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"The Cold War - On The Brink Of Destruction" is a box set of 6 DVDs on the Cold War that was originally made for the History Channel. They cover the threat of nuclear destruction (mostly about an underground shelter for Congress), the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall (mostly the means people used to cross from East to West), the Bay of Pigs (there is some political analysis here), Shadow Warriors (how the CIA aided the anti-Russian Mujahideen in Afghanistan), Yanks before Stalin (how some US companies, notably Ford, got involved in the Soviet Union in the 1930s), and spy planes (about US spy plane missions over the USSR). In all there is some interesting material here. But there are two major weaknesses. First, the stories are told entirely from the US point of view and offer no insight at all on the politics of the Soviet Union and therefore no explanation of how and why the Cold War developed (and ended) as it did. Second, there is very little analysis and reflection in these programmes - they assume audiences are mostly interested in technical matters, war footage, tales of heroism and the like. The Soviet leader to receive most attention is Khrushchev, who is presented as a belligerent opponent of the Americans, thereby missing the complexity of this leader and the fact that there was a 'thaw' in the Cold War in the later 1950s - early 60s. Having watched these one is little wiser about the international politics of the Cold War.