There were victims of this burlin airlift.

31 American boys were killed.

The city was short of coal, food, particularly milk.

Babies were dying.

The Russians are good at propaganda.

So they said words that they would send milk for the babies to the people of burlin,

and that part of Germany was blockaded.

And they Germans have it to say refused.

You know, it's actually kind of amazing if you think about it.

The first conflict of the Cold War, more precisely,

the event that triggered the Cold War,

set the style of every Soviet American flashpoint for the next 43 years.

That same dynamic, that familiar series of steps,

virtually every one of them on the part of the Soviet Union,

testing American resolve all across the world,

like water running downhill, seeking to fill any cracks in the rocks along the way.

In part one of this series, we looked at several possible start dates

for the apocalypse that never was.

The likeliest candidate, and the one I think that set the stage for everything that was to follow,

was June 29, 1948, when the Soviets blockaded passage to the city of Berlin.

After three years of rapidly eroding cooperation between the former World War II allies,

three years of complaints, broken promises, threats, and counter-threats,

...