Original subtitles

Narrator: A discovery that changes the world...

Man: A revelation that the splitting of uranium atoms

Contained unfathomable amounts of energy.

Narrator: Promising a time of limitless possibilities.

Man: Maybe it will run our cars,

Ships, submarines, medicine.

[explosion]

Narrator: But one haunted

By the specter of nuclear holocaust...

Man: Once the soviets got the bomb,

Then the race was on.

Man: This is very, very scary information for the americans.

Narrator: Where secrets become as crucial

As the weapons themselves.

Man: The bomb is the origin of american secrecy.

Narrator: Hidden stories...

Man: We would have lost a significant portion

Of the east coast of the united states.

Narrator: From a world on the brink

Of global annihilation...

Man: Over 600 million dead from america's weapons alone.

Man: The idea was, if it comes to that,

We just want to wipe them off the earth.

Narrator: Now, decades later,

They can finally be told.

The atomic age is being declassified.

♪

♪

October 3, 1995.

A presidential committee declassifies a grim report

Chronicling some of america's darkest secrets...

Buried programs finally brought to light.

Bill clinton: Thousands of government-sponsored experiments

Did take place,

At hospitals, universities, and military bases

Around our nation.

In too many cases, informed consent was withheld.

Narrator: In a world haunted by the threat of atomic weapons,

The u.S. Conducts radiation tests

On unsuspecting humans.

Clinton: In one experiment,

Scientists injected plutonium into 18 patients

Without their knowledge.

And that was wrong.

Narrator: The truth went a lot further

Than medical experiments.

[explosion]

Clinton: We have declassified

Thousands of government documents,

Files from the second world war,

The cold war.

Narrator: The secret documents laid bare

The dark truths of the atomic age,

When suspicion and paranoia,

Nuclear anxiety and anti-communist fervor

Would justify the kinds of things

Clinton's apologizing for now.

Clinton: So today,

By making ourselves accountable for the sins of the past,

I hope, more than anything else,

We are laying the foundation stone

For a new era.

Narrator: The old era began with the atom.

Alex wellerstein: Atomic and subatomic physics

Was the physical problem

Of the early decades of the 20th century.

It was how you got your nobel prize.

It was completely where many of the best and the brightest minds

Were aimed at.

Narrator: A breakthrough in the late '30s

Shocks the scientific world.

Atomic fission--

The splitting of atoms.

But it happens in the wrong place,

At the wrong time.

James hershberg: Discovery of fission

In berlin, germany, of all places,

In December 1938,

Couldn't have come at a worse moment,

With the world on the brink of world war ii.

Narrator: It's a huge new source of energy.

Used as a bomb,

It would be immensely powerful.

Peter kuznick: The people in the united states

Who are most concerned about this in 1939

Were the european émigré physicists

Who had to escape from nazi-occupied europe.

Wellerstein: They are desperately,

Desperately afraid of the idea

Of nazis with nuclear weapons.

Narrator: The united states responds

With a massive project.

Hershberg: June 1942

Was when fdr put his good old check mark on a document,

Said okay,

And approved a crash program to build a bomb

That a few months later would turn into the manhattan project.

Narrator: Entire cities spring up

In places like hanford, washington,

Oak ridge, tennessee,

And los alamos, new mexico,

Where the first atomic bomb was built.

Thousands of people,

Huge industrial forces,

All working together under a shroud of secrecy.

Wellerstein: Much of what we associate with secrecy,

The way of doing security clearances,

The way of doing declassification reviews,

Many of those practices come out of the atomic bomb project

And were invented for the atomic bomb project.

So, it's, in a very real way,

The bomb is the origin of american secrecy.

Narrator: Two years and two billion dollars later,

The manhattan project succeeds.

[bomb whistling]

[rumbling]

Hershberg: The atomic bomb

Was dropped on japan, on hiroshima,

On August 6, 1945.

Narrator: America's nuclear secret is out,

Surprising the entire world...

Especially the soviet union,

Still picking up the pieces after a devastating war.

Anton fedyashin: It's worth remembering

That the soviet union loses 27 million citizens,

Which is a figure unprecedented in the history of our species.

Narrator: They were supposed to be allies,

But the americans had developed the bomb in secret.

Fedyashin: There was a lot of mistrust

That started coming out into the open

In the second half of the 1940s,

And this is what paves the way for the cold war.

Narrator: The soviets see america

As a growing threat.

Fedyashin: The fear was

That a nuclear, an atomic monopoly

In the hands of the united states

Would make the world more unstable.

