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September, 1945.

Germany and Japan have surrendered unconditionally.

The destruction and death of the Second World War is over.

There is jubilation around the world.

The United States and the Soviet Union emerged

from the conflict as the globe's two dominant superpowers.

They fought side by side when they shared a common enemy.

But now that that enemy has been defeated,

an American-Soviet rivalry appears unavoidable.

All wars changed the world,

but none of them changed the world like

the Second World War did.

Japan's on the march. Germany's on the march.

No one can imagine the nightmare they're about to unleash.

The most destructive war in human history.

Suddenly the world is turned upside down

and all hell is let loose.

The West is stunned by the speed of the advance.

You get the Allies led

by the Big Three: Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin.

Men who are dealing

with immensely complicated questions.

It's the biggest military operation

of human history.

The Allies have to come together,

not just militarily, but industrial scale.

It's a global perspective.

They have to fight in every climate

from the Arctic to the jungles of the Pacific

to the deserts of Africa and the depths of the ocean.

But there was no certainty of victory.

It was going to be a horrific bloodbath.

We see humans at their absolute worst,

how they treat other human beings.

And we see them at their absolute best,

willing to give their lives that others might live.

World War II was a struggle

in which there could be one victor and one vanquished.

It's official.

It's all over. It's total victory.

The day of days for America and her allies.

Peace, it's wonderful.

The war is over.

The entire world begins to breathe and live again.

The Allies won this war in the cause

of freedom and the ideals of anti-fascism,

the ideals of democracy.

One of the great legacies of the Second World War

is that a disputatious, complicated,

often wrong

nation like the United States

can in extremis marshal significant force

to do the right thing.

It took us a long time.

As Churchill is alleged to have said,

you can always count on the Americans to do

the right thing once

we've exhausted every other possibility.

We spent blood and treasure to defeat fascism.

The United States had fulfilled Roosevelt's ambitions

to be the arsenal of democracy to orders

of magnitude no one could have predicted.

In New York,

hundreds of thousands lined the docks

to greet America's ships

and welcome home their sons and daughters.

President Harry Truman is honored

with a ticker tape parade

through the city's Canyon of Heroes.

Speaking in Central Park,

the President addresses the nation.

The world cannot afford to let

the cooperative spirit of the Allies

in this war disintegrate.

The world simply cannot allow this to happen.

In Red Square,

thousands celebrate and honor Generalissimo Joseph Stalin.

He's dressed in a white Marshal's summer uniform

with shoulder boards like a Russian Romanov emperor.

Stalin emerges from the Second World War

with astonishing, almost religious prestige

in the Soviet Union.

Stalin and the United States have made

an alliance that ultimately brings Hitler and then Japan

to its knees.

The spirit of cooperation is so high

that Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Command

in Europe, probably one

of the future staunchest anti-communists

in American history, stands right next to Stalin.

The bloodshed and horror

of the Second World War is unprecedented in human history.

Nearly 70 million people are killed, the majority civilians.

An estimated 27 million Soviets.

20 million Chinese.

10 million Germans and Japanese.

1 million British and Americans.

And 6 million Jews.

Europe is destroyed.

The Brits are bankrupt.

The Americans and the Soviets, they're demobilizing.

What's really clear coming out

of World War II is that the United States

has an incredibly important role to play in the world.

She hasn't been physically touched by the war other

than Pearl Harbor.

America is the superpower.

There's every expectation

that some kind of peaceful coexistence will emerge.

When the Americans talk about the way they want

the international system to be,

they talk about the United Nations.

The United Nations, in many ways,

is Franklin Roosevelt's dream come true.

During the war, it's Roosevelt who says we must

have this international body.

It's a very hopeful group.

Lots of ideals, the UN Charter,

all of this comes into being in 1945.

Here, leaders of the United Nations,

representing all but a fraction

of the earth's population,

are laying the foundations of international security

in the post-war world.

Out of the fires of war,

they wanted for there to be an organization

where we don't have 1939 again.

The United Nations combines two ideas.

The first is the General Assembly,

where equal states can meet and confer and make resolutions.

There is also the wartime military alliance

between the Soviets, the British, France,

and the United States, as well as China.

And that's the Security Council that will be

the cornerstone to ensuring peace.

Because it's not just winning the battle

of the day, it's trying to prevent the next one.

One of the first challenges is to determine

how Germany will fit into the post-war world.

