Original subtitles

NARRATION: At the start of the 1960s

Cold War tensions were heightening.

Confrontation threatened.

The two superpowers watched and waited,

preparing for a nuclear holocaust.

The world's safety depended on mutual assured detsruction -

the treat of mutual suicide that came to be known as M.A.D. -

MAD.

It's not mad! [ Laughs ]

Mutual Assured Destruction is the foundation of deterrence.

Reconnaissance plane like this took off on a routine

mission to probe the radar defenses of the Soviet border.

COL. JOHN McKONE: We took off from Brize Norton Air Base in England.

That was our forward operating

location on that particular date,

and we were supposed to fly this quote-unquoted 'milk run'.

There were not supposed to be any particular problems during that

flight and we thought that this would be a rather...

rather simple flight, although it was a twelve-hour mission.

[speaking Russian ]

They flew in order to detect our radar stations.

The wanted to know the location of the air defense system of

the Soviet Union.

They often flew close to our borders.

We started flying parallel to the Soviet coastline,

which had Murmansk and the mouth of the

White Sea and so forth up there,

and we knew there was quite a bit of activity

going on up there by the Russians at that time.

[speaking Russian ]

I was on combat duty to intercept,

and I flew up to find the enemy.

I was guided from the ground.

When I saw the enemy plane, I identified it,

and radioed my base.

The co-pilot said, 'Check, check, check,

right wing',

and the aircraft commander, Major Palm, said,

'Where the hell did that guy come from?'

[speaking Russian ]

I signaled the plane to follow me.

He wouldn't obey.

I radioed my base, and asked what I should do.

An order came back "Destroy it".

I opened fire and the plane started to burn.

NARRATION: As the MIG fighters returned to base,

John McKone and Co-pilot Bruce Olmstead parachuted to safety,

and imprisonment in Moscow's Lubianka prison.

The four other Americans on board had died in mid-air.

On the front line, constant vigilance.

War, if it came, would soon 'go nuclear'.

American Titan missiles,

each with a warhead that could destroy Moscow,

were ready to be launched.

It would be done before we had time

to stop and think about what we were doing.

It doesn't take all that long and it was just automatic.

There was no question in our mind that

this was the thing to do.

If we had ever received a launch message over the PAS system,

I ha... would have had absolutely no doubt that my life

expectancy was measured in probably less

than a half an hour, and the only question was

would we able to launch this missile

before the incoming hit us.

NARRATION: Pearl Harbor was still a painful wound in the

American psyche.

In Alaska, Greenland, and England,

Ballistic Missile Early Warning radars were in operation.

America did not want to be surprised again.

TOM DENCHY: The Cold War

was a war that went on 24 hours a day,

7 days a week.

We felt that they were

trying to take over the... the world and actually

we were one of their largest stumbling blocks in

that effort and therefore we were one

of their primary enemies, and their primary

target was to take over our country.

GEN. MIKHAIL MOKRINSKI: [speaking Russian ]

They were banging it into our heads

and we couldn't have imagined otherwise:

the Americans were aggressors

who wanted to conquer the whole world,

and we had to protect the world.

NARRATIONI In 1961,

the new American President John Kennedy,

had taken office in a tense nuclear world.

He inherited from Eisenhower,

the doctrine of 'massive retaliation'.

The term "Massive Retaliation",

as it was understood at the end of the 1950s,

and the beginning of the 1960s,

was a policy of responding to major Soviet conventional attacks -

for example,

in Western Europe,

should that have occurred,

with a massive nuclear response.

NARRATION: "Massive Retaliation"

had been conceived at a time of clear American superiority.

Now, the Russians were trying to catch up.

GEN VALENTIN LARIONOV: [speaking Russian ]

There was a syndrome to catch up and overtake,

to try and show everyone that we

weren't far behind the Americans,

that we too had nuclear weapons.

There were those who said that we can only prevent

a nuclear war if we oppose world

imperialism with a force of similar strength.

NARRATION: Khrushchev sought a dramatic

means to remind the West of the power of the Soviets.

He broke a moratorium on nuclear testing.

October the 30th, 1961: a Russian bomber crew were

preparing to drop the largest bomb the world had ever seen.

The explosion was the equivalent of more than

50 million tons of TNT,

more than all the explosives used in World War ll.

50 miles away, people were blown off their feet.

Khrushchev said he wanted the bomb to

"hang like the sword of Damocles over the imperialists heads".

