The Cold War's grinding final decade unfolds through archival footage and expert commentary, tracking how détente collapses when Soviet troops enter Afghanistan and the United States starts arming the Mujahideen. Muhammad Ali appears as the public face of the American campaign to boycott the Moscow Olympics, touring nations to persuade them to stay home. Mass demonstrations against nuclear annihilation fill city streets as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament grows, while governments respond with fallout shelters and civil-defense broadcasts. In Afghanistan the fighting escalates, with Soviet hardware backing the government and Western money flowing to the rebels, and the film highlights an unexpected detail: women fighting for the government side, unwilling to give up the education and jobs Soviet rule had granted them. The episode closes with the shooting down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 over Kamchatka, a civilian jumbo jet destroyed by Soviet fighters after straying into restricted airspace, killing 269 people. Archival news footage and period interviews carry the account throughout.