- [Voiceover] Hello, David. How are you doing?

- [Voiceover] I'm doing well. I'm excited to learn

about this thing we call "the Cold War."

What is a "cold war" and what makes it

different than a "hot war"?

- [Voiceover] So, a cold war, and in this case

it's really,

it might be a term that we could debate.

is a war where the two major combatants

never actually fire bullets at each other

or drop bombs on each other.

So never in the course of the Cold War did the

US ever meet the ground troops with the USSR.

- [Voiceover] But people still died in combat.

- [Voiceover] Right.

- [Voiceover] So the Cold War is kind of fought

through proxy wars. And these are wars that are

taking place in other nations, developing nations

of the world where the US is supporting one side,

generally the pro-capitalist side,

and the Soviet Union is supporting

the other side, a communist side.

So this is the case in the Korean War

in the 1950s, and then definitely

the case in the Vietnam War in the 1960s.

- [Voiceover] So the US and the USSR aren't fighting

directly but they're kind of betting on boxing matches,

betting on different fighters in the same boxing match.

- [Voiceover] Yeah, but they're not just betting,

they're also putting money and arms

where their mouth is.

- [Voiceover] So now if there are two different

fighters in the ring, the US is given

the capitalist fighter...

feeding him...

- [Voiceover] So you've got the capitalist fighter

in one corner and he's sweaty and he's beaten,

but the US is behind him with a towel and one

of those water buckets, splashing water in his face,

like "Get in this fight! Get in there!'

- [Voiceover] Right. And if necessary,

tying up his boxing gloves,

maybe giving him a new pair of shoes.

- [Voiceover] Sure.

- [Voiceover] Doing whatever they can... - [Voiceover] Paying his rent...

- [Voiceover] Right. Doing everything that they can... - [Voiceover] Buying him meals, probably,

like at the Marshall Plan.

- [Voiceover] Exactly!

- [Voiceover] Okay, so tell me about these two

combatants. In this corner...

- [Voiceover] Laughs.

- [Voiceover] Wearing a suit...

- [Voiceover] (laughs) Is Harry Truman.

And Harry Truman is the President of the

United States, starting in 1945.

He was Vice President to Franklin Roosevelt,

who had been the US's president since 1932,

and who tragically died in 1945.

So Truman is really in charge of ending

World War II for the United States and also

kind of setting up post-war plans.

- [Voiceover] So he prosecutes the end of the war.

He makes the decision to drop the atom bomb

on Nagasaki and Hiroshima,

and he ends the war in both theaters.

- [Voiceover] Right.

- [Voiceover] Okay.

- [Voiceover] And...

- [Voiceover] And in the other corner, wearing a

very fine mustache...

- [Voiceover] (laughs) Is Joseph Stalin.

And he's the Soviet premier.

He's been in charge since the 1920s.

And for him, I would say the most important

thing that Stalin wanted after World War II

was security, shall we say.

- [Voiceover] Okay.

- [Voiceover] So if you remember your history,

in World War I

Germany invaded Russia.

In World War II

Germany invaded Russia.

- [Voiceover] Oh, I'm seeing a pattern.

- [Voiceover] And if there's anything that Stalin wants

in the post-1945 era,

it is not to be invaded by Germany anymore.

- [Voiceover] Sure.

- [Voiceover] So he is very anxious to make sure

that the world is safe for communism.

He thinks that

the best way to make sure that

Russians can continue the experiments and the

revolution of communism

is to have a buffer zone,

shall we say, between Russia and the rest of Europe.

- [Voiceover] Okay.

- [Voiceover] And if he does that by kind of shoring up

some puppet governments, in what we now call the

Eastern Block,

these nations that had been

taken over by Hitler

and then when the Soviet Union joined the

war on the side of the Allies,

then were retaken over

by Russia as they fought Hitler back.

- [Voiceover] Okay. So a lot of those central European

countries like Hungary, and Lithuania, and the former

Czechoslovakia, and the former Yugoslavia.

- [Voiceover] And he had the advantage of having

boots on the ground there because he'd beaten

back Hitler's invasion, eventually White Russian

troops were fighting against Hitler, and American

troops who were fighting against Hitler.

You know, they meet in Berlin

at the fall of Hitler,

and kind of shake hands in Berlin.

But the advantage that Russia had was

that they've got a lot more people here.

They've got most of Europe now,

at least east of Berlin,

has Soviet troops on the ground.

- [Voiceover] Sure. So you've been telling me

that the Soviet Union did yeoman's work

in containing and basically prosecuting the entire

Eastern Front during World War II.