Kennedy took up the challenge.

In view of the Soviet Action,

it will be the policy

of the United States to proceed in developing

nuclear WEEIPOHS,

to maintain this superior capability

for the defense of the free world against any aggressor.

NARRATION: To Kennedy's anger,

the super bomb was just one of a series of Soviet nuclear tests.

GEN. MIKHAIL MOKRINSKI: [speaking Russian ]

I remember counting down the seconds,

then dropping the bomb.

We had to put on special glasses,

and pull down curtains to protect us

against the radiation.

We'd put on the glasses, but we'd forget

to draw the curtains as we wanted to have a peek.

Suddenly, there would be something like a rising sun.

The clouds disperse and you see a beautiful,

beautiful picture,

like in a fairytale- a mushroom growing up and up.

It's on top of you and you are going underneath.

The instruments measuring the level of radiation

went right off the scale,

but of course we forgot about that.

Then suddenly there is a huge

blow as the shock wave hits the plane,

all the controls go crazy, and you have to grab the joystick,

and quickly, quickly try and get it under control.

The plane was thrown from side to side.

We knew what a nuclear explosion was like.

It became obvious that the Russians just...

there was no containing them,

they were shooting hot just this big bomb,

but lots and lots of them

and we essentially did the same thing.

We went and, you know,

we got bombs from wherever we could

find 'em and took 'em to Nevada and shot them

just in order to respond to these Russian tests.

It was a crazy period.

NARRATION: In the West,

public opinion was turning against the arms build up,

and the testing of the bomb.

In Britain, what started in 1958

as a march to the weapons centre at Aldermaston,

swelled to an annual rally of tens of thousands of campaigners

for nuclear disarmament.

DORIS BOOTMAN: We did seriously accept

the fact that if a nuclear

bomb was used in the London area

the effect was going to be so massive over such a

geographical area

that even people living miles out would have repercussions.

And we were quite serious in

our expectations that this could happen.

The scientists have made it, it's there and available,

somebody's going to want to use it.

NARRATION: Kennedy and his secretary of defense, McNamara,

were increasingly aware of the danger of relying

on the strategy of "Massive Retaliation".

ROBERT MCNAMARA: Nuclear weapons

have no military utility whatsoever,

excepting only to deter one's opponent from their use.

Which means you should never never never initiate their

use against a nuclear-equipped opponent.

If you do, it's suicide.

And that conclusion I came to very early.

As I say, when I came in I... I didn't know the difference

between a nuclear weapon and a conventional weapon,

but it didn't take me long to find out.

A few months,

and I came to that conclusion.

The problem was, how to implement the conclusion.

NARRATION: McNamara presented the Joint Chiefs of Staff

with an appealing alternative.

Soviet cities were no longer to be targeted.

They were to strike only at Soviet military forces.

This was known as No Cities/Counter-force.

And if both sides did that,

then the casualties,

in the unlikely and very undesirable prospect of a nuclear war,

would be less.

[speaking Russian ]

This idea of a "No-Cities" plan,

this striking only against military bases,

rocket forces and submarines-

it was simply an attempt to make nuclear war morally acceptable.

It was an attempt to deceive oneself.

NARRATION: The Russians weren't the only skeptics.

The head of the Strategic Air Command General Power,

was briefed on Counterforce by one of McNamarafs assistants.

WILLIAM KAUFMANN: General Power insisted

that the only way to deal with these

barbarians was to blow them all up and I said,

'But who's going to win that?'

And he said, 'I would be satisfied if there were

just two Americans left and one Russian -

that would be we would have won'.

And I said, 'Well there'd better be one of them a woman'.

NARRATION: October 1962.

Khrushchev, seeking to reduce American nuclear superiority,

sent Soviet missiles into Cuba.

GEN RUSSELL DOUGHERTY: It was real.

You know, this was no joke.

They were moving mid-range missiles into Cuba and

and I don't think there's

any doubt about the fact they were moving.

They may have had some there already.

They certainly had the facilities

to rapidly introduce them.

That was tense.

NARRATION: Kennedy ordered a blockade,

and put his forces across the globe on the highest alert.

B-52s loaded with hydrogen bombs,

were ready for war.

OVIDIO PUGANALE: During the Cuban missile crisis,

if the horn blew we shook like the devil.

I mean we were scared we said we're on our way.

