When Ted Turner asked me in late 1994 to make COLD WAR, it was easy to agree. Easy because the period to be covered, 1945 to 1990 or 1991, was the time we both lived through; easy because what he asked was what I wanted to do.

He wanted to tell a universal, not a partisan, story and to do justice to the experience, reasoning, motives and actions of both the protagonist great powers involved, the United States and the U.S.S.R., and of other countries also. And he and I both wanted to tell the story simply and directly, without gloss or spin, in visual images of record and through the memories and testimony of eyewitnesses to history.

This was the technique of "The World at War," a history of World War II, which I made in the '70s, of which Ted was a fan. But COLD WAR would be trickier and more complex; its spread was at least as wide, worldwide; it lasted much longer.

The first critical decision was to present COLD WAR as a story. Television history is popular history, and that means narrative history. Short, by comparison with academic history, on analysis; long on anecdote; big on the human incident that brings large political matters clearly home to us. The trick is to keep a clear narrative going and resist the temptation to stray all over the place. We have avoided, mostly, thematic episodes that span the entire period of 45 years and instead arranged our subject matter so that each film, which is intended to stand up on its own, follows on from last week's episode and leads on to the next. Thus, we hope to keep you on the edge of your viewing seats, hungry for more, over a six-month span.

To make a series this big, you need a team. Martin Smith, series producer, has driven it through to completion and held it all together. I have been there to back him up and, with my co-executive producer, Pat Mitchell, president of Time Inc.-CNN Productions, occasionally point the way. But neither the three of us together, nor any one of us, could have made COLD WAR. That has to have been a team effort, with an individual producer and writer for each episode and, for finding film and interviewees, some of the best researchers in the world.

And it has been fun; a joy to hear Svetlana Palmer, in Russian, convincing an ex-KGB general, over the telephone, to speak to us; or watching Miriam Walsh jumping for joy at newly discovered color film, historic images never seen before. It has taken 50 people nearly four years to make COLD WAR. We hope that you enjoy what we have done together.

But we deliver more than enjoyment. COLD WAR tries to get it right and present you with a guide you can trust, of the story of our time.

At every stage, we have had the benefit of guidance from professional historians, American, Russian, British and others, to keep us to the ascertainable truth. We check every testimony and every fact against a valid source and an objective record. COLD WAR is not, could not possibly be, the whole truth; telling a story, in short television hours, we leave out a great deal. But it is as accurate as we can make it. You are free to test the record we offer against your own experience. If you do, we believe you will decide that we've got it, roughly, right.

Viewers of one generation will find themselves remembering their own pasts. Those of a younger generation will gain some understanding of the world their parents and grandparents knew.

In COLD WAR, world leaders speak: Bush, Gorbachev, Castro. In COLD WAR, you also meet, from among our 500 interviewees, GIs who fought in Korea and Vietnam, and Chinese and Vietnamese soldiers, too. You meet Russians and Americans, Poles and Germans, Angolans and Nicaraguans, Israelis and Egyptians. Telling their stories to us are astronauts and spies, policemen and prisoners, politicians and protesters; men and women in Berlin, in Prague, in Havana, in Budapest, in London, in Washington, in Moscow who lived through and acted in the crises which, time after time, brought the world to the brink of nuclear war and back.

To make COLD WAR, we needed luck. Sir Frank Roberts, British diplomat, who met Stalin in Moscow in 1941, was the first man we interviewed. A rare witness to the 1940s, he died earlier this year. George Kennan served in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in the '30s. His famous "Long Telegram" in 1946 alerted Washington to the Soviet threat. Kennan is, happily, still living; he gave us his first television interview in many years. McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy's aide, sought advice when we asked him to appear. He consulted Fred Friendly of CBS fame. Friendly said, "If it's for Jeremy Isaacs, do it." He did, and died three weeks later. Now, Friendly, too, is dead. Our series would have been the poorer if Ted Turner had waited and not given the green light as promptly and presciently as he did.

And Fidel Castro, who stalled us for over a year, finally agreed to an interview only weeks before we had to wrap. It is a good one.

I have particularly enjoyed being part of the team that brings COLD WAR to you because I myself lived through these times. These are my memories, too. I remember my shock at the headlines I saw on the way to school when FDR died, between Yalta and Potsdam. The Korean War had me wondering, because Britain still had national service, if I would have to fight there. I remember during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a tense moment for all, Richard Dimbleby, tthe BBC's Walter Cronkite, advising a mother -- I was now myself an anxious parent -- that it was safe to send her child to school the next day. As a TV producer, I remember handling the Tonkin Gulf and the Tet Offensive and the Soviet tanks in Prague. And I recall, as General Director of the Royal Opera House, London, welcoming Mikhail Gorbachev to Covent Garden and daring to hope that, like that evening's opera, the Cold War, too, would have a happy ending. It did.

The nuclear shadow cast over humanity's future meant that at crisis after crisis, we held our breath. But we survived and lived to tell the tale.

Here it is. Good viewing.