‘Turning Point’ Docuseries Deconstructs The Cold War and Warns of Another

When filmmaker Brian Knappenberger began making a docuseries on the Cold War, his main objective was to remind people about the dangers of nuclear weapons. 

Two months later, Russia invaded Ukraine.

Knappenberger and his film crew left for Kyiv soon after to capture history as it unfolded in real time. They met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and recorded the people and land that would become protagonists of Turning Point: The Bomb And The Cold War, a nine-part Netflix series chronicling the birth of nuclear weapons and the events that led to the Russia-Ukraine war and the impending modern nuclear arms race. 

“I set out to make a documentary about the weapons we created that can destroy all of humanity,” said Knappenberger, an executive producer, writer, and director at Luminant Media, which produced the series. “But suddenly Ukraine was in crisis and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin was spewing disinformation about the Cold War to excuse it…. It became clear that we had a new obligation to tell the real story.”

A year after the docuseries’ release, Knappenberger spoke with Outrider about making The Bomb And The Cold War, what fuels today’s global nuclear instability, and the upcoming Turning Point project. 

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Outrider: The Bomb And The Cold War is a second, bigger installment of the Turning Point docuseries, following 9/11 And The War On Terror, which was released on Netflix in September 2021. It has more episodes, high-profile interviews, and covers nearly 80 years of history. How did your storytelling approach to these two projects differ?

In some ways, they were actually very similar. 

During the year after September 11, I went to Afghanistan to make a film for PBS and found that a lot of people were warm and welcoming to the American presence. There were a lot of people who felt oppressed by the Taliban, and it seemed like there was this shared surge of energy and anger following 9/11.

But that really deteriorated over time and then we plunged into 20-plus years of war. I felt compelled to go back and tell the story of the reverberations of 9/11 — this traumatic event that rattled the geopolitical tectonic plates — on its 28th anniversary. 

Some of the tension in Afghanistan was a direct result of the Cold War; the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in the late 1970s in support of its deteriorating communist government. So, I see the second Turning Point series as a big expansion of the story I began to tell in the first. 

That said, making The Bomb And The Cold War hit a little closer to home. I grew up in a small town called Broomfield, CO, which is the closest community to a nuclear weapons-making facility called Rocky Flats. It was sort of like Stranger Things — there was this mysterious government project going on right over the hill that nobody really understood. There were a number of leaks and fires that happened around Rocky Flats, and rumors that all of the water near it was contaminated. That’s the water I drank and swam and played in as a kid. The Cold War was at work right there in my little suburban neighborhood, and telling its story felt personal.

Just months after you began filming The Bomb And The Cold War, Russia invaded Ukraine, dramatically restructuring your storytelling process. The Russia-Ukraine war has persisted now for over three years, and the United States is three months into a second Trump presidency. If you were making the docuseries today, is there anything you would do differently?

When I started on this project, I set out to make a film about the origin of nuclear weapons and the effect it had on the Cold War. I’m a believer that we’ve forgotten the dangers of nuclear weapons. They’re still here and can destroy all of life on Earth. I wanted to remind people. 

Then, within a couple of months, tanks were heading toward Kyiv, and there was an assassination attempt on President Zelensky. Putin justified the invasion by telling his own version of the Cold War, riddled with factual errors. He was taking kernels of truth and excusing this war — the biggest in Europe since World War II. Suddenly, I had a new purpose: to provide an accurate counter-history. I wanted to fact-check Putin. 

Would I do it differently now? I don’t think so. But I continue to think about how scary it is that leaders are openly joking about using nuclear weapons today. Even during the Cuban Missile Crisis — when the world seemed moments away from actual nuclear war — we didn’t see that kind of public confrontation. The language is radically different with Putin and Trump now. There’s all these offhand comments and casual mentions of nuking countries. This kind of thing didn’t happen during the Cold War, and it’s very scary. 

The Bomb And The Cold War features several high-profile interviewees, including former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. In a previous interview, you said you hoped to include former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Had you been able to speak with her, what would you have asked?

I’m particularly interested in her relationship with Putin. He has very obviously hated her, and a lot of Russian misinformation has been targeted at Hillary Clinton. He has some belief, for instance, that she covertly triggered the 2010 anti-government protests in Moscow. Hillary has previously shared some very interesting anecdotes about meeting Putin over the years — stories about his family and background that haven’t really surfaced anywhere else.

She unfortunately wasn’t up for talking. A lot of public figures have their own production companies and don’t like to do public interviews. 

There have been many fictional films and television series made about the Cold War and the dangers of nuclear weapons. Why do you think a nine-part docuseries is the most effective way to tell this story? Who was your target audience?

I wanted to be able to tell real stories using the actual people who were involved in them. Sometimes that’s more dramatic than a fictional depiction — the audience sees that everything is actually real and genuinely scary. The series doesn’t even explicitly say that nuclear weapons are bad, but one might arrive at that conclusion based on its in-depth presentation of past human choices. 

I try to make stuff that’s accessible to everybody. After the first season of Turning Point, we had people commenting online that they didn’t know what happened on 9/11. There’s no point in being cynical about that; a lot of these folks are 18 or 19 years old and weren’t even born when 9/11 happened. I know and respect that people come from many backgrounds and may not know the ins and outs of a particular time period. So I try to start all of my documentaries with an approachable base that grows in sophistication as it progresses. 

History also has a way of being so dry. It’s such a mistake to just tell it as a string of series or facts. History is, at its core, people acting and behaving based on what they know and believe will happen in the future. Those decisions then ripple out and affect other people and their choices. We live in a giant human drama and I want all kinds of people to engage with that story.

There is a lot of discussion throughout the docuseries about how the Cold War was driven by misinformation and the United States’ underestimation of Soviet fear-mongering. What do you think is driving the present-day nuclear arms race?