We can't today perhaps understand just

how threatening and powerful Germany seemed

to the Allied leadership in 1945.

They had just fought two world wars,

the greatest enemy of which of theirs was Germany.

Ultimately, they realized the control of Germany is going

to play a huge role

in determining the future of Europe.

The American view is just like the Soviet one

at the beginning in the sense that we've got

to divide Germany.

We've got to make sure that it can never rise up again.

That's the first urgent thing.

The Allies split Germany into four occupation zones.

The British, Americans,

and French will govern Western Germany.

The Soviets will govern the East.

Berlin, deep within the Soviet zone,

is divided between all four nations.

The wartime Allies have very different plans

for the new Germany.

What Stalin is doing is taking as much of the wealth,

as much of the factories,

as much of the productive capacity and stockpiles

from occupied Germany back to the Soviet Union.

Stalin would say he was only taking

what the Germans owed him for the horrible suffering

during the war.

Conversely, the Western Allies want Germany rehabilitated.

The Western idea is not to devastate Germany

economically through reparations,

but bring them into global markets,

connect Germany to the world,

and through that you'll get German people

who are incentivized to do things

that are constructive instead of destructive.

So it's gonna need industrialists, middle managers,

local governance, that many of these people would

have been members of the Nazi party.

The crimes of the Nazi Third Reich

are so horrific

that the wartime Allies determine there must be

an attempt to achieve justice.

Nuremberg is highly symbolic

as the spiritual heart of Nazi Germany

and as the place where hopefully the demons

of Nazism can be purged.

Everyone in court stands up

as the tribunal enters.

Four judges and alternate members: French, American,

British, and Russian.

The defendants are to plead guilty or not guilty

for charges against them.

Rudolf Hess.

Nein!

22 Nazi leaders are put on trial.

The next defendant called was Ribbentrop.

Sich nicht schuldig.

Robert Jackson, chief prosecutor

of the Nuremberg tribunals,

announces that history will judge the fairness

of the trial not by the convictions

and the executions it obtains, but by the acquittals.

But the Soviets are expecting these

to be good old-fashioned show trials.

Wilhelm Keitel.

Sich nicht schuldig.

Stalin had seen how effective show trials could be

in his own consolidation of power in the 1930s.

Nicht schuldig.

And was happy to give the Germans a trial.

Hermann Wilhelm Göring.

Nicht schuldig.

And then hang them.

12 of the defendants receive

the death sentence.

Hermann Göring avoids the gallows by committing suicide.

Seven are given lengthy prison terms.

Although the Soviets object, three are acquitted.

From '45 onwards,

you just have this constant growing tension

between the United States and Britain on one hand

and the Soviet Union on the other.

And Stalin has to play quite a careful game.

He wants to keep what he has.

But he doesn't want to directly antagonize

the United States.

Because the United States

is still much more powerful economically.

It has complete air and sea control.

And it has the atom bomb.

World War II devastated the Soviet Union.

Joseph Stalin must rebuild his country, ensure its security,

and consolidate his power.

But some of Stalin's ambitions will conflict

with the post-war plans of his Western allies.

Stalin saw the wartime alliance as a way

to defeat Nazi Germany.

But never something that would permanently reshape

the globe or that would make capitalism

and communism friends.

Stalin is an ideologue. That can never be forgotten.

He believes that communism and capitalism are incompatible.

That they will actually at some point wage a great fight

for the future and he believes communism will win.

Stalin is in an extraordinary position.

There's a moment when he reviews what they've conquered

in World War II.

And he looks at the map of Europe and Russia and he says,

we really haven't done badly, and it's an understatement.

The Red Army is in Berlin and most countries

to the east: Poland,

the Baltics, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria.

The Soviet wave broke right around Berlin

and they just never receded.

Stalin has done better than any

of the greatest czars in Russian history, Peter the Great,

Catherine the Great.

He's created the biggest Russian empire in history.

Stalin intends to create a buffer

against the West, militarily and ideologically.

He would say, we have now had two world wars

where first Imperial Russia and then the Soviet Union

have been invaded through Eastern and Central Europe.

I am gonna make sure that they are never a threat

to the Soviet Union again.

For Stalin, the key thing for Eastern

and Central Europe is that it must be loyal

to the Soviet Union.

That's non-negotiable and the recipe for doing

that is communism.