So we simply ran to that airplane

and fired up the ground carts to get

get power to the airplane and air to start

the engines and we cranked those engines as fast as we could

and we would listen for a message

from Strategic Air Command

to give us instructions on what type of exercise it was,

if it was a practice or if it was the real thing.

You know, you literally swallowed

because you didn't know what it was going to be.

NARRATION: Confronted by Kennedy's nuclear superiority,

Khrushchev turned the missile ships back.

[speaking Russian ]

Both Khrushchevs government and Kennedy's government

proved to be wise enough to find their way

out of this situation.

The Cuban missile crisis was very important.

It showed just how close to the edge of the

nuclear precipice the world was standing.

NARRATION: Moscow and Washington realized that direct

communication between the two capitals must be improved.

They installed the "hot-line" between them.

The following summer, shocked at how close

they'd come to nuclear war, the Soviet Union,

America and Britain agreed a Limited Test Ban Treaty.

There would be no more 'atmospheric? tests.

Nuclear testing would continue, but underground.

In Russia, the Kremlin had learnt a lesson.

Never again did it want to confront America

from a position of weakness.

NIKOLAI DETINOV: [speaking Russian ]

Lack of nuclear armaments

and the weakness of the Soviet Union

came as a shock to the Soviet leadership.

It was like a cold shower for the Government,

who realized that these weaknesses had to be overcome.

NARRATION: The Soviet Union

built up their nuclear forces.

They added hundreds of missiles to their arsenal.

The Americans had to accept that, realistically,

they could no longer destroy all the Soviet forces.

HAROLD BROWN: It became clear that if you said that

your main approach was going to be to target the other

side's military capability, what would happen is that

those targets would proliferate to the point

where there would be no limit to the amount

that you would spend on strategic forces.

The military on both sides accepted that

they could no longer protect their own country

from destruction.

NARRATION: The superpowers

had discovered they had one thing in common;

an interest in avoiding nuclear war.

It is an ironic, but accurate fact,

that the two strongest powers

are the two in the most danger of devastation.

All we have built, all we have worked for

would be destroyed in the first twenty-four hours,

and even in the Cold War which brings

burdens and dangers to so many countries,

including this nation's closest allies,

our two countries bear the heaviest burdens.

For we are both devoting massive sums of money to weapons

that could be better devoted

to combat ignorance, poverty, and disease.

NARRATION: A grim logic

was beginning to emerge.

Nuclear disarmament was not achievable,

yet nuclear war was unthinkable.

By 1964,

McNamara had concluded that his 'No Cities' plan

was a dangerous illusion.

War would only be avoided,

he now thought,

by the threat of mutual suicide.

WILLIAM LEE: McNamara in particular became totally

convinced that the only strategy was...

what is known as Mutually Assured Destruction,

MAD for short.

And what that meant was that the only

way to have stable deterrents in the world was

for both sides to be able to kill twenty-five to

fifty per cent of the other's population.

It's not mad!

[ laughs ] Mutual Assured Destruction

is the foundation of deterrence.

Today it's a derogative term,

but it's those who denigrate it,

don't understand deterrence.

If you want a stable nuclear world-

if that isn't an oxymoron,

to rephrase it,

to the degree one can achieve a stable nuclear world -

it requires that each side be confident that it can

deter the other, and that,

that requires that there be a balance

and the balance is the understanding that if either

side initiates the use of nuclear weapons,

the other side will respond with sufficient

power to inflict unacceptable damage.

NARRATION: Submarines now played a crucial role.

[Archive Sound- Countdown ] 3, 2, 1, Fire!

NARRATION: For MAD to succeed, each side needed to be able to retaliate,

even after it had suffered a surprise attack.

JOE WILLIAMS: The Polaris system to begin with was really a city killer.

It was an extremely

survivable assured destruction capability that the

Soviets knew, they could not destroy

and knew that if they conducted a first strike,

that system would some day be available to retaliate.

It might take some time to

get the message to them from a

destroyed national headquarters, but at some day the missile

warheads would come raining in and they would pay the price.

I don't think that there would have been

hesitation on the part of any commanding officer to launch.

Did we think about what was back home?

Sure we did, but you didn't let that control your actions.

Time to think about that after you'd done your duty.

[speaking Russian ]

The fact that very tense people

were close to nuclear weapons,

ready to use those weapons,

presented a huge danger to the world.

And of course, we felt uncomfortable,

but we still had to accomplish our task,

like the Americans had to accomplish theirs,

and we would have accomplished it.