The invention of nuclear weapons changed everything. In a lot of ways, it brought an end to the types of large-scale wars that were defining the human race, and that’s remarkable. Tension didn’t dissipate, of course — it was just pushed underground, so to speak.

The Cold War had a new kind of playbook. There were suddenly proxy wars, dictatorships, and spy agencies popping up around the world, and it became a war of thought and allegiances. I mean, when you have these types of weapons, and no one wants to join a suicide pact, how do you fight your enemies? Disinformation and propaganda.

The chaotic world of mis- and disinformation that’s confusing and nauseating us right now is a direct result of those exact Cold War tactics being used on us. There is no question about it. Back during the 2016 presidential election, various factions of American life were being supported by foreign disinformation. It didn’t matter which side was good or bad — there was just conflict. It’s far cheaper and less physically destructive to get a society to annihilate itself that way than to actually use bombs. Nuclear weapons help instill fear, but if you can make citizens hate their own country like we do right now, there’s no need to actually drop them. 

If you could have interviewed President Donald Trump in The Bomb And The Cold War, what would you have asked? What advice would you give to his administration?

Oh boy. To list a few: What are the details of your relationship with Putin? How often do you guys hang out? Why does so much of what you propose seem to come from the Russian playbook? 

Man, yeah, that’d be fun. He usually likes to walk out of stuff like that, though. I mean, we’re talking about someone who just seems to lie for fun. Lying is just a method of communicating for him, so it’d be interesting to try and catch him in the act. 

The Bomb And The Cold War conveys the overarching message that the “United States is sleepwalking through a second Cold War.” What will it take for the American public to wake up?

I really believe that Putin is at war with us, and we don’t realize that we’re at war with him. We’re in a very dangerous period where, because of social media and the decimation of journalism’s financial underpinnings, we have lost our understanding of what’s real. Everyone loves to complain about the media, but they’ve got to understand that since the creation of Facebook and Twitter in the early 2000s, more than 3,200 newspapers in America have gone under. A significant part of our culture — the 4th estate — is basically gone. It’s been replaced by social media platforms with twisted algorithms that make it difficult for users to decipher the truth and easy for people like Putin to manipulate them. 

What can we do about it? I think the best tactic right now is, as former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon once said, to “flood the zone with shit.” The truth needs to be in there among the nonsense, and we need to encourage people to find it. There’s definitely a growing sentiment that social media is toxic and unsafe in a lot of ways, but I also think we can use it to drive people toward real, human stories. We have a chance at corralling the online Wild West if we just keep pushing facts and transparency about news sources and who financially back them. 

The docuseries’ third installment, Turning Point: The Vietnam War, premieres on Netflix on April 30. President Nixon once proposed using a nuclear weapon on Vietnam to end the war to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who opposed the idea. How did nuclear discussions influence the path of that conflict? Will the new series explore this?

We only briefly touched on this in the Vietnam series, but for Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War, I conducted one of the last interviews with Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, before he passed away. The danger of nuclear weapons was Ellsberg’s primary concern, and he spoke in depth about how close we came to using the weapons in Vietnam. In fact, he told me his first leaks actually happened in 1968 to counter General Westmoreland’s push to use nuclear weapons in defense of the Marines surrounded at Khe Sanh. At the time, President Johnson declined.

Nixon was different. Nixon seemed to be actively seeking an opportunity to use nuclear weapons. Ellsberg told me that Nixon’s plan to end the war “with honor” involved withdrawing American troops while building up South Vietnamese forces and using U.S. air support to keep President Thieu in power — that part was public. But if the North launched another major offensive, the plan was to respond with nuclear weapons. 

Nixon also wanted to use them preemptively. In 1969, Roger Morris, a former aide to Henry Kissinger, drafted a speech for Nixon that outlined “a major escalation,” including the use of nuclear weapons against North Vietnamese bases, one located just a mile and a half from the Chinese border. But Nixon never delivered the speech. At the time, nearly two million people were protesting in the streets during the “Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam,” one of the largest demonstrations in U.S. history. Fearing the protests could escalate further, Nixon backed down. Ellsberg told me that those demonstrators, “without knowing it,” helped delay the use of nuclear weapons in war for at least another half-century.

Yet Nixon continued to consider their use. In a 1972 recording, Nixon said about Vietnam, “for once, we've got to use the maximum power of this country against this shit-ass little country to win the war.” 

Other than the use of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is likely the closest the United States has gotten to using nuclear weapons against another country. 

In March, President Trump told reporters, “It would be great if everyone would get rid of their nuclear weapons… There’s no reason for us to be building brand-new nuclear weapons — we already have so many. You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over.” How do the president’s recent statements about denuclearization change the landscape?

Unfortunately, I don’t think Trump’s comments change much, even if we take him at his word. During his first term, Trump withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, undermining a significant Cold War-era milestone. He also dragged his feet on extending the New START Treaty, which was only renewed during the first weeks of the Biden administration.

Currently, New START is the only bilateral agreement between the U.S. and Russia that limits deployed nuclear forces, and it is set to expire in early 2026. Without a replacement, it will be the first time in 50 years that no treaty limits the total number of nuclear weapons the U.S. and Russia can deploy. This would be very dangerous. It would undo decades of progress in reducing the risk of nuclear war, especially as China rapidly expands its nuclear arsenal.

Global tensions are already high: an unnecessary trade war has been triggered, the war in Ukraine continues to create uncertainty, and Trump and JD Vance have criticized NATO and distanced themselves from European allies. Meanwhile, France is discussing creating a new “nuclear shield” to defend Europe, and the U.S. is modernizing its nuclear arsenal.

The dangers are real. These world-ending weapons continue to exist, and recent developments only increase the risk they pose.