Narrator: So the soviets spring their own surprise.

[explosion]

Robert standish norris: On August 29, 1949,

They demonstrated the detonation of their weapon,

And it was a replica,

An exact replica of the american bomb.

Narrator: It's america's turn

To be shocked.

Wellerstein: People in the united states in particular

Are really worried that the soviet union

Is now embarked on this active expansion campaign

To, by force, impose communism over the entire globe.

Narrator: At the turn of the decade,

Communism is spreading throughout the world.

Wellerstein: You have revolutions in china,

You have cracking down on countries in eastern europe,

You have what looks like the active spreading

Of propaganda and political influence

By the soviet union.

Kuznick: It looks like the united states

Has got to stand up to the russians

Because the russians seemed to be sweeping the table

At that point.

Narrator: And now they're building their own bombs.

In america,

The reaction would be an almost religious determination

To contain the spread of communism.

Wellerstein: This period

Really increases the temperature of the politics

In the united states.

You have people who become very hardline anticommunists,

Who start believing there are communists everywhere.

And the bomb has a big part to play in that.

It raises the stakes,

And it raises americans' sense of vulnerability.

Narrator: It only gets worse

When they find out how the soviets got the bomb.

They had spies inside the manhattan project itself.

Kuznick: It was early 1950

That the british were able to arrest klaus fuchs.

Wellerstein: Fuchs was considered brilliant.

I mean, he was considered to have

A virtually photographic memory,

A brilliant theoretical and mathematical physicist.

He was so trusted that he was their babysitter

When the scientists would have parties,

And they didn't have any clue

That he was actually giving everything that he looked at

To the soviet union.

Narrator: Klaus fuchs is the first link

In a chain leading to one of the biggest spy scandals

In american history.

Wellerstein: Fuchs identifies a man

Who served as his go-between with the russians,

Named david greenglass.

David greenglass explains that he was recruited for spying

By his brother-in-law, julius rosenberg.

Narrator: Julius rosenberg

Has a small machine shop in the bronx.

He's arrested in July 1950.

His wife, ethel-- david greenglass's sister--

A month later.

Both are members of the communist party.

Court filings present them as super-spies.

They refuse to talk,

Pleading the fifth instead.

Wellerstein: The rosenbergs deny all involvement.

They say this whole thing is fabricated,

It's just an anti-communist plot.

Narrator: They have little chance,

Especially when ethel's brother, david greenglass,

Testifies against them.

Both are found guilty and sentenced to death.

Kuznick: When judge kaufman handed down the death sentence,

He accused the rosenbergs

Of having given the atomic bomb to russia

And having caused thousands of american deaths

In the korean war.

It was a crazy charge.

And the europeans and others reacted

That the united states was going insane.

Wellerstein: There were multiple attempts

To plead for a pardoning or clemency

Or a commutation of sentencing.

All of this was rejected.

Kuznick: And this becomes a cause célèbre

For the left in the united states

Because the evidence that was presented at the trial

Was very flimsy.

Narrator: Both rosenbergs

Maintain their innocence to the end.

Wellerstein: Julius and ethel rosenberg

Are executed in sing sing prison by electric chair.

Narrator: Debate about their guilt or innocence

Lasts for decades...

Until 1995,

When previously classified documents

Reveal the prosecution knew a lot more

Than ever came out in court.

Wellerstein: During world war ii,

The united states intercepted

A large number of soviet communications,

And they spent an immense amount of time

To try and crack these codes.

Narrator: They were from a spy program

Code-named venona.

Wellerstein: We now know,

We've been able to get access to those decrypted communications,

And it's pretty clear that julius rosenberg is a spy.

Narrator: Spies are never referred to by name

In soviet communications.

Wellerstein: Julius had a fancy code name

Because he was an important person.

His code name was "antenna."

Narrator: Ethel was a different story.

Wellerstein: Ethel is referred to in the files as "ethel."

That's a sign that she isn't a spy.

That's a sign that she's the wife of a spy

Or something like that,

Very minor.

Narrator: Information from the venona papers

Could have convicted julius,

But exonerated ethel.

Wellerstein: Here's the thing, though--

The united states does not want the soviet union

To know that it has cracked its codes,

So it will never use that evidence in court.

Narrator: A government secret deemed so important,

Ethel rosenberg lost her life to ensure it wasn't divulged.

Kuznick: Documents released in 2014

Confirm that david greenglass lied on the stand.