What would it have ended in?

It would have had very sad consequences for the world.

I thought from the beginning

it was morally bankrupt, decrepit,

morally dis... I mean, I...

I just do not accept war... that the primary objective

to war is to kill people.

The primary objective of war is to win the bloody thing with

as... as few losses to er... first of all to your own

side and second to the other side.

Always you want to minimize losses on both sides,

but first of all yourself: but you want to win the thing

and get it over as soon as possible.

HAROLD BROWN: If the first day

had involved attacks on cities

then it would have been

just unbelievably catastrophic:

tens of millions of deaths and enormous destruction.

Even one thermonuclear weapon

on a large city

would be destructive on an almost

unimaginable and unprecedented scale.

World War ll killed 50 million people,

but it didn't do it in one day.

NARRATION: In 1963, Peter Watkins, a British film-maker,

made a drama documentary to show what a nuclear war would mean.

ARCHIVE NARRATION: 9:16 am.

A single megaton nuclear missile

overshoots Manston Airfield in Kent,

and air bursts six miles from this position.

At this distance the heat wave is sufficient

to cause melting of the upturned eyeball,

third degree burning of the skin and ignition of furniture.

12 seconds later the shock front arrives.

The blast wave from a thermonuclear explosion has been

likened to an enormous door slamming in the depths of hell.

NARRATION: The film was called the 'War Game'.

The BBC banned it.

It wasn't seen on television for twenty years.

HAROLD BROWN: There was, for a period of a couple of years -

at least a year -

a strong effort to persuade the American public

that it was worth investing in and practicing civil defense.

That campaign fell flat;

the public wasn't very interested.

I think the public concluded that if

a thermonuclear war were to take place,

civil defense, although it might preserve some lives,

would not preserve most lives, and what came

afterwards would have made life not worth living.

"Whether you're sitting in your desk next to the window,

or standing in the elevator shaft,

it wouldn't be of any great

significance if the bomb were dropped in this

area within a radius of 25 miles."

"I assume you're supposed to go to a shelter,

but in a city like New York there's not

much chance that a person would survive if there

was an attack or something...

"In the case of a real attack,

nobody would know what to do I'm quite sure."

NARRATION: Officially the Russians

took Civil defense more seriously,

but the reality was not encouraging.

MARIA STEPANOVA: [speaking Russian ]

When people began to realize how dangerous these weapons were,

they used to joke that if a nuclear bomb

was dropped nearby all there'd be left to do

was to cover yourself with a white bed sheet

and crawl to the cemetery.

[ laughs ]

If you could make it to the cemetery that is.

[speaking Russian ]

The leaders were guided by the idea that

as there might not be a nuclear war,

why spend money which we were so short of?

On the other hand,

if there was a war, civil defense would not help.

It was a very sensible,

purely pragmatic Russian attitude.

NARRATION: Even short of total war,

deterrence carried its own dangers.

In 1966 over the coast of Spain,

a B-52 was due to attempt a routine refueling,

mid-air from a tanker.

In the village of Palomares,

Simo Orts was setting out for the day's fishing.

SIMO ORTS: [speaking Spanish]

I was fishing opposite Villaricos,

and the planes were flying overhead.

We always used to watch the planes.

There were two B-52s refueling, and the ones at the back

must have brushed against each other and the planes exploded.

[ Speaking Spanish ]

I remember all this fire in the air and pieces

of airplane falling to the ground.

I remember all the neighbors running to the place

where the smoke came from.

We thought that what had fallen there was still burning.

NARRATION: As the planes broke up,

4 hydrogen bombs were scattered over the coast.

Three hit the ground, one was lost at sea.

SIMO ORTS: [speaking Spanish]

I saw it very clearly:

the bomb fell into the sea very close to me.

And then, I saw how much interest the Americans showed...

the whole Sixth Fleet came.

There were 5,000 soldiers living on land in tents -

generals, colonels, so many important

people from North America.

NARRATION: The American fleet searched the ocean for the missing bomb.

Those on dry land had different problems.

When the bombs hit the ground,

safety devices prevented a thermonuclear explosion.

But the conventional high explosives,

used to trigger a nuclear blast,

had gone off, scattering radioactive plutonium.

ANTONIA FLORES: [speaking Spanish]

They started doing medical

check-ups here in the town with a Geiger counter.

Some people had to throw away their clothes

because they were contaminated.

The houses were washed down with detergent or water.

