Power and Subterfuge in the Time of the Bomb : ‘War and Peace,’ ‘Intelligence’: Mixed Signals of the Cold War

We live in an age of video paradox.

How can something as exquisitely beautiful and majestic as a nuclear explosion be so unthinkably catastrophic?

The familiar flash of warming white light precedes a disturbingly seductive, fiery, violent eruption in a fine new documentary series starting tonight on PBS. As we watch--at once awed, enthralled and horrified by the orange shade of holocaust being drawn across the screen in “War and Peace in the Nuclear Age”--we hear Robert Oppenheimer, father of the Bomb, recalling the first atomic blast in 1945.

“A few people laughed. A few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: ‘Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.’ ”

How, also, can the romantic, glamorous and thrilling espionage epitomized by mythical idealistic heroes in spy stories be squared with the shadowy realities of the FBI and CIA pictured in another fascinating but upsetting documentary series titled “Secret Intelligence”?

Domestic spying? Secret components of open government working covertly and sometimes illegally? Vendettas as a substitute for foreign policy? Often questionable ventures in Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Vietnam and Central America? Even now, the negative residue remains.

This pair of series--the 13-part “War and Peace in the Nuclear Age” opening at 8 p.m. on Channels 28 and 15 and 9 p.m. on Channel 50, followed by the premiere of KCET’s own four-part “Secret Intelligence” at 9 p.m. on Channels 28, 15 and 24--is a powerful double whopper. Both series assume added relevance given the holdover perils facing the new Administration in Washington.

Add to them Tuesday’s worthy but arid “Frontline” documentary on the John A. Walker Jr. spy ring (“The Spy Who Broke the Code” at 9 p.m. on Channels 28 and 15 and 10 p.m. on Channel 50) and tonight’s slimmed-down rerun of ABC’s infamous nuclear holocaust drama “The Day After” (at 9 on Channels 3, 7 and 10) and you get a different and infinitely more depressing version of a thousand points of light.

A production of Boston’s WGBH-TV and England’s Central Independent Television in association with NHK of Japan, “War and Peace in the Nuclear Age” not only documents the fusion of science and politics, but does so from the dual perspectives of the West and the Soviet Union. That may be the finest virtue of this impressive series.

Appropriately titled “Dawn,” tonight’s opener traces the frantic race to create the atom bomb, a race culminating in that extraordinary first explosion in the New Mexico desert recalled by Oppenheimer, and also physicist Philip Morrison from his vantage point of 10 miles away:

“I’ll never forget the sense of heat on my face, as though the noonday sun had appeared across the cold desert morning. To me that was much more important than the flash or even the rumbling, thunderous sound that came and echoed among the mountains a minute later.”

It wasn’t long before the United States had dropped the two atomic bombs on Japan that ended World War II and altered the course of global relations for the foreseeable future.

Already the Cold War was surfacing, for the Kremlin, we’re told tonight, perceived the dropping of the bombs as less a blow to Japan than a U.S. threat to the Soviet Union.

“War and Peace in the Nuclear Age” sort of meets “Secret Intelligence” at the pass in next week’s second episode, in which a combustible mix of Cold War passions is seen shaping early nuclear politics. These intense feelings were fueled by such demagogues as Red-hunting Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.), who is seen exploiting the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg spy case, and FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, who accuses the controversial Oppenheimer of being a communist agent.

Hoover also surfaces as a central character in “Secret Intelligence,” the thoughtful, bold and provocative KCET series that explores still another paradox, the need for secrecy in democracy. The executive producer is Blaine Baggett, whose credits include last season’s award-winning “Spy Machines” documentary for the PBS “Nova” series. And the correspondent--who does a splendid job of setting the tone--is Bill Kurtis.

“Secret Intelligence” may offer nothing new for specialists, but undoubtedly will shock and perhaps anger lay viewers unaccustomed to encountering such a broad, blunt and expertly presented survey on the uneasy coexistance of secrecy and openness in America. It covers some of the same turf, but surpasses in scope Bill Moyers’ 1987 program, “The Secret Government.”

“The Only Rule Is Win” is the title of tonight’s premiere of “Secret Intelligence” that examines the evolution of Hoover and the FBI, the intelligence blunders that contributed to the disaster at Pearl Harbor and the legacy of the OSS, Bill Donovan’s fabled wartime organization that sired the CIA.

Subsequent episodes will clarify, among other things, the CIA’s controversial role as America’s “secret army of intervention” (spelled out even more definitively in William Blum’s book “The CIA”) and the zigzagging lines leading to the Iran-Contra affair.

If there is one segment of recent U.S. history that more than any other dramatized limits of secrecy in democracy, however, it was John F. Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs invasion, in which a CIA-trained brigade of Cuban exiles made a doomed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro.

For a myriad of reasons, CIA operatives who had succeeded in drastically shifting the courses of governments in Italy, Iran and Guatemala, failed in Cuba. Shrouded in subterfuge and disinformation, the Bay of Pigs debacle was more than merely an act of espionage against a communist regime whose existence had become a U.S. obsession, Kurtis notes in next Monday’s episode. It was an act of war.

After it was over, one former CIA official recalls, “I got drunk, drunk with fatigue and drunk with remorse.” That is exactly the feeling pervading much of “Secret Intelligence.”