He downplayed ethel's role initially

And then later accuses her of having transcribed the documents

And been involved in a much more fundamental way.

Narrator: Ethel rosenberg was framed...

By her own brother.

Wellerstein: He later admitted to perjuring himself,

And the reason he did this

Was because if he got both julius and ethel implicated,

They would let his wife, ruth, off the hook.

Narrator: David got off with a much lighter sentence,

While ruth was never charged at all.

Wellerstein: There's still an open question today

About what's the justice in executing them?

They were spying for an ally.

Klaus fuchs only got 14 years in prison,

And he didn't serve all of them.

Narrator: The secrecy surrounding the rosenbergs

Still shadows their case today.

Wellerstein: The fact that the united states

Did not and could not give

The really compelling evidence on the rosenbergs

Meant that people could kind of look at it

And see what they wanted to see,

And that further drove

This polarizing politics of the period.

It's seen as a very dark moment in the cold war.

[horn honks]

Narrator: By the time julius and ethel rosenberg are executed

In June 1953,

There's no line that wouldn't be crossed

In the name of containing communism

In a country that's convinced

It's better dead than red.

Hershberg: It wasn't just paranoia.

The soviets were a threat,

But it was clearly an exaggerated threat.

Narrator: Even the suggestion of communist activity

Is enough to provoke a brutal response.

[whistle blowing]

[yelling]

Wellerstein: You also get the rise

Of senator joseph mccarthy,

Who alleges that there are innumerable communists

Throughout, embedded in the united states government.

Joseph mccarthy: All that senator mccarthy

Has been trying to do is expose the communists

Who have infiltrated the department of the army.

A very small percentage.

Fedyashin: In the united states,

You see the evolution of this fear of penetration

In the american public,

Which really paves the way for mccarthyism.

Wellerstein: And it's just a very dangerous, ugly time

In american politics.

Narrator: No one seems to know who to trust,

So they trust no one.

Kuznick: The americans become obsessed with secrecy

In a way we had never been before.

J. Edgar hoover: We ask every citizen

To immediately report any information

Regarding espionage, sabotage, or un-american activities.

Kuznick: It becomes an obsession

For j. Edgar hoover, the fbi,

And the congressional investigators.

They begin to question the loyalty

Of people like robert oppenheimer.

Narrator: J. Robert oppenheimer,

The man who led the manhattan project

At los alamos.

Wellerstein: J. Robert oppenheimer

Was an american theoretical physicist

And was considered extremely brilliant

From a very young age.

Narrator: With the war over,

The future of the american nuclear program

Is up for debate.

Conflicts arise between oppenheimer

And a former friend and colleague,

One of the world's leading physicists--

Edward teller.

Wellerstein: Teller became a major advocate for building

Not just nuclear weapons,

But thermonuclear weapons.

This is a weapon that was imagined as being

Easily a thousand times more powerful.

Narrator: Oppenheimer isn't convinced.

And he wasn't alone.

Hershberg: Some of the scientists who opposed it--

Most importantly,

The general advisory committee

To the u.S. Atomic energy commission...

They unanimously voted against building the hydrogen bomb.

Several of its members said,

"this is a weapon

That's too large for any military target.

It would constitute a weapon of genocide.

It would be evil."

Narrator: Teller becomes the h-bomb's

Most outspoken champion.

Wellerstein: He felt that if the soviet union, especially,

Got the atomic bomb,

Then the proper response

Was to get the hydrogen bomb in the united states,

That you always had to stay one step ahead.

He eventually came to see anybody who stood in the way

Of progress in nuclear weapons development

As potentially being traitorous.

Narrator: Teller teams up with lewis strauss,

Powerful chairman of the atomic energy commission

And another aggressive supporter of the h-bomb.

Kuznick: Strauss was particularly bitter

Toward oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer had no respect for strauss.

Oppenheimer even ridiculed him.

Narrator: Teller and strauss decide that oppenheimer

Can no longer be trusted with america's nuclear secrets.

Wellerstein: This is a conspiracy.

There is an active conspiracy

Between people like strauss, teller,

Several other scientists as well.

Narrator: They get a chance to act

When a letter reaches president eisenhower,

Accusing oppenheimer of being a soviet agent.

Wellerstein: Oppenheimer's past

Is starting to become a major liability.

In the 1930s, he became very active

In sort of far-left communist causes.

Kuznick: We don't know for sure

If oppenheimer himself was in the communist party,

But everybody around him,

Including his wife, his brother, his brother's wife,

All of his graduate students,

They were all in the communist party.

