Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…This is so hard for us to process today. But doing the research, I really felt it. I think, for a lot of people, the stakes, the pressure, and the worry about the Cold War was greater than World War II. Yeah, that's a great point. When the Americans entered World War II, we had reason to believe that we could come in and win. The Cold War, I think to the American psyche, felt very different. I think we had good reason to believe we were not going to win. Right after the war, Churchill comes to America and gives his famous Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri that an iron curtain has descended over Europe in the form of the Soviet Union. Before the end of the decade—I didn't really realize the timeline on this—in August 1949, the Soviet Union detonates its first nuclear bomb. Nobody believed that they were going to have the bomb that quickly or that powerfully. Not only did they have the bomb, but whether this was real or not, or positioning, people really believe that the Soviets and Khrushchev's intention is to use the bomb against America, If they ever believe that they could do so without fear of retaliation, that they could knock us out first, that they would do a first strike and use nuclear weapons on America. This kicks off the Cold War arms race. People probably know and learn about mutually assured destruction and deterrence. This really was the policy of the military in the American government that we need to have capabilities to deter the Soviet Union from launching a first nuclear strike against us by being able to guarantee and have them know that we guarantee that if they do so, we will destroy them. They can't do this because if they do, they will be destroyed. That was the whole policy. That's a really scary place to be in. This is like, if somebody over there in the Kremlin decides one day that they think they can win, we're all going to die. In 1955, there was a national poll that asked the question, what do you think you are most likely to die from? Over half of America responded that they thought they were most likely to die in thermonuclear war above any other cause. Let that sink in. Over half of the country thought they were going to die in nuclear war.…

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