‘Unthinkable’ Allies is the first documentary in The Unknown Cold War series. The film explores how decisions made by Western leaders in the 1940s led to an era of nuclear tension.
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Watch the feature on the RT.Doc website.
In the summer of 1945, the leaders of World War II’s victorious powers – the USSR, US, and UK – convened in Potsdam to formalize agreements that would determine how the postwar world was to function after the defeat of Nazism. The leaders sat at the negotiating table, while reporters described the triumphant atmosphere – it seemed like the beginning of a new era, in which the great powers would live in peace. But it was precisely these agreements that became the starting point of a new war – the Cold War.
The cooperative image concealed a growing alienation. The new US president, Harry Truman, viewed the Soviet Union with distrust. While smiling at Stalin, Winston Churchill was discussing plans for a possible strike against the USSR. Instead of mutual understanding between former allies, a latent hostility was growing that would transform into a prolonged confrontation, step by step. The outcome was a world divided into opposing poles.
A review by the Russian Foreign Ministry
The film explores how the Western allies of the Soviet Union in the anti-Hitler coalition — whose peoples, side-by-side with our nation crushed Nazism — eventually abandoned allied solidarity forged in fire of WW2. Under the pressure of ideological differences and their profound rejection of the post-war model of development promoted by Moscow, the Allies embarked on the path of confrontation and containment of the USSR.
The evidence, files and testimonies presented in this feature elucidate facts behind some pivotal political decisions by the UK and US leaders driven by the determination to “defeat”, as they put it, the ‘Red Menace’. Those political superstitions reigning in the minds of the Western leaders and hostility toward the Soviet ideology effectively put the world into an era of bipolar confrontation with the unprecedented risks of mankind descending into nuclear catastrophe.
In the summer of 1945, the Potsdam Conference was held on the defeated Nazi German soil.
The Leaders of the victorious powers — the USSR, the United States, and UK — framed together the post-war world order and reached the final settlement of the German issue by dismantling Nazi military and industry, having eradicated Hitler’s ideology.
Nazism was defeated. The Reich was no more.
In the aftermath of the Great Victory, it seemed that a new era was upcoming — the final and, seemingly, long-awaited moment when the Great Powers, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, would build their relations upon the principles of constructive cooperation, mutual trust and respect, cemented by the common background of years of the allied fight against the evil of Nazism.
Yet, the Western block, emboldened by the successful testing of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos (at first, designed as a means of deterring Nazi Germany, but, following its final surrender, the bomb was further seen by US leadership as the deadliest instrument of blackmail) and by the bomb’s subsequent use against the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the hostility toward the Soviet Union and Soviet people was just increasingly growing and seemed implacable.
👉 In the UK government, the discussions were held on the possibility of a pre-emptive strike against Moscow — the infamous plan later exposed as the top secret Operation ‘Unthinkable’.
Instead of seeking better understanding and trust, the former WWII Western allies were nurturing aggressive plans that further evolved into dangerous Cold War confrontation.
