( bright music)
You might believe in destiny
(crank)
But if you ask me, and I'm glad you did,
there is one powerful force that drives human behavior,
changes the world, money.
(coins rattling)
(dramatic music)
(violin music)
This Trident Nuclear Missile, with it's multiple warheads
could obliterate up to half a dozen enemy cities
all for the low low price of 70 million dollars a missile.
That is a fraction of what our military currently spends
on bands, but the Reagan administration wanted something
a little flashier, you know, and lot more expensive.
So for example, the B2 stealth bomber,
couldn't go as far as this missile,
couldn't do as much damage, was easier to deter,
but man it was intimidatingly expensive.
At 2 billion dollars a plane, it might have been cheaper
to build each one out of solid gold.
It was as if we were trying
to bling the Soviet Union into submission.
(dramatic music)
Comprehending the trillions of dollars and rubles
spent on the military during the cold war,
is like trying to count the stars in Heaven.
(dramatic music)
No mere number, no matter how many zeroes,
can convey the scope.
(missile launching)
I was born in the middle of the cold war,
and I lived to see it end.
I was taught it was a struggle between good and evil,
freedom and tyranny, but follow the money,
and it leads straight to the corner store.
(chanting)
Once the Soviet people got a taste of
our blue jeans and silk stockings and fast food,
it was no contest.
(dramatic music)
They had always been told, we know,
through Soviet propaganda that Americans live terribly,
and we have terrible race problems
and people are impoverished,
and we're all slaves to our capitalist masters,
but then they got a glimpse of
what our supermarkets are like,
and they're like, wait a minute, that's fantastic,
Right, when the information starts to flow,
you can only hold of information for so long,
and when real live information began to come
into the Soviet Union about living standards,
whether it was the US or just simply West Germany,
it was stunning to people.
They realized that these are places
that are not on the verge of collapse,
that are not at war with themselves.
They actually seem to be quite peaceful
and quite prosperous and wouldn't it be nice
to get a little of that.
Yeah so in a weird way the Cold Way came to an end
because people wanted a better choice of breakfast cereal.
Yes, exactly and maybe a spare roll of toilet paper.
Eisenhower presided over the first decade
of the Cold War, even as he warned about it's dire cost.
Every gun that is made,
every warship launched, every rocket fired
signifies a theft from those who hunger
and are not fed, those who are cold
and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone,
it is spending the sweat of it's laborers,
the genius of it's scientist,
the hopes of it's children.
Such honesty would soon become political death,
denounced as weakness, or worse, disloyalty.
No mere president could halt the juggernaut
of defense spending.
(patriotic music)
By 1959 it consumed over half the federal budget.
For decades the arms race generated trillions in profits.
Governor Ronald Reagan....
Then in 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected president,
thanks in part by promising
to dramatically increase defense spending.
If you have the means to defend
your freedom, you won't have to use those means.
And that's what we're all aiming at.
Reagan wanted victory over the Evil Empire,
and he saw a way to get there, bankrupt them,
spend more than they could ever match,
as he wrote in his diary,
if we can cut off their credit
they'll have to yell Uncle or starve.
Soviet citizens had long endured a horrendous standard
of living, only one in three apartments had hot water,
only one in ten people had a telephone,
and the waiting time for a new apartment was fifteen years.
The state run economy was a joke, literally.
As the saying went, we pretend to work
and they pretend to pay us.
You have an enormous military budget,
20 percent, by some measures, 20 percent of GDP
in the Soviet Union is going to this huge military,
that will not budge when it comes to the budget,
they're not gonna give an inch on that,
And we often forget this, that they had their own Vietnam,
long drawn out war in Afghanistan in the 70s and early 80s.
Which plays into the political part of it,
so it's not just a collapsing Communist economy,
it's a collapsing political order,
so they invade Afghanistan in 1979,
thinking it's going to be quick and easy,
and it turned out to be a disaster.
(rumbling)
(dramatic music)
Soviet troops would spend nine miserable years
in Afghanistan, stuck in a bloody stalemate
with local guerrillas.
(softening music)
(clapping)
Mr. Gorbachev wants to bring the Communist
party up to date, it's old fashioned methods of
blocking his reforms at home and abroad.
In 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev took the reins of power,
after years of doddering commissar and apparatchiks,
here was a man in the mold of western politicians.
Gorbachev knew his country had to modernize.
He introduced Glasnost, a new openness,
but a little freedom can be a dangerous thing.
When you have Glasnost right at the time
when there's a lot of simmering discontent,
people are furious about the economy
they're furious about the corruption,
they're furious about the inadequate supply of everything.
They're also furious about the war,
the tremendous anti-war opposition,
and when you allow people to freely discuss that
and publish that and then
have external sources of information,
dissident writers and things,
it is a recipe for disaster.
(Russian music)
In 1990, journalist David Remnick attended
a screening of the movie Wall Street in Moscow,
now Oliver Stone intended the movie
to be an indictment of reckless greed,
but it didn't play that way.
To the Russians it was like affluence porn.
Look at that guy, he had tailored shirts,
and really expensive hair, he had a TV in his limo.
When he parked it at home, he had a house with a TV,
with a car with another TV inside it.
