Two Cold War themes run through Star Trek: the risks of great-power confrontation, and the danger of ultimate annihilation. In “The Omega Glory,” a mediocre episode that Roddenberry pushed to have produced, the Enterprise finds an underdeveloped planet where Asian-looking “Kohms” oppress the white “Yangs.” Turns out it’s a planet that developed just like Earth in every way—there is some sci-fi hocus-pocus to explain how planets sometimes do this—including an America and a Red China (Kohms and Yangs, Communists and Yankees, get it?), and then wiped itself out with biological warfare.
Other episodes were a bit more sophisticated. In “The Return of the Archons,” Kirk encounters a society that is run like a beehive by a single leader named Landru, who demands that all citizens be “of the body.” (Spoiler: He’s a computer. Out-of-control computers were another common theme.) As Cushman notes, the crushing of the individual for the good of the collective was an intentional statement about life under communism.
Likewise, just as the U.S. and the Soviet Union competed against each other in the developing world of the 20th century, the Klingons and the Federation were often at odds with each other over developing planets in the future. In “The Trouble With Tribbles,” a famous episode and one of the show’s few comedic attempts, the Klingons and the Federation are competing to develop and win control of a neutral planet. The Federation’s bid is to offer to plant wheat; the Klingons respond by secretly poisoning the seeds. And in “Errand of Mercy,” the Enterprise races to stop a Klingon takeover of Organia, a strategically located planet seemingly run by annoying pacifist simpletons. But the Organians, it turns out, are actually super-advanced, nearly omnipotent beings who have had enough of all this conflict, and they impose a peace treaty on both sides, thus averting an interstellar war. (“It would have been glorious,” the disappointed Klingon commander says at the end.)
In 1968, Star Trek made one of its most obvious comments on the Cold War in “A Private Little War,” an episode written about the Vietnam War. Once again, the Federation and the Klingons struggle over an underdeveloped and internally divided planet, but this time the Klingons start shipping weapons to one of the warring sides. The script went through various changes as the writers wrestled with whether Kirk should intervene and arm the planet’s more peaceful faction—which he finally does, with deep sadness.
The original Star Trek often fudged the question of whether Earth experienced a nuclear war. (Later entries in the show’s canon, including the Star Trek movies, confirmed that a nuclear World War III did, in fact, take place.) But nuclear weapons were often on the writers’ minds. Spinrad, for example, created the “Doomsday Machine,” an alien device that devours entire planets; when it wanders into our galaxy, Kirk ruminates on how Earth once foolishly thought of thermonuclear bombs as an ultimate weapon.
