Film Analysis: The Fog Of War

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The Fog of War is one of the best documentaries that tells the story behind the superpower conflict during Cold War years and how the world came to the brink of war due to misperception and uncertainty created by the possession of nuclear weapons. In the documentary, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara was interviewed and narrated the story from the American perspective. He specifies 11 points that he considers significant lessons about war even though at that time, they were not able to see clearly due to the notion of “fog of war”. According to McNamara, Cold War was a period that both side made mistakes that might have led total destruction of world; therefore, he shares the 11 lessons driven from his experiences as being one of the important figures in the Cold War years. It provides an insight into those years by focusing on the issue of …show more content…
Superpower rivalry was at the center while nuclear weapons were used as tools to achieve superiority. It was ideological as well as military and economic rival between U.S. and USSR. Due to ideological dimension, the mindset was hard to change, both sides had already positioned themselves at the the opposite sides of continuum. One of the major issue was refusing to accept failure of decisions and taking action to reexamine them. Cold War was an environment where a lot of mistakes have been made, a lot of crimes have never been taking into account, and resulted in significant number of casualties as well as civilian deaths in the world. State-centered security understanding might be considered as main driver behind the mistakes and crimes committed by both sides. To conclude, Cold War was complex environment where rationality was constrained by the concept of security dilemma by WMD; yet their existence also ensured Cold War to not to turn into hot nuclear war since it was

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