When Michael Douglas says his immortal line,
meant to demonstrate his dark twisted soul,
the Russians exploded in applause, greed is good,
or as he was dubbed in Russian, zhadnost' eto khorosho,
zhadnost' eto khorosho.
(upbeat music)
Russians had discovered the delights of capitalism,
they no longer feared the west, or their own leaders.
The Soviet Union was essentially a third world economy
boosted by petrol dollars, but in the late 80s,
Saudi Arabia, encouraged by the US, drastically increased
it's oil production and cut prices by two thirds.
Soviet oil revenue plummeted.
The two fellas in the Soviet Union
were walking down the street and one of them says
have we really achieved full communism,
is this it, is this now full communism,
and the other one said, oh hell no,
things are going to get a lot worse.
(laughter)
The truth could no longer be masked by lies.
Communism had utterly failed to provide
a minimum standard of living.
One Soviet economist remarked, for decades we've strived
for universal equality, now we have equality in poverty.
(dark music)
The final nail in the Soviet coffin,
was a fantastic futuristic vision.
(missile launching)
What if free people could live secure
in the knowledge that their security did not rest
upon the threat of instant US retaliation
to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept
and destroy strategic ballistic missiles
before they reached our own soil, or that of our allies.
(space music)
Reagan's strategic defense initiative, or SDI,
was immediately dubbed Star Wars.
The nickname conjured up real images,
well real fake images from movies
that made it all the more plausible.
(dramatic music)
The flight was the first in a series of test
flights that will use a kinetic energy Aris Interceptor
to destroy a simulated enemy warhead.
We have these missiles that they couldn't stop
and they have these missiles that we couldn't stop
so nobody was going to go to war.
Yeah mutually assured destruction
Right and then all of a sudden we're saying,
Aha, we've got this system, this incredibly expensive system
that will stop your missiles and that
will totally shift the balance of power,
and that sent the Soviet Union into kind of a panic
Right
A quick look assessment of the first
Aris Interceptor test flight,
indicates it was a successful mission.
(orchestra music)
The White House doled out the goodies,
contracts worth billions were awarded to companies
in no less than 40 states.
That leftist rag the Wall Street Journal reported
the most effective support for Star Wars
is being generated by good free enterprise greed
(laser shooting)
Whether or not SDI ever worked,
Gorbachev believed it could
and he knew he could never muster
the resources to compete with it.
(fast music)
The United States, Gorbachev told his people
wants to exhaust the Soviet Union economically,
through an arms race in the most up to date
and expensive space weapons.
There's also a huge technological gap,
by 1980 the personal computer revolution is on
in the United States and we often sort of forget
how revolutionary that was in everything,
economics, education, information systems and so forth.
And the Soviets were whetted to these 1960s gigantic,
building sized IBM like computers,
so they weren't able to make that,
they knew they couldn't make that shift.
Desperate to cut costs, Gorbachev devised a brilliant
last ditch gambit, he offered to cut nuclear arsenals
in half if the US dropped SDI
(alarms)
Panicked, the American Defense Industry
went on red alert.
It was a doomsday scenario, the loss of trillions
of dollars from Star Wars and nukes.
The military industrial complex went into overdrive
to stop Reagan from taking the deal.
Air Force One touched down
at Keflavik Nato Base in Iceland tonight
carrying Ronald Reagan on the twentieth
and potentially most important foreign journey
of his six year presidency.
After nerve wracking suspense,
the Reykjavik Summit ended in failure.
Order had been restored.
(chanting)
Soon after in 1989 one Eastern Block country
after another broke free from the Soviet Empire.
(cheering)
In Russia Gorbachev gave way to President Boris Yeltsin.
(gunfire)
That same year half a million American troops
descended on the Persian Gulf.
The United States and Russia joined forces
to liberate oil rich Kuwait from
the clutches of Saddam Hussein.
(explosions)
Listen to Master Sergeant J.P. Kendall
of the 82nd Airborne,
We're here for more than just the price of a gallon of gas
what we're doing is going to chart the future of the world
for the next hundred years.
It's better to deal with this guy now,
than five years from now.
(dramatic music)
American forces would soon spend two decades at war,
from Moscow to the middle east, capitalism had won,
but it would always, always keep fighting.
A few months after the fall of the Soviet Union,
Gorbachev attended the 75th anniversary celebration
for Forbes magazine at Radio City Music Hall.
He and Ronald Reagan both appeared to demonstrate
their historic friendship and also because
they were each paid two million dollars.
Meanwhile, new Russian President, Boris Yeltsin,
was trying to keep his country from staggering,
as much as he did, now Yeltsin had grown up with
Soviet Communism and was still a true believer.
He thought capitalism was this savage system
where all the wealth was horded by the elite,
while the proletariat suffered.
And then he took a trip to Houston
and visited a supermarket, a proletarian supermarket.
And he was amazed at all the fresh meat
and produce and fish,
the twenty different kinds of spaghetti sauce.
He saw shapes of pasta, heretofore undreamt of by man,
not even the czar himself had imagined such riches.
On the flight back to Moscow,
Yeltsin turned to his closest aid and quietly confessed
that he was no longer a communist.
Boris Yeltsin had learned to follow the money.
(Russian music)