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American Morning

Cold War Memories

Aired May 09, 2001 - 10:25   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
LINDA STOUFFER, CNN ANCHOR: Baby boomers grew up knowing who the bad guys were. Childhood's Westerns taught us that villains wore black, and the Cold War instilled in us the ever-present fear of the Red menace. Today, danger comes in shades of gray -- no less threatening, but much harder to identify.

CNN national correspondent Bruce Morton shares some thoughts.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BRUCE MORTON, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Hey, a young CNN employee asked a couple of years ago, when was the Cold War?

If you were 40 or older, you were shocked. It lasted for almost half a century, from the end of World War II to the end of the Soviet Union, in 1991. A couple of generations of U.S. school children learned a song about what to do when an atomic bomb hit the neighborhood.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: Duck and cover. That's the first thing to do: duck and cover.

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MORTON: Two alliances -- the Free World, as the West called itself, and the Communist Block -- each having enough nuclear bombs to destroy the planet, literally to blow it away. The acronym was MAD, for mutual assured destruction. And maybe because the planet really was at stake, the two sides kept the peace.

Now, in a way, life seems more dangerous because there is no deterrent that will guarantee the peace. The enemy is not an alliance as big as our own. The enemy might be one country with a grudge against the United States -- an Iraq, maybe, an Iran -- or even one individual, an Osama bin Laden or a Timothy McVeigh.

The United States has been lucky so far, comparatively speaking. Terror, yes: the bomb at the World Trade Center, the bomb in Oklahoma City -- but as bad as those were, they were attacks with conventional explosives. Experts worry now about more lethal weapons: biological, chemical, nuclear, and so on. A nuclear missile from a freighter, perhaps -- it's hard to track all of those -- or the terrorist slouching into a bus station, with a small nuclear bomb in his suitcase.

(on camera): How to deal with these new enemies? Should the United States, one question goes, be allowed to recruit informers with records of human rights abuse? A generation ago in Vietnam, the United States itself ran an assassination program, Operation Phoenix. What rules are there now for dealing with terrorists whose aim is to kill the innocent? Should there be a new agency, a kind of anti- terrorism czar?

(voice-over): The United States has had several anti-drug czars, and none of them has won that war.

Clearly, the Bush administration wants to go in their direction, away from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which was fashioned to fit the Cold War; working on an anti-missile defense, though one does not now exist; or looking anew at the role of the military. Government spending on supposedly anti-terrorist programs has gone up, and will surely go up more.

And in the meantime, try to come to terms with this new world: not one big enemy alliance, but a world full of shadows -- maybe friendly, maybe not.

Bruce Morton, CNN, Washington.

(END VIDEO TAPE)

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