He starts to create

a new economic centralized system in Central

and Eastern Europe.

Controlled governments, armies, secret police, factories,

agricultural systems, with all

of the decisions effectively for the economies

of those countries being made in Moscow.

The Europe that the United States wants

to build does not look very much like the Europe

that the Soviets wanna build.

The United States has an enormous advantage

over the Soviet Union, the atomic bomb.

The Soviets construct numerous sites across the USSR

in order to accomplish task number one.

Task number one is to create a nuclear weapon

at breakneck speed.

No resources are too much.

The nuclear program is what the Soviet Union

was almost designed to do.

It's a big country with lots of natural resources.

It can marshal and mobilize for the nuclear project.

It's not completely unlike the Manhattan Project,

which was also top-down, secretive and resource-heavy.

And the Soviet Union puts the full weight

of its coercive power behind this project.

Stalin puts one

of his most ruthless lieutenants in charge,

the chief of his secret police.

Lavrentiy Beria is a man

of brutal ruthlessness and sadism.

One of the great monsters of the Soviet story.

He rapes women, he tortures victims himself.

But he's also as efficient as a Swiss clock,

and he uses everything.

He happily turns off power

in several cities just to power a project.

He gives scientists villas,

dachas, cars, shooting rifles, holidays.

But at the same time,

he threatens to kill them and their whole families

if they ever deceive him.

And he drives on the project.

It's not gonna be quick for Stalin.

There's no way that he can flip a switch

and acquire nuclear weapons.

But the Soviet Union simply can't sit

on its laurels in 1946.

It has to ready itself for a new phase of conflict.

After the turmoil of the Second World War,

the people of Great Britain and the United States hope

to return to a normal, prosperous life.

With peaceful coexistence among nations,

including with the Soviet Union.

For the past five years,

Stalin had been your friend. He had been Uncle Joe.

But once again,

a familiar voice sounds a warning.

Winston Churchill's in a pretty bad mood.

He was thrown out by the British public

in a dramatic election defeat in 1945.

His wife said it might be a blessing in disguise.

He said, well, I think it's a pretty good disguise.

He feels he won the Second World War. He saved Britain.

And here he is on the speaking circuit.

Winston Churchill receives an invitation

to give a speech at a small college

in President Truman's home state.

This is an opportunity for Churchill

to say some things that he's got in his mind.

It's also an opportunity to spend some time

with the President of the United States of America.

And then he's gonna stand on that stage

and he's gonna tell the American people some home truths.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,

an iron curtain has descended across the continent.

The famous Iron Curtain speech,

where he very clearly lays out what is happening in Europe.

One side free, the other side not.

Behind that line,

all are subject to a very high

and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.

Churchill sees Soviet communism and Stalinism

as a greater threat really,

as Nazism was a generation before.

This is certainly not the liberated Europe we fought

to build up.

It's dynamite.

Because what Churchill is doing is reframing

the wartime alliance.

He's casting the Soviet empire

as a malign force in the world.

Truman, by the way,

is absolutely on board with this speech.

But to Stalin, this is just proof that Churchill

is a warmonger.

The alliance that defeated Nazi fascism

is beginning to fray.

In late 1946, the French vote to elect a new government.

The Communist Party does well,

winning a plurality of seats in the French legislature.

With the politics of Europe in a state

of extraordinary upheaval because of the catastrophe

of the war, you do have a high degree of concern

in Washington about countries in Western Europe turning

in a communist direction.

There's a lot of unrest.

There are strikes starting to take place in France.

There's a huge pro-communist movement in Italy.

And Stalin thinks, maybe he'll win some

of these countries without even having to send an army in.

To the south,

Stalin attempts to pressure Turkey

into giving him control of the Turkish straits,

which would allow access to the Mediterranean

and the Middle East.

And in Greece, communist guerrillas

and government forces are fighting an ongoing civil war.

These are countries

that have never been viewed as essential

to American security.

The United States does not have a history of backing

the governments of Turkey or Greece.

The British have been funding the Greek army

and sending weapons to Turkey.

But early in 1947 in the White House,

this document arrives, and it's a shocker.

It's from the British government, and it says,

For a long time, we've been supporting Greece

and Turkey, but we are broke.

This is a really important moment,

the winding down of the British Empire.

But early 1947, they do not wish to be

this sort of great force in the Eastern Mediterranean,

which they had been for a long time.

