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- DirectorMichael KirkStarsRichard ArmitageRick BaccusDan BalzFrontline examines the war in Iraq and offers an inside look at a number controversies surrounding the war including September 11, al-Qaida, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraid, WMDs, and Fallujah.
- DirectorDan Curry"On Deterrence" (2016) is a documentary about nuclear deterrence - part history and part contemporary dialogue and debate looking forward. Relying primarily upon interviews with American experts from government, academia and science, the words of thirty-six storytellers are seamed together with contemporary & archival imagery to describe the impact that nuclear weapons have had on the practice of deterrence since the end of WWII. Part 1 presents a short history of both the risks and the achievements of deterrence during the early Cold War. Part 2 offers a broad view of the practice of deterrence today by the major and secondary nuclear states. Part 3 looks ahead toward an uncertain world and considers how deterrence endures. The purpose of the film is to reinvigorate a dialogue about deterrence and the role of nuclear weapons in a community of US policy & decision makers. Part 1 - the nuclear revolution - opens with a definition and a description of the concept of nuclear deterrence and continues with a bit of theory and practice from the likes of the late Thomas Schelling - a deterrent threat is the art of leaving something to chance in the mind of an adversary like Khrushchev during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, for example. The discussion of Cuba 1962 book ends Part 1. Along the way short vignettes are presented about the nuclear signaling of Harry Truman, the brinkmanship of Dwight Eisenhower, the extension of US nuclear deterrence to NATO and the credibility of Kennedy's deterrent threat to protect Western Europe. The film considers whether Khrushchev's miscalculation in Cuba 1962 was the product of an erosion of Kennedy's deterrence credibility that spilled over from the 1961 Berlin Crisis. Cuba 1962 represents the nuclear brink in the Cold War and Part 1 closes with scholar Keir Lieber asking if so-called rules of the game - massive assured retaliation - a condition that subsequently emerged in a bipolar nuclear era - "...whether that condition adheres today". Part 2 - the majors, the minors and the aspirants - flashes forward to the end of the Cold War in 1992 and asks if nuclear weapons remain a persistent reality notwithstanding a new world order, the promises of globalization and a Europe, whole and free. Part 2 occupies the longest portion of the film and provides a broad look at the nuclear order today. Geography and geopolitics are examined as drivers of the first waves proliferation during the Cold War - conditions that inform the national self-interest of nascent nuclear weapon states today. Part 2 is not a comprehensive catalog of the policies, force structures and postures all the nuclear states. There is scant mention of the UK and only the briefest reference to France. And a state in the Mideast that shall go unnamed is omitted altogether. Rather, the structure of Part 2 follows the lead of the speakers and they chart the course. Part 2 focuses on topics and stories around which the insights of multiple speakers converge: the post-Cold War expansion of NATO and the subsequent rise of Russian nationalism with its reliance on nuclear weapons; the tensions between US policy aspirations of a world without nuclear weapons and the security interests of other nuclear states lacking conventional force superiority; the challenges to the US extended deterrent in east Asia in the face of an opaque China and an unpredictable regime in North Korea; and the south Asian nuclear experience of India and Pakistan - outliers to the nuclear nonproliferation treaty - and what this portends for a state like Iran. There are no clear answers to any of the conditions, dilemmas or questions presented in Part 2; and Bradley Roberts' closing words here about Iran are fitting - "Well, we'll find out." Part 3 - looking ahead - poses yet even more questions that a diverse group of speakers do their best to answer. Part 3 of On Deterrence is rapid and organic with its interrupting and associative editorial style. The eight questions considered, like the topics in Part 2, are hardly comprehensive but they follow from the interests and politics of the thirty-six speakers interviewed for the film over a period beginning in the fall 2011 and through the spring of 2014. The on-screen debate ends on the inspirational question - A world without nuclear weapons? And again the closing words, this time delivered by Sam Nunn, former US Senator and CEO of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, are apropos - "History will tell us."
- DirectorChris DentonAs soon as Hitler's forces occupied the Channel Islands in 1940 he ordered a series of fortifications to defend the only British territory he ever conquered. The problem was he never stopped - pouring men, concrete and weapons into the islands. By 1944 his officers talked of the Fuehrer's inselwahn - his 'island madness' and the Channel Islands had become the most fortified place on earth.
- StarsRobin EllisAlec Douglas-HomeSisir Kumar BoseSeries looking at the end of British imperial rule in various states.
- StarsRobert DurstCharles BagliAndrew JareckiFilmmaker Andrew Jarecki examines the complicated life of reclusive real estate icon Robert Durst, the key suspect in a series of unsolved crimes.
- StarsKenneth BranaghAnatoli DobryninRobert McNamaraA 24-part series which deals with the relations between the United States, the Soviet Union and their respective allies between the end of World War II to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
- DirectorDavid ZeigerStarsMichael AlaimoEdward AsnerJoe BangertNO! SIR! tells an almost entirely forgotten story of the military men and women who forced the U.S. government to end the Vietnam War
- StarsTim Pigott-SmithSönke NeitzelIan KershawThe First World War - carnage on a scale never-before seen. But how did it all start? And how did some key figures of WWII fare in the earlier war?
- DirectorBarry J. HersheyStarsTony BlairGeorge W. BushDick CheneyLEADING TO WAR documents how the Bush Administration made its case to the American people for military action in Iraq, despite worldwide opposition.
- DirectorFleming E. FullerStarsRichard H. EllisWilliam R. GrahamFrancis P. HoeberAn interesting Cold War film that starts with showing a hypothetical Soviet nuclear first strike scenario leading to a U.S. surrender, followed by a United States Air Force "sales pitch" for more defense spending.