Narrator: Eisenhower revokes his security clearance.

In response, oppenheimer demands a hearing.

Wellerstein: The hearing is not supposed to be a trial,

But it plays out a lot like a trial.

It's very adversarial.

It turns out to be

A really awful experience for oppenheimer.

Every decision he made,

Every failure he had in his life,

The fact that he had mistresses and affairs,

The fact that he had lied to security officers...

All of this comes out.

Narrator: Teller is one of the last to testify.

Kuznick: Teller says

That he would rather see somebody else in that position,

And he basically says he doesn't trust oppenheimer.

Narrator: After 19 days,

The commission announces its decision.

Wellerstein: Though they do say

That they don't have any evidence that he was a spy

And they don't really have any evidence

That he was disloyal,

What they eventually conclude was he's unreliable at times.

Narrator: His clearance revoked,

Oppenheimer is forced into scientific exile.

He lives out his life a broken man.

But it turns out

The deck was stacked against oppenheimer.

A series of crucial declassifications

Reveal what really happened.

His defense team had their hands tied from the start.

Without the necessary security clearance,

They couldn't even review many of the charges against him.

They were removed from the room

When the prosecution presented classified evidence.

They were also being wiretapped.

May 2009.

Notebooks made with special access to kgb archives

Are released,

Confirming that oppenheimer was never involved

In soviet espionage.

Wellerstein: It wasn't until 2014 or so

That the department of energy

Re-looked at all of these hearings

And decided what could be released,

And the answer is everything can be released at this point.

Narrator: The October 2014 declassification

Was the biggest of all--

19 volumes of transcripts from the hearing,

Much of which would have supported

Oppenheimer's public claims of innocence.

Wellerstein: Oppenheimer was shattered

By the whole experience of the hearing

And its consequences.

He ended up sort of retiring to an island in the caribbean

And essentially drinking himself to death.

Narrator: For many, he is another example

Of an innocent victim of the red scare.

Wellerstein: He became really a martyr.

He became a symbol of a muzzle on people,

A sort of punishment for their political positions.

Narrator: As anti-communist politics

Continue to dominate america,

The country embraces teller's vision

Of its nuclear future.

The device he first called "the super,"

The h-bomb.

[explosion]

Beginning in 1952,

The u.S. Films dozens of thermonuclear tests,

Studying the frightening power of the h-bomb.

These images were only recently declassified.

[explosion]

America has built the most destructive weapon

The world has ever seen.

Is it prepared to use it?

In the 1950s,

The u.S. Nuclear arsenal expands at an astonishing rate,

From 50 weapons at the start of the decade

To 12,000 at the end.

The official policy is that we have them

So that we don't have to use them.

But in 2015,

A declassified battle plan shows

That it wasn't all defensive posturing.

Here's how america planned to fight world war iii.

Norris: You just can't leave these weapons around.

You have to plan for their use,

And there was, at the end of the eisenhower

And the beginning of the kennedy administrations,

The creation of real nuclear war plans.

These war plans are highly secret.

Narrator: "the strategic air command

Atomic weapons requirements study for 1959"

Is the most complete u.S. Battle plan

Ever declassified.

Kuznick: The most frightening thing

Is the assumption

That any war between the united states and russia

Is gonna go nuclear almost immediately.

Narrator: Sac's plan?

Respond with nukes.

Lots of them.

Kuznick: The american policy

Was to shoot off our entire arsenal at once.

Not a graduated step-by-step escalation,

But to shoot it all off at once.

Narrator: The 800-page battle plan

Breaks down into two types of targets--

Military installations...

Wellerstein: You do strategic bombing

To destroy the enemy's ability to wage war.

And this means you hit the military bases

And their airfields and things like that.

Narrator: And what the report euphemistically calls

"urban-industrial complexes."

Wellerstein: But it also means destroying

Their entire industrial infrastructure as well,

And that means destroying cities.

Narrator: Targets include

Major population centers spread across china,

The soviet union,

And eastern europe,

With moscow at the top of the list.

Over a thousand in all.

Wellerstein: There's probably going to be a lot of fallout

That will go onto your allies as well.

The idea was you could destroy the entire soviet union

Within three to ten hours or so.

And so the hope was, maybe you'd lose europe,

But united states would survive.

Narrator: The battle plan assumes

The civilian population will be hit hard

To destroy the enemy's will to fight.