[A.J.} It becomes clear to Truman

and the American State Department that this issue

in Greece and Turkey is actually a threat

to national security.

They believe that if Greece

and Turkey become Stalinized, these are dominoes,

and the rest of Western Europe could possibly fall.

And the British say to the Americans,

if you wanna make sure these places remain pro-Western,

you as the United States are gonna

have to use military force.

Now that is a real put up or shut up moment for Truman.

Truman is a very practical,

plain-spoken, linear thinker.

He doesn't come into office with some big vision

of what the world should be.

He sort of picks up the mantle of FDR and tries

to build a post-war order according

to what he thought FDR would have done.

But really from the moment of meeting Stalin

at Potsdam onward, he's starting to formulate his own views.

And now Truman recognizes

that this is a turning point.

In this new post-war world,

what's happening on another side

of the globe can be critical to America's national security.

After deliberating with his diplomatic

and military advisors, President Truman addresses

a joint session of Congress.

I believe that it must be the policy

of the United States to support free peoples

who are resisting attempted subjugation

by armed minorities or by outside pressure.

We must assist free peoples to work out

their own destinies in their own way.

The United States

is shifting away from isolationism.

The Truman Doctrine is now U.S. policy.

The Truman Doctrine is the culmination,

going all the way back to Woodrow Wilson,

of setting out these American ideals,

setting out these American principles,

but this time backing them

with more power, more force,

because Truman's vision is that the U.S. will support

any country that is resisting communist aggression.

Any country.

It is difficult to overstate

what a dramatic departure the Truman Doctrine

is for the United States.

In 1941, the United States

had to be dragged into war.

But what Truman is saying is now,

we're ready to take

the fight wherever democracy requires us.

We must take immediate and resolute action.

Truman asks Congress,

and he receives $400 million

of military aid for Greece and Turkey.

This is only the beginning.

This is a radical shift,

not only in the way that America had thought

about its place in the world,

but a radical shift in where Harry Truman's own line was.

It's actually putting American power behind

a global ideological contest with the Soviet Union.

As the American-Soviet alliance fades,

a contest between superpowers emerges.

Europe is in the grip

of one of the coldest winters in memory.

People have little to eat and struggle to stay warm.

They begin to despair at the slow pace of post-war recovery.

Western governments have not been able

to rebuild their economies.

Agriculture has been destroyed.

Transportation has been destroyed.

Manufacturing has been destroyed.

And there's an enormous refugee crisis that is ongoing.

During the war,

there was the deliberate forced movement of populations.

So there are millions and millions of refugees

on the roads, in camps,

in towns and cities and villages that are not their own.

Truman and his advisors fear that Europe

is on the verge of collapse.

General George Marshall, one of the chief architects

of American victory in World War II, believes,

the whole world hangs in the balance.

What Truman and George Marshall,

his Secretary of State realize,

is you need to rebuild the European economy.

It has to be not just the militarized Truman Doctrine,

but there needs to be a way of getting money

to support Western European or capitalist states.

The Marshall Plan

is a $13.3 billion essentially handout

to foreign governments

to help these countries rebuild themselves,

westernize, and stabilize politically.

And it would be keeping people alive

in places where starvation was an actual real thing.

So it's done for altruistic reasons,

but also geopolitical ones.

President Truman and George Marshall

believe that the best guarantee against communism are

well-fed bellies, good schools,

orderly societies, the kind of things

that can only happen in a prosperous economy.

Stalin recognizes how Marshall's plan

threatens his objectives.

To him, it's another trick.

It's another American way to try to undermine

the Soviet Union and pull Europe into the American orbit.

It's presented as Stalin's typical paranoia.

Actually, he's got every reason to distrust the West.

He was right.

Today, our aid to the free nations of Europe

is helping them to resist dictatorship.

Stalin understands that Western goods

with Western money would lead to Western values

of liberal democracy, of open society,

and also would spread the attractions of capitalism.

And it would undermine Stalin's own rule.

So for him,

the Marshall Plan has to be stomped out.

Stalin directs the countries under his command

to reject the American offer.

Very clearly, Stalin has drawn a line

and said, this is my turf, this is your turf,

and that's that.

Stalin expects to maintain complete control

of the East European countries liberated from Germany

by the Red Army.

But one nation will test him.

Czechoslovakia is deeply connected

to the Western European economy.

The Czechs have advanced industry.