At no stage did the Americans tell us anything.

People were scared,

because no one knew what was happening -

all you knew was that you were forbidden to eat things,

that you couldn't go out on the street,

you couldn't touch anything -

everything but everything was permanently prohibited.

NARRATION: Over four and a half

thousand barrels of contaminated soil were

shipped back to the United States for burial.

At sea, the search

continued for the missing bomb.

NARRATION: The Spanish feared that the Mediterranean was contaminated.

American Ambassador, Biddel Duke,

went swimming for the cameras.

INTERVIEWER: "Ambassador do you detect

any radioactivity in the water?"

[ laughs ] "if this is radioactivity, I love it."

NARRATION: Eighty days after the accident,

an American mini submarine,

Alvin, found the missing bomb, intact.

The Pentagon called a lost nuclear bomb a 'Broken Arrow'.

Palomares was the 14th Broken Arrow since 1950.

More were to come.

The number of Soviet Accidents' is still unknown.

The Russian military

were unconvinced by McNamara's notion of 'Assured Destruction'.

They saw it as their first duty to

protect their homeland.

They worked to develop anti ballistic missiles -

ABMs, which could destroy American missiles in flight.

COL.GEN. YURI VOTINTSEV: [speaking Russian ]

First there used to be sword and then a shield,

then a tank and anti-tank gun;

now it turned out that a missile was not invulnerable.

Science and technology was developing so fast.

It had become possible to

fight the most dangerous, the most invincible weapons.

NARRATION: To the United States,

Russia's ABMs came as a blow.

It was a terrible paradox.

By building a 'defensive system, Russia had

put the delicate nuclear balance at risk.

NIKOLAI DETINOV: [speaking Russian ]

We thought of it as an umbrella.

Would an umbrella harm anybody?

If it rains, you open it up.

That was how we saw the ABM system.

It was an umbrella to protect our population

against a possible missile strike.

In terms of MAD,

if you believe in Mutual Assured Destruction,

anything that interferes with the...

with... with both sides, see,

it's mutual, Mutual Assured Destruction.

It must be mutual, and it must be assured.

So anything on either side that it

would interfere with both sides,

either or both sides,

capability to kill twenty to fifty per cent

of the population of the other side is,

by definition, destabilizing.

[speaking Russian ]

The introduction of ABMs destabilized MAD,

the balance of terror.

We were both so afraid of nuclear armaments.

We knew that you wouldn't strike and we wouldn't strike.

But, now if one side could counter

the other's ability to respond,

then they had the advantage.

NARRATION: America too,

had been developing an ABM System,

but McNamara was reluctant to authorize production.

The system was easy to beat,

and the sums just didn't add up.

WILLIAM KAUFMANN: The ratio of cost to the defender,

as against the offense, was very unfavorable,

in that it would cost say, like, five dollars to the defense

to counter every dollar that the offense spent.

And therefore the... the economics just strongly

favored the offense.

NARRATION: McNamara convinced President Johnson to abandon ABMs.

But only if the Soviets agreed to do the same.

In 1967, war in the Middle East raised

international tension to boiling point.

America supported Israel.

The Soviet Union supported Egypt, Syria and Jordan.

ARCHIVE NARRATION: "The Israelis have released

these dramatic aerial pictures to support their claim to have

shot down six MIG fighters of the Syrian Air Force."

NARRATION: Israel swiftly inflicted a crushing defeat.

America, fearful that the Soviet Union might come to Egypt's aid,

prepared the Sixth fleet for action.

ROBERT MCNAMARA: The Six Day War between Israel and

and Egypt-

And as a part of that, the hotline was used

for the first time and one of the

messages from Kosygin to President Johnson was,

'If you want war, you'll get war'.

These were very very tense times.

NARRATION: To reduce the tension President Johnson

Soviet Premier Kosygin agreed to meet

at Glassboro, New Jersey.

In spite of the Middle East crisis,

ABMs were high on their agenda.

[speaking Russian ]

The President and the Premier had a meeting,

and the President started speaking.

He said, "Let's come to an agreement,

let's each not build such expensive ABM systems."

Kosygin said, "I am against this...

Why do you object to a system that protects people?

Defense is something moral, and aggression is immoral.

Missiles mean aggression.

If you agreed to reduce the number of aggressive missiles,

then I could speak about reducing our defense system...

NARRATION: Whilst the arguments over ABMs continued,

American scientists were preparing a countermeasure;

Multiple Independently Targeted Re-Entry Vehicles-

MIRVs for short.