Wellerstein: The u.S. Government has not liked to acknowledge

That many of its targeting policies

Would have huge civilian casualties.

It's not typically the policy of the government to say

We target civilians directly.

That's sort of like a war crime.

Narrator: As the plan gets updated,

It still includes massive collateral damage.

Wellerstein: The internal government estimates

For how many soviet citizens would die in this kind of thing

Are, you know, hundreds of millions.

It's a huge number.

Kuznick: Over 600 million dead from america's weapons alone.

That doesn't even account for any soviet retaliation.

Narrator: The cold, brutal calculations

That will obliterate huge parts of the planet.

Were we really ready to push the button?

It's all there in any of that era's battle plans.

America, leader of the free world,

Is prepared to destroy it.

Wellerstein: The idea was, if it comes to that,

We just want to wipe them off the earth

And be done with it,

And we'll have to deal with the consequences of that.

Man: If north america is under attack

By a hostile force of manned bombers,

It would, as you have just seen,

Be subjected to a continuous, intensively devastating attack,

From as far out as possible,

With every type of lethal weapon in our air defense arsenal.

[explosion]

Narrator: If there is a third world war,

There won't be winners and losers

In the traditional sense.

And most likely,

Nobody left for either side to negotiate with.

Mutually assured destruction

Becomes the atomic age's most infamous doctrine--

One the world hopes will never be put into action.

Many scientists still think

That there might be more peaceful possibilities

For the atomic age.

Kuznick: From the beginning,

Many of the scientists had a dream

That nuclear power would be used for beneficial purposes,

For life-affirming purposes,

Not just for destructive purposes.

Wellerstein: A lot of the scientists

Who worked on this

Saw it as being potentially extremely useful

For medicine, for research,

For even changing food production.

They were hoping--

Almost hoping against hope--

That this wouldn't just be used for exterminating cities.

Narrator: In December 1946,

The first successful treatment of a patient with thyroid cancer

Using a radioisotope

Is reported in medical journals.

Isotopes are created from nuclear reactions.

Announcer: Capturing the atom's probing power,

Science has found a powerful new tool

To study and defeat sickness

And make a healthier, happier life

For the benefit of all mankind.

Narrator: Many other atomic plans

Border on science fiction.

Wellerstein: Some of these ideas are relatively modest.

Some of them are completely, in retrospect, outlandish.

Kuznick: We were going to reroute rivers.

We were going to change mountain ranges.

We were going to change the surface of the earth.

We even had plans to change the direction of hurricanes

By dropping hydrogen bombs

Alongside the eye of the hurricane.

Narrator: Some of the wildest ideas

Come close to being approved,

Like an artificial harbor in alaska

To be excavated with five detonations.

[explosions]

Wellerstein: Project orion would use thermonuclear weapons

To accelerate a spaceship.

Announcer: The technology needed to build a nuclear rocket

Is well advanced.

Nuclear rocket propulsion

Will expand our ability to explore space.

Narrator: In the beginning,

The promises for atomic science were out of this world.

[explosion]

But the reality quickly crashes back to earth.

Wellerstein: On the whole, it isn't the thing

Where everybody has, you know, a nuclear pill that they take

And it cures them of all their diseases.

But these things are what happen

When you get very creative people and say,

"find a use for this that isn't just killing people."

Narrator: But the real spending and progress

On nuclear technology

Continues to be powered by the military--

Often in secret.

Announcer: Even the atom may release

Its giant strength for aircraft.

The atomic energy commission,

The air force, and general electric

Are already cooperating on an atomic power plant

For an aircraft to be built by convair.

Narrator: The air force commissions a project

To build the world's first nuclear-powered plane.

Details of the propulsion system are classified.

September 1955.

A specially adapted convair xb-36h bomber

Rolls out for its first flight...

With a fully functioning nuclear reactor on board.

It's the first of 47 test flights.

Although active,

The reactor never provides power to the engines.

In 1961,

The project is scrapped for good.

But there were still high hopes for nuclear propulsion systems.

They just weren't in the sky.

Announcer: This is the story of the nautilus,

The world's first atomic-powered submarine

And the world's first use of nuclear fission for propulsion.

Narrator: In June 1952,

President truman characterizes nautilus

As a breakthrough event for nuclear science.

Harry truman: This ship will be something new in the world.

The heat in her boilers will be created

By the same force that heats the sun.

Narrator: Converting a fission reaction

Into propulsion

Marked a milestone in atomic science.

The nautilus, in theory,

Could cruise around the world without refueling,

Powered by a lump of uranium the size of a golf ball.