They could become wealthy with access to Western capital

in the form of the Marshall Plan.

The democratically elected government

in Prague is led by President Edvard Benes.

Several of its ministers are members

of the Czech Communist Party.

Stalin pressures Benes to reject American aid

and compels the Czech communists to seize control.

Over the next few months,

local communists stir up unrest throughout the country.

The citizens of Czechoslovakia

haven't quite gotten the memo

that they're really the subordinates of Soviet power.

In 1948, there is a communist-led coup

in Prague that topples the Benes government

and places another East European country firmly

in Moscow's orbit.

Now Stalin decides to take fewer risks

in Eastern Europe, no risks at all.

He doesn't believe

that ultimately communism will flower politically

and economically and that working peoples around

the world will just embrace it because it is the true

and scientific approach to human civilization.

He believes in power.

Across Eastern Europe,

he crushes any hint of liberalism, free speech.

He doubles down on his Soviet system.

He arrests tens of thousands of people.

More people are sent to the Gulags after the war

than before the war in the 1930s during the Great Terror.

Marshall aid is an essential component

in the American post-war recovery plan for Europe.

But its success widens

the increasing divide economically and politically

between East and West.

We are now in a bipolar world.

It's a world of rivalry

like the world had never seen.

The Soviet Union has proved again and again

that it cannot be trusted.

And it's a race.

It's a competition for preeminence

and it's ultimately going to be a competition for security.

And Berlin, the former capital

of the Third Reich, is at the center of the conflict.

In the summer of 1948,

billions of Marshall aid dollars flow into the countries

of Western Europe.

Europe is slowly

but surely edging back towards economic health.

Careful planning for the use

of the $324 million allotted

has helped Western Germany temporarily to its feet.

Great Britain and the United States merge

their German occupation zones.

The French will soon join them.

A common currency is introduced, the Deutschmark.

Stalin understands that the Western powers intend

to establish a strong and independent West Germany.

Since the end of the war, Great Britain, France,

the United States and the Soviet Union have occupied Berlin.

It lies deep within Soviet dominated Eastern Germany.

Now imagine for someone as paranoid as Stalin

having these Western militaries going back

and forth between Berlin and the Western occupation zones.

This is a source of instability, disruption, it's dangerous.

Stalin wants to sever direct contact

between Berlin and the Western half of Germany.

He doesn't wanna invade West Berlin

because that's an act of war,

but what he believes he can do is he can blockade Berlin.

At this time, Berlin is still a pile of rubble.

It has very little tactical significance

for the United States government.

So it really made no sense

to keep West Berlin,

and Stalin believed

that in the end the West would blink and withdraw.

On June 24th, the Soviets cut all road,

rail and water routes linking West Berlin

to Western Germany.

Suddenly the trains stopped.

Traffic between Berlin and the Western zones was banned.

The famous autobahns were deserted,

and even canal traffic was at a standstill.

The blockade even cut electric power

and put out 75% of the lights.

Truman is a pragmatic person.

This could be a moment where he says,

it's not worth saving this city

because I don't know what Stalin's gonna do.

I don't know how dangerous this is gonna be.

Instead, he says, we're not going anywhere.

The U.S. and Britain realize

that this is Stalin testing the wire.

It'll be Berlin first, then it'll be elsewhere.

And the Allies choose to make it a red line.

Keep in mind, it's 1948.

For Truman, it's an election year.

It's the first post-war election.

It's the first election in the nuclear age.

The first election in the television age.

He's aware that all eyes are on him.

The British and Americans ask,

what can we do short of war?

And the answer is, they can keep Berlin supplied.

Not by road, not by rail, not by canal, but by air.

The British and the Americans construct

an air bridge into West Berlin.

The plan is to deliver it on airplanes

everything that a modern city needs to survive.

Got food, got coal, you got fuel,

you've got medical supplies.

It's a superb example of an operation

that's pulled together very quickly.

Huge numbers of aircraft, planes flying around the clock.

These British and American officers,

the same officers that have organized the triumphs

of logistics that you see during the Second World War.

A continuous stream of cargo planes land

in West Berlin every few minutes.

But to reach the city,

they must fly over hundreds of miles

of Soviet-controlled territory.

They're choosing to defy Stalin.

And if you fill the airspace with military aircraft,

even though they're unarmed,

you have to assume that Stalin might strike back.

