CNN's "Cold War" Will be Released on DVD on Tuesday Which part of the cold war is over? In Beijing a Chinese dissident seeks protection in the American Embassy. A Russian general threatens pre-emptive attacks on Western missile-defense sites in Poland. A sleeper cell of Russians posing as ordinary Americans is unmasked one day; on another, British spy equipment is discovered hidden in a fake rock on a Moscow street. We live in a post-cold-war period that is in many ways as complicated and dangerous as the epoch that followed World War II. And just as it's impossible to start the story of the cold war without delving back into what happened at the Yalta Conference, today's world has to be seen through the prism of the Cuban missile crisis, the Cultural Revolution in China and the Prague Spring. At least, that is the official reason to welcome on Tuesday the DVD release of "Cold War" (Warner Home Video), a 24-part CNN documentary series first shown on television in 1998. Ted Turner financed the series, which took three years to make. One of the executive producers is Jeremy Isaacs, who was the creative force behind an extraordinary historical series a quarter-century earlier, "The World at War." There are less lofty reasons to watch "Cold War." The series is a thorough, sober and responsible account of history that is still thrilling to watch. The storytelling is artful enough to ensnare even the more knowledgeable viewers. "Cold War" doesn't start in 1945 with the Yalta Conference or even the origins of World War II, but pivots all the way to World War I, with grainy footage of marching troops sent by the United States and Britain to help the White Army fight the Bolshevik Revolution. That early show of hostility set the tone for lasting mistrust. In an archival interview the diplomat and politician W. Averell Harriman recalls meeting Stalin at the Potsdam Conference and congratulating him on reaching Berlin. He says Stalin replied that Czar Alexander made it to Paris. The series stretches, as Mr. Isaacs once put it, "from Yalta to Malta" and beyond, including everything from Mao's Long March to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Major events are deconstructed by key players - Henry A. Kissinger, North Vietnamese generals, Soviet spy masters - but it's the minor incidents, illustrated with real images, that tell the story best: A former East German border guard recalls his impulsive dash to the West as the Berlin Wall went up, and there is grainy footage of him vaulting across freshly strung barbed wire. It's almost impossible to fast-forward through, say, the Korean War or détente, because arresting, unfamiliar images pop out: the North Korean dictator Kim Il-sung is shown in a fur-collared coat and homburg hat reading a speech in Russian on a visit to meet with Stalin in 1949. There are Soviet workers doing the bunny hop at a picnic; the Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev, star-struck in Hollywood, being lifted up in a big hug by the actor Chuck Connors; and John F. Kennedy at a campaign rally, looking ill at ease and anything but dapper in a garrison cap. To illustrate the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, the series forgoes the familiar footage and instead shows young Eugene McCarthy supporters reacting to the news on television, some frozen in shock, others weeping. The history of the cold war is not told in a linear, chronological narrative; each chapter covers a theme, like Sputnik or the Red Scare, and loops back to subjects covered earlier, from a different perspective, be it the death of Stalin or the rise of Fidel Castro. And just as the cold war can't be fully understood without long looks backward, "Cold War" harks back to "The World at War," a documentary that mixed archival material and interviews with witnesses like the Nazi architect Albert Speer; Lord Mountbatten; a Hiroshima survivor, Hiroko Nakamoto; and Dwight D. Eisenhower's wartime driver and companion, Kay Summersby. Laurence Olivier was the narrator. "Cold War" has spectacular archival film and interviews with front-line participants, many of whom are now dead. The narrator is Kenneth Branagh. When the episode titled "Reds" was first shown, some scholars complained that by pairing McCarthyism with Stalin-era persecutions, the documentary was suggesting a moral equivalency between the United States and the Soviet Union. It's now easier to see why some reached that conclusion. There are many pictures of the Rosenbergs and the Hollywood Ten, but not many of the Gulag. Unlike the Nazis, who meticulously documented their atrocities, the Soviets didn't leave an ample photographic record of Stalin's terror - there are so few pictures, and none that expose the full horror of the millions who starved or froze to death. Survivors give witness on camera, but it's not the same as seeing actual film clips. The battle between East and West has not ended. Mostly it has morphed into something looser and broader and in some ways even more dangerous. Mutually Assured Destruction isn't bilateral anymore, and it isn't even mutual: the threat of thermonuclear annihilation may have ebbed, but the greater fear now is a nuclear weapon in the hands of rogue nations or extremist groups too crazy to fear reprisal. The series was made after the collateral damage from the collapse of the Soviet Union was already plainly evident, from Bosnia to Chechnya. The spread of Islamic terrorism even then was a growing threat. The ending, accordingly, isn't exactly triumphant. The series concludes with the 1991 address by President George H. W. Bush after Mikhail S. Gorbachev resigned. Mr. Bush declares that the years of fighting Communism and nuclear destruction were at an end. "That confrontation," he says, "is now over." There is plenty left for a sequel.