The u.S. Publicly touts it

As the most advanced sub of its day.

But the details of its real breakthrough,

Nuclear-powered propulsion,

Are highly classified,

Then and now.

Announcer: On April 25, 1958,

The nautilus departed her home port

Of new london, connecticut.

Destination--the pacific, by way of the panama canal.

Narrator: It begins a mission code-named operation sunshine.

In late July, it reaches hawaii,

And the naval base at pearl harbor.

What happens next is so top-secret,

It's known to only the ship's crew,

A few high-ranking navy officials,

And the president.

Officially, nautilus will sail south first,

To the equator,

Then on to panama.

Instead, she submerges and heads north

On a three-week journey.

Announcer: Unseen, beneath the sea,

The nautilus journeyed north,

To the edge of the arctic ice-pack.

Then, under.

The voyage to the north pole was underway.

Narrator: The nautilus is attempting to become

The first vessel to sail under the north pole.

The proposed route has them traveling up the bering sea,

Under the pole,

And emerging at greenland.

Announcer: All hands on the nautilus

Knew their destination

And the perilous route they were to follow in reaching it.

Above, a continent of ice covering the arctic sea.

And ahead, 1,800 miles of cold, watery darkness.

Narrator: Running blind in the cold, dark depths,

The nautilus clears

A vast uncharted underwater mountain range,

Reaches deep water again,

And closes in on the top of the world.

Captain: All hands, this is the captain speaking.

In a few moments, nautilus will realize a goal

Long sought by those who have sailed the seas--

The attaining of the north pole.

8, 6, 4, 3, 2, 1...

Mark.

For the usa and the u.S. Navy,

The north pole.

Narrator: 36 hours later,

The sub surfaces,

And america quickly tells the world

About operation sunshine.

The u.S. Trumpets it as a scientific miracle.

Announcer: Nautilus had made history.

The men of the nautilus

Had blazed a trail under the arctic pack

Which reduced the distance from the orient to europe

By almost half.

Narrator: But the soviet union

Gets a very different message.

America has put a submarine on its doorstep--

A sub that may soon carry nuclear missiles.

Announcer: At once a formidable fighting ship

And a forerunner of commercial atomic power,

The nautilus heralds a new era of the atomic age.

♪

Narrator: The need to demonstrate

The ability to strike the enemy

Will become a hallmark of the cold war.

♪

April 1962.

John kennedy's popularity hits an all-time high,

With many citing his firm hand with the soviets.

That October,

He'll face the ultimate test of the atomic age.

Kuznick: Khrushchev decided he could both protect cuba

And restore some of the imbalance

In nuclear capabilities

If he puts nuclear weapons into cuba.

Narrator: The cuban missile crisis.

Soviet ships carrying nukes approach the island,

Just 100 miles off the florida coast.

Kuznick: It was a reckless, foolhardy, crazy thing to do.

John kennedy: It shall be the policy of this nation

To regard any nuclear missile launched from cuba

Against any nation in the western hemisphere

As an attack by the soviet union on the united states,

Requiring a full retaliatory response

Upon the soviet union.

Narrator: As the world watches and waits,

Even the american president is unaware

Of the two greatest dangers he's facing--

Two secrets that won't be revealed for decades...

Two stories of how close the world really came

To all-out nuclear war.

[roaring]

♪

October 1962.

Soviet ships carrying missiles approach cuba.

U.S. Forces are at defcon 2,

The highest state of alert ever.

The next step, defcon 1--

A shooting war.

Kuznick: Kennedy declares a blockade,

Which is also an act of war,

But he calls it a quarantine

In order to make it seem a little more palatable.

Narrator: More than 230 american warships

Spread out along the sea lanes into cuba,

Awaiting the soviet response.

It will become one of the most famous moments

Of the cold war.

But it wasn't until 1992

That we found out the official version

Wasn't the whole story.

Kuznick: The soviet ships

Are heading toward the quarantine line.

A sub, accompanying some of those ships,

Is spotted by the american cruisers

And destroyers.

Narrator: The american ships

Start dropping special depth charges,

About the size of grenades.

Wellerstein: The soviets think

That the united states is trying to sink them,

That this is the beginning of the war.

Why else would we be attacking a military vessel?

They didn't realize that our protocol

For a destroyer to make a sub surface

Is to drop sort of mock depth charges on it,

Not trying to kill it,

But to signal to it in a very rough way

That they should surface.

