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There is a good series that's pretty new on Netflix called "Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War." The last episode I watched was focusing on the Soviet Union's collapse. There was some guy who's name I can't recall, but his job was basically making sure that no nukes disappeared from Soviet states and fell into the wrong hands. Condoleezza Rice talks about these secret meetings they had daily for several weeks where they gamed out every scenario of the Soviet collapse: Military coup, political coup, should we help a coup along, should we warn Gorbachev he was going down, should we help them out...

Really interesting to get a glimpse of what was going down then. So much happened in such a short period of time it had to be crazy to wrap your mind around being in high level politics like that at the time.

I remember it well. The owner of the big video production facility I worked for was going back and forth to Russia at the time meeting with high level media people. They knew it was going down and were looking to create a media production empire afterward. They did.

After the collapse, Yeltsin's body guard for social events came to NYC. He was an animator who had a black belt in Judo. They wanted to do new openings for the Russian TV networks to replace the 1950's style art cards they used. After the programmers they brought with them crashed the machines constantly for three days, the job was handed to me. In a couple of days they had two new American network style flying logo ID's. Seeing that kind of change on TV not long after Yeltsin came to power was like a promise for a better future.

Yeah, there was great concern about all of those nukes floating around.

This post was edited on 3/20/24 at 11:17 am