One single missile could now carry ten separate warheads,

each capable of destroying a city.

HELMUT SONNENFELDT: Once you got into the MIRV era,

the problem of strategic defense became

infinitely more complicated, infinitely more expensive,

because you had to devise ways of

going after a multiplicity of warheads

and all kinds of junk that would be put

into the atmosphere to mislead the defense.

COL .GEN. YURI VOTINTSEV: [speaking Russian ]

One anti-ballistic missile is enough to shoot

down one ballistic missile.

But now imagine that a ballistic missile

has 10 separate warheads.

In order to shoot down one of those missiles,

you would need at least 10 anti-ballistic missiles.

Here are two figures for you to compare.

The United States of America had,

on their land based launching sites alone,

1,054 ballistic missiles.

To counter that, we would have needed

over 10,000 anti-ballistic missiles.

That would be madness.

[speaking Russian ]

The Soviet Union realized that unless we stopped

the arms race, then the Americans,

who were financially better off,

could out-do the Soviet Union.

The leadership began to understand that now we

had to choose between building socialism and communism,

or making missiles.

NARRATION: By 1969 the super powers were, between them,

spending more than 50 million dollars a day

on nuclear armaments.

It was a burden both sides were finding intolerable.

At last, they agreed to meet in Helsinki

to try to halt the arms race.

The negotiations came to be known as SALT.

HELMUT SONNENFELDT: SALT stands for

Strategic Arms Limitations Talks.

It was an... an effort, er,

in the light of later events, a...

a rather modest effort to try and put some kind of a cap

on the accumulation of strategic delivery systems.

NARRATION: The bargaining was not going to be easy.

[speaking Russian ]

It was like diving into a swamp with your eyes closed.

There were a lot of doubts

and difficulties in organizing these things.

Particularly because before going to the talks,

the members of the delegation were called up by Brezhnev

and very seriously warned not to say too much.

He reminded them that the KGB was listening,

and the Lubianka prison was watching.

HELMUT SONNENFELDT: The Soviets were even more

were far more hesitant about doing anything that might

involve some sort of intrusion into their society,

because inevitably anything

to do with real arms control would involve inspection,

verification and so on and so forth.

And this, for the Soviets, remained anathema.

NARRATION: Negotiations dragged on throughout 1970 and 1971,

as each side tried to come to terms

with the other's philosophy.

HELMUT SONNENFELDT: The Soviets

really had it in their

gut, in the marrow of their bone, this... this right,

this inherent right of a nation to defend itself and

there wasn't really any argument in those days,

early days of a technical nature,

of a... of a strategic analytical nature.

It was just the God given- they wouldn't have said God-

right of a nation to defend itself.

[speaking Russian ]

The Soviet Union felt naked, unprotected,

surrounded everywhere by American nuclear forces.

It was very difficult to protect the Soviet Union.

When we had developed our

own ballistic missiles, although we had very few,

we realized that it had acted as a counterbalance.

But when we started the talks,

we remembered all the kinds of weapons that could reach us.

NARRATION: Behind the scenes, Henry Kissinger,

Nixon's national security advisor,

arranged private meetings with

Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin.

ANATOLY DOBRYNIN: [speaking Russian ]

These meetings made it possible

to introduce corrections, or amendments without losing face.

Using the back channel with Kissinger,

we could first state the official point of view,

and then talk more freely.

I would say, "Henry, mind you, or you should realize..."

I was really just thinking aloud,

and then he would say,

"Well, Anatoly, why should we get stuck on this?

Why don't we do it in a different way?"

NARRATION: Face to face across the table,

the two sides made progress on ABMs.

But they barely touched on the most destabilizing of the

new technologies- multiple warheads- MIRVs.

[speaking Russian ]

The subject was not really discussed

because by then the Americans already had this technology

and Russia didn't.

We believed that we should have it too.

NARRATION: Finally, in May 1972,

after almost three years of negotiations,

President Nixon arrived in Moscow to sign the

SALT agreements with Premier Brezhnev.

ABMs had now been discredited

and the two sides agreed to limit them.

But all they could agree on 'offensive' weapons

was a temporary freeze on missile launchers.

The superpowers were learning to cooperate.

Yet, their failure to control MIRVs

meant that, in the next decade, Russia and

America would add 12,000 nuclear warheads to their arsenals.

Preparations for global annihilation continued.