Narrator: We now know that was almost a fatal mistake.

Kuznick: The americans had no idea

That they had nuclear weapons on board.

Narrator: Or that the sub's three senior officers

Had the authority to launch those nukes.

But only if the decision was unanimous.

Kuznick: The soviets' commander

Gives the order to launch the nuclear torpedo.

Wellerstein: One of the other high-ranking officers

Says, "ok, that sounds good,"

And then the last high-ranking officer,

A guy named arkapov,

Says "no, we're not gonna do that.

I will not approve of that."

That's how close it comes.

One vote, one person.

Narrator: Another of the cold war's biggest what-ifs.

Kuznick: Had that happened,

They would have taken out the u.S. Fleet,

The u.S. Would have definitely taken out cuba,

But very likely would have taken out the soviet union.

Narrator: That wasn't the only near miss

We didn't know about.

Aerial reconnaissance had brought back evidence

Of missile site preparation in cuba.

If operational,

They could strike almost anywhere in the united states.

In response,

American military leaders urge kennedy

To authorize an attack on mainland cuba.

Kuznick: The military leaders want to bomb the missile sites

And invade and overthrow the cuban government.

Kennedy resists.

Narrator: In the days that follow,

An american u-2 spy plane is shot down,

And u.S. Troops are ready for invasion.

After a 13-day standoff,

Kennedy and khrushchev strike a deal.

It's over.

The soviets pack up their nukes and go home.

History records it

As president kennedy's finest hour--

The day he stood up to the soviets,

Kept nukes out of cuba,

And saved the world.

But as so often in the atomic age,

Declassified secrets tell a very different story.

Wellerstein: The biggest myth of the cuban missile crisis

That was common for decades and decades

Is that the united states stopped the soviet union

From putting nuclear weapons on cuba.

It was not until the 1990s

That we found out that we had not stopped them,

That there were already nuclear weapons on the island.

Narrator: Smaller short-range tactical nuclear missiles.

Battlefield nukes.

Wellerstein: There were several operational missiles

Already ready to go

That would have been used if the united states

Had attempted a military invasion of cuba.

Kuznick: Mcnamara, when he heard that,

He turned white.

Narrator: Because as secretary of defense,

Robert mcnamara knows how close america came

To invading cuba.

Wellerstein: But if we had actually done that,

We would have certainly gotten into

At least a limited nuclear war,

And that easily could have sped out of control

Into a much larger nuclear war.

Narrator: Those thirteen days in October

Brought us even closer than we ever thought

To nuclear war.

What we didn't know almost killed us.

Fedyashin: The cuban missile crisis

Was a great example

Of how a hair-trigger decision by a submarine captain

Or a battery defense unit on the island of cuba

Could have precipitated a full-out conflict,

Potentially with a nuclear exchange,

Which, thank god, never happened.

Narrator: When you're always prepared for a nuclear attack,

It means you're always on the brink of world war iii.

And all it takes is one mistake for it to start.

January 24, 1961.

275 miles south of washington,

In faro, north carolina,

A u.S. Air force b-52 declares an emergency.

[beeping]

It carries two 4-megaton thermonuclear bombs.

H-bombs.

260 times the explosive force

Of the bomb that destroyed hiroshima.

The plane is part of an operation

Code-named chrome dome.

Announcer: This, our country and all its people,

Could be in danger of nuclear attack--

In minutes by enemy missiles;

In hours by enemy aircraft.

To avoid surprise disaster,

Some of our aircraft must always be in the sky or on the alert,

Carrying nuclear weapons.

Narrator: It's one of up to 12 b-52s carrying nuclear payloads

That are in the air at all times,

Ready for the order to strike the soviet union.

Norris: They would fly up to the borders of the soviet union,

And turn around and come back.

Narrator: The plan works to keep the soviets on edge.

Wellerstein: But there's a certain number of hours

You can fly a bomber

Before you're gonna expect it to crash.

[explosion]

Narrator: Crashed bombers with nuclear payloads.

Lost nukes.

It happens often enough, there's a name for it.

Norris: The phrase "broken arrow"

Has to do with a nuclear weapon accident.

To be a broken arrow, it has to...

It's a pretty serious accident.

Narrator: January 17, 1966.

Palomares, Spain.

A small fishing village and beach town

On the mediterranean coast.

An american b-52 carrying four h-bombs

Collides with a tanker at 29,000 feet

And breaks up in mid-air.

Norris: A strategic air command bomber

Filled with bombs

Dropped the weapons,

Some which landed on land

And one that went into the mediterranean.