- [Voiceover] Yeah, and the Soviet Union actually

lost 20 million people during World War II.

That's just a ludicrous number.

They lost more than anyone except

for China and Germany.

So they feel like they have a real stake

in the outcome of World War II.

- [Voiceover] So, at the end of this, what is the

situation in the USSR?

Like they've conquered all of this territory

but are they strong enough

economically to hold all of it

and feed everyone?

- [Voiceover] No, not really.

In fact, most of Europe is in pretty dire straits

if you think about it.

All of World War II was really kind of fought,

right, in Europe...

- [Voiceover] Right in the European bread basket.

- [Voiceover] And so there is serious economic

trouble in the aftermath of World War II.

People don't have enough to eat.

They certainly don't have any cash,

and they don't have any fuel,

which is very worrisome

in 1946 because of the terrible winter.

So people are cold and they are hungry.

And when people are cold and hungry there is

a lot of fuel for a possible revolution, right?.

Even in the 1930s, in the United States, there's

a lot of different political ideas that come up

during the Great Depression.

Because when your political system isn't working well,

you consider other kinds of political systems.

- [Voiceover] So the United States is worried that,

because of the cold winter of 1946, and scarcity

across western Europe, this blue part of the

map will turn much redder.

- [Voiceover] Right. So for the United States, they're

worried that communism is kind of the child

of hunger and poverty.

And they're afraid that because Stalin has so much

territory in Europe, that he is really well poised

to become "Hitler, part two."

- [Voiceover] Okay. And that is a sequel the

United States does not want to see.

- [Voiceover] No. Absolutely not.

And if they really learned anything from World War II,

it's that appeasement doesn't work, right?

During the 1930s, many people in the West,

the prime minister of England, Neville Chamberlain,

kind of felt like they didn't want to go back to war

because World War I is still very much on

people's minds during the 1930s.

And so they figured, let's not confront Hitler

head on because we're not up for that right now.

We're also in the middle of worldwide depression.

And that helped nothing because it just meant that

Hitler could gain a whole lot of territory

and World War II was much worse than it might

have been if they hadn't gone after Hitler earlier.

- [Voiceover] And stopped the Anschluss.

- [Voiceover] Yes.

- [Voiceover] If you stop the Anschluss, you stop

the "onschlaught."

- [Voiceover] (laughs) Exactly.

So they're really trying

to say, all right, Stalin, if he wants to, could probably

just run his way through the rest of Europe, right,

with very little resistance,

because the only nation in the world

that has the military and economic

power to stop the Soviet Union is the United States.

- [Voiceover] Because their factories and fields

were not bombed to cinders during the

European theater.

- [Voiceover] Right. So if they wanna stop

"Hitler, part two, the Stalin years,"

then they're going to have to really

stand up for capitalism

and also for the kind of material comforts and

democratic, what we call, self-determination.

This is one of the most important ideas to come

out of the alliance between the United States

and Britain, which is that the citizens of a region

should have the right to decide their own

form of government.

- [Voiceover] And they think of the Soviets as being

totalitarians. And that's not a wrong assessment

because there is a very strong totalitarian control

coming out of Moscow and the Soviet Union.

So they say, If we're going to keep Europe

from turning all red, all communist,

then we're going to need to kind of shore up Europe.

They think of communism as kind of being a little

bit like a flood, shall we say,

that you gotta, you gotta put sandbags

around the edges of communism.

Otherwise, it's gonna leak out.

- [Voiceover] So is the United States and their allies

also interested in creating their own kind of

light blue buffer zone, also next to the Eastern Block?

Or are they interested in...

Is this when we get into the creation of NATO?

- [Voiceover] NATO really comes out of an

understanding that World War II has not created peace

and so the US is going to have to

forego their more than a century-long

commitment to being isolationist

and take a stronger role in the world.

- [Voiceover] So, okay, for the folks at home, what

does NATO stand for? North Atlantic Treaty Organization?

- [Voiceover] North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

And this is a defensive alliance

between, at first, 12 nations,

which say that an attack on one

will be treated as an attack on all.

- [Voiceover] Gotcha! Well, that sounds like they're

maneuvering their boxers into position

and rubbing the shoulders and getting them ready.

- [Voiceover] Yes. Very much so.

And I think one of the tragedies

of the post-war era

is that maybe things didn't have to be like this?

Right after the US and the USSR had worked

together to defeat Hitler,

it might have possible for them

to coexist peacefully?

But I think they both had the idea that the other

economic system, and we're talking about

communism and capitalism, were just kind of