by Bryan & Heather
Over the past few years, Netflix has begun building a robust collection of 20th-century history documentaries under, among other things, the banner of its umbrella Turning Point series. While they all bear the same foretitle, each of these docuseries is listed as its own product on the streaming service, and to date have covered the 9/11 attacks and wider War on Terror, the Vietnam War, and now the role of nuclear weaponry in sparking and maintaining the Cold War. We had watched and quite enjoyed that initial series that focused on the context of and American response to radical Islamic terrorism back when we reviewed a whole slate of media that aired surrounding the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks back in 2021. When Heather spied this new Cold War series, then, it was an easy decision to add it to our queue. Our experience this time, though, would be quite different.
Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War spans nearly eight decades of 20th and 21st century history, from the Second World War up to the first year of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Its guiding purpose, allegedly, is to show how the development, capability, and stockpiling of nuclear weapons became one of, if not the, defining features of the geopolitical clash between capitalist United States and communist USSR, and indeed the primary factor in that conflict remaining a “cold” war and not developing into a hot one. Starting out, the docuseries seemed to mostly stick to this theme; the entire first episode is devoted to the pre-Cold War research, policies, and strategies that led to America inventing the atomic bomb when it did, then dissects the decision to use the bomb to compel Japan’s surrender in 1945. The subsequent two episodes then delve into the break between the former wartime Allies, opening salvoes in Europe that built tension, and how the Soviets’ own successful nuclear tests leveled the playing field while simultaneously raising the stakes of any direct conflict to hold the survival of humanity in the balance. As any good work of public-facing history does, however, The Bomb and the Cold War also takes opportunities to deliver wider context and discussions about adjacent topics like the role of espionage and resulting Red Scares and public persecution in the United States during the 1950s. Ironically, however, what is normally so welcome would for us slowly develop into the documentary’s Achilles Heel.
As we reached the midpoint of the series’ ten episodes, it became increasingly clear that the showrunners didn’t know how to deftly handle the wide array of 20th century history that could feasibly be considered relevant to their topic. Most general themes of the Cold War (like decolonization, Civil Rights, and counterculture) were at least briefly represented, but major events related to them (Like the Suez Crisis or Civil/Voting Rights Acts) were not. When the entire Vietnam War received only a single sentence allusion, we knew that something very odd was going on. At first, we thought that there might be a reasonable explanation; despite some of the earlier episodes’ wider context, this wasn’t supposed to be a documentary about the entire Cold War, just the atomic aspect of it. In the case of Vietnam, a previous Turning Point (that we have yet to watch) had been devoted entirely to that conflict, so perhaps they didn’t want to retread ground that had already been examined in much better detail elsewhere. Our cautious optimism was soon dashed, however. In a series supposedly devoted to the nuclear history of the latter 20th century, the disaster at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania (which has featured in posts here and here on Concerning History) was not mentioned at all, while Chernobyl was only covered briefly. Indeed, the final third of the series hardly featured discussion of nuclear technology at all, including the entire episode on the collapse of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe not mentioning it once.
And then, there’s the war in Ukraine.
It’s clear from the very beginning of The Bomb’s first episode that the showrunners are attempting to demonstrate the relevance of their topic by showing how fears of nuclear war have recently been reawakened due to Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of its southern neighbor and subsequent humiliation of Russian forces. Every episode of the series begins with a short cold open portraying an episode in the early days of that war. Some of these are connected to the subject matter of that episode, but others feel more vague and irrelevant. Once the show reaches the conflict in earnest, the narrative continues the pattern of being interested in anything other than nuclear history, devoting massive amounts of time to a biography of Putin. That is not to say it is absent; multiple talking heads do present the fear that Putin will resort to his nuclear arsenal out of desperation and an effort to erase the humiliation of being stymied by Ukraine’s success waging asymmetrical war, but it is a small fraction of those episodes. Furthermore, their contention that the world hasn’t been this close to nuclear holocaust since the 1960s ring mostly hollow given the decades-long presence of aspiring nuclear rogue states Iran and North Korea, not to mention that Russia’s armed forces have been revealed to be so weak and mismanaged that we wouldn’t be surprised if their silos weren’t even able to open should the time come.
By the time we finished, it seemed like we watched a series that was a chimera of three different projects. At different moments, The Bomb could easily have been a documentary on the history of nuclear technology, the war in Ukraine, or even the Cold War in general. Yet certain key omissions, tangents, and failures of organization ensured that none of these were fully served in their own right, and thus the show fails at all three. At one point, we even wondered aloud whether someone had wanted to make a project on Ukraine, but had been advised to make this instead to use as a backdoor for fear of alienating viewers of a certain political persuasion. This is a real shame—what history is there is very well-told, and with some changes Netflix could have really fleshed out an entire viewing experience, mapping out the history of the modern era in discreet, interlocking topical documentaries one subject at a time. For now, though, Turning Point is one and one for us; we’ll see if future installments, or that covering Vietnam if we get around to it, will improve or worsen that record.