So you have all this military capacity.

You have the paranoia and fear in Washington and in Moscow.

You have this hall of mirrors quality.

The two countries are involved

in a kind of escalatory spiral.

Truman now deploys dozens of B-29s

to air bases in England,

the same plane that dropped the atomic bombs

on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Nuclear weapons go from being a secret weapon

to a public strategic weapon.

The pressure on Truman at this point is incalculable.

He knows that this move could be provocative enough

to start World War III.

But the Americans are hoping

that this strong show of resolve will encourage Stalin

to back off.

They are gambling that Stalin does not want World War III.

After nearly a year

of daily international tension, Stalin halts the blockade.

Here's a glimpse of Berlin itself

as the first trains and vehicles got going at night.

All routes

that connect Berlin to the West are reopened.

Restrictions within Berlin between the Soviet zone

and American, British, and French zones are lifted as well.

Stalin set up a challenge for the West.

He was probing the West.

He needed to know how far he could go.

But in fact, Truman rose to the challenge.

And in the end, it was Stalin who blinked.

As relations between the United States

and the Soviet Union continue to deteriorate,

Western governments plan

to provide collective security

against possible Soviet aggression.

When the United States and the Soviet Union

look like they can be on the verge of war,

it became obvious

that the United States couldn't continue to ad hoc this,

to lurch from crisis to crisis to crisis.

The post-war path that FDR anticipated

was one in which the United Nations

would help adjudicate disputes and rule the peace.

What he was not able to fully anticipate

was that a struggle against his former ally, the Soviet Union,

would become the defining force of the era.

Representatives from Europe, Canada,

and the United States meet in Washington to discuss

the formation of a new military alliance,

the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO.

The idea is to create

what military strategists call deterrence.

It's an alliance that is created to make sure

that the Russians know that if they attack one state

in the alliance, they could theoretically face a war

against all of the states in that alliance.

NATO is created to keep the Americans in,

the Russians out, and the Germans down.

What Harry Truman does

with the Marshall Plan, with the Truman Doctrine,

with NATO, is establish an infrastructure of deterrence

to try to contain the communistic influence.

If there is anything inevitable

in the future, it is the will of the people of the world

for freedom and for peace.

But the world is about to cross a threshold

from which there is no return.

In an appropriately desolate landscape,

the Soviet Union prepares to test its first atomic bomb.

Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin's kind of mega manager,

arrives to supervise in a little hut

in the middle of nowhere.

He's incredibly nervous.

If it doesn't work, his downfall is quite likely.

He watches from a safe distance.

The test is a success.

Stalin's overjoyed and relieved.

Now he's got an equal footing with the West,

and they cannot push him around any more.

After this period when Stalin's struggling

to catch up with America,

he's back in the game.

Truman's a poker player,

and for these years after the war,

he always had an ace in the hole.

He had the bomb, the Soviets didn't. That surety was gone.

There was no turning back.

You've got two superpowers,

two nuclear powers that are facing each other across

the world, and all of a sudden the world

is much less stable.

An 18th or 19th century scholar would say, oh,

you're gonna have a war between those two powers.

It's inevitable, right?

Because they're the two great superpowers.

But the atomic weapons change things.

If the Soviets and the United States can't compete

in the military sense directly

because it's too dangerous,

well, then you compete indirectly.

After 1949,

there'll be one war after the other:

big wars, small wars, guerrilla wars,

proxy wars between the two superpowers.

But what hasn't happened is the big one.

There has not been a World War III,

a general war involving the globe

that involves nuclear weapons.

World War II began in a universe that would

have been recognizable 50 years before.

It ends in a world that wouldn't have been recognizable

to anyone because of the splitting of the atom.

The moral and philosophical underpinnings that enabled

the Allies to triumph in World War II,

an appreciation for the individual,

support for the dignity of all peoples,

a bias for democracy,

have for almost a century now enabled us to live

and thrive in a world where Armageddon is always at hand.

But it hasn't come,

not least because we've done the right thing.

The Second World War alters everything.

National, political, even moral boundaries are redrawn.

What was inconceivable before the war is now part

of the fabric of life.

The conflict that follows, the Cold War,

poses even graver consequence,

because now for the first time in human history

the world could literally destroy itself.

One war replaced by another and the world remains on edge.

As President Dwight D. Eisenhower observed,

the only way to win the next world war is to prevent it.