Narrator: The official line is that a plane has crashed

And spread hazardous material on the ground.

In fact, as the press finds out,

A nuclear weapon is missing somewhere in the mediterranean.

Reporter: Cruisers and destroyers

With sonar equipment

Have been trying to locate the lost bomb

And also screening the approaches

Against enemy spies.

Narrator: It takes two months just to find the sunken weapon.

A mini-sub eventually hauls it to the surface.

It was intact,

But two of the other three bombs actually exploded.

They became accidental "dirty bombs,"

Spreading traces of toxic plutonium dust for miles.

American troops remove truckloads of contaminated dirt

For months.

Norris: And this still goes on.

I mean, I think we're still bringing back soil from Spain

That is laden with plutonium that's a serious health hazard.

Narrator: At least all four bombs were recovered.

Some broken arrows are never found.

Kuznick: There was another incident in 1968

In thule, greenland,

Which, again, nuclear bombs were dropped.

Narrator: A crippled b-52

Patrolling near the arctic circle

Is attempting an emergency landing.

The crew of seven bails out.

One dies.

The plane crashes onto the sea-ice.

There's no nuclear detonation.

But once again,

The impact, conventional explosion,

And resulting fire

Create the effect of a dirty bomb,

Spreading radioactive material for miles.

Cleanup crews battle a frozen wasteland.

Average temperature-- negative 40 degrees fahrenheit.

Crews work around the clock

To remove a quarter of a million cubic feet

Of contaminated ice and snow

Before it melts into the sea.

The military claims all four nukes

Are recovered at the crash site.

But a 2008 report alleges

That one of the bombs still lies on the sea floor.

Closer to home, in January 1961,

In north carolina,

A b-52 attempting an emergency landing

Never makes it back to base.

Wellerstein: This bomber sort of disintegrates into the air,

It sorts of breaks apart very violently,

And these two weapons are sort of flung out of the bomber bay.

Narrator: Pieces of the bomber rain down

Onto the small farming town of faro.

One bomb floats to earth after its parachute deploys.

The other crashes into a field.

The pentagon claims neither weapon

Was ever in danger of exploding.

But a 2013 freedom of information request

Reveals that one of the weapons

Had virtually completed the arming sequence.

Wellerstein: This bomb

Actually attempted to arm itself and fire.

It went through all--just a very set of freak accidents,

And fortunately didn't.

Narrator: One switch like this one,

Out of four,

Prevents a nuclear disaster.

Kuznick: If that other small switch didn't hold,

Then that nuclear bomb would have detonated.

We would have lost a significant portion

Of the east coast of the united states.

Narrator: When its chute doesn't open,

The second bomb slams into the ground,

Sinking more than 150 feet deep.

It takes three days of frantic digging to find it.

Wellerstein: They found that its switch was armed.

So if that one switch

Had been in the other bomb at that time,

The bomb would have completely, legitimately

Thought that it was ready to explode.

Narrator: The military removes the nuclear fuel

At the bomb's core.

But the uranium trigger is never located.

A nuclear detonator is still buried

In that north carolina field.

In 1968, operation chrome dome,

Keeping nukes in the air 24-7,

Is abandoned.

[explosion]

To date, the u.S. Military admits to 32 broken arrows.

Information about 21 has been declassified.

11 remain top-secret.

[explosion]

November 9, 1989.

The berlin wall falls.

Many hope five decades of paranoia and suspicion

Crumble with it.

Norris: There was great joy and enthusiasm

That perhaps the cold war would be over.

The russians weren't coming,

Which had been a rationale all along through the decades.

Narrator: With the fall of the soviet union,

The atomic age's hidden stories are finally being declassified,

And americans are finding out

What we were willing to do to fight the cold war

And protect our secrets.

Wellerstein: In the 1990s, after the cold war ended,

Many americans had a sort of reckoning

With what had happened.

How did we get to the state of almost killing ourselves off?

How did we get to the state

Of having tens of thousands of nuclear weapons?

How did we get into a place of having all these secrets

About doing things that seemed not just anti-american,

But, you know, unethical by any standard?

Narrator: The obsession with secrecy,

Born with the bomb,

Is a legacy of the atomic age.

America still keeps its secrets.

Which ones are we keeping now?

Clinton: I saw this

As an indispensable part of our effort

To restore the confidence of the american people

In the integrity of their government--

That, at the very least,

They could trust the united states government

To tell the truth and to do the right things.