and the book. That theme is that nuclear weapons are not really
weapons at all; they are political instruments whose very existence
deters their own use. Author Newhouse calls the quest for strategic
advantage "the chimera of the nuclear age."

    Having been used only twice, within a four-day period nearly
44 years ago at the end of World War II, the Bomb is prone to
mind-numbing abstraction. The TV series uses grainy,
black-and-white newsreels to make landmark events feel as though
they happened in the real world and epigrammatic statements sound
as though they were said by real people.  One of many moments that
make War and Peace television at its best: a 1946 United Nations
disarmament conference is seen considering a U.S. plan for
international controls that would prevent the Soviet Union from
developing its own bomb. The proposal comes to a vote. It needs
unanimous endorsement. One delegate after another says "Yes," until
first the Polish, then the Soviet, delegate is heard from. A
37-year-old Andrei Gromyko says, softly and in English, "Abstain."
The plan is dead, and the tone of the superpower rivalry is set for
nearly 40 years to come. Finally, Gromyko is shoved aside by
Mikhail Gorbachev, who knows how to say yes to the West and churn
out a dizzying array of proposals of his own.