Cold War

Read Part One HERE Det A was the Army’s clandestine Special Forces unit stationed in Berlin during the Cold War.  Charged with the “stay behind” mission, these Green Berets would prepare to conduct acts of sabotage in Berlin in the event that the Soviets ever invaded.  When new members arrived at Det A, they would […]

Perhaps more so than any other tool used by the clandestine services, an accurate map can mean the difference between success and failure, or life and death. The CIA, renowned for its secrecy, has long kept its maps and cartographic methods under wraps. But, in honor of the agency’s Cartography Center’s 75th anniversary, the CIA […]

In a derelict industrial complex just outside of Kiev, soldiers of the Ukrainian National Guard are demonstrating their technical and tactical competence. Enlisted men and officers of the Ukrainian National Guard are designing, engineering, innovating, and manufacturing custom tanks developed to meet the evolving challenges throughout the Ukrainian battlespace. Warfighters with pre-war experience in engineering, mechanics, […]

Most people are familiar with the British SAS and American Navy SEALs. Some may have heard of the Rhodesian Light Infantry and Selous Scouts, but nearly lost to contemporary military history is the South African Recces. These white, black, and interracial soldiers pulled off some of the most hair-raising operations that you have never heard […]

President Elect Donald Trump took to Twitter on Thursday morning to call for the expansion of the U.S. nuclear arsenal just hours after Russian President, Vladimir Putin, did the same in Moscow. “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes,” […]

We’ve all had jobs that asked a lot of us. Sometimes the work that needs to get done requires more hours than it seems like any sane person would give, leaving you and your coworkers with no choice but to find ways to make another few hours bearable, another long night survivable, and another humorless […]

In 1958, the United States Air Force launched Project A119, also known as “A Study of Lunar Research Flights.”  While the US would not visit the moon with a manned mission for eleven more years, this project involved sending something quite different to the lunar surface: a nuclear missile. As the United States and the […]

John Glenn passed away on Thursday, December 8, and although the exact cause of death for the 95-year-old senator and veteran has yet to be announced, it was likely tied to a stroke he suffered two years ago after having heart valve replacement surgery. He was born on July 18th, 1921 in Cambridge, Ohio and […]

The CIA declassified scores of articles from Studies in Intelligence, The Agency’s internal journal on “historical, operational, doctrinal, and theoretical aspects of intelligence.” One undated article settles one of the most controversial incidents of the Cold War’s often-panicked final decade: the 1983 “war scare” in which rhetoric of nearly unprecedented belligerence from Moscow may have been backed with […]

Fidel Castro, the fiery apostle of revolution who brought the Cold War to the Western Hemisphere in 1959 and then defied the United States for nearly half a century as Cuba’s maximum leader, bedeviling 11 American presidents and briefly pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war, died Friday. He was 90. His death […]

On April 12th, 1961, a Russian man named Yuri Gagarin made history aboard a Soviet Vostok 3KA-3 spacecraft.  For years, the United States and Soviet Union had been using the barrier between our world and beyond as a benchmark to test each nation’s greatest technological and engineering advances, and on that day, Gagarin achieved an […]

During the cold war, America’s ICBM program was the key to America’s safety.  The certainty that if our nation’s enemies decided to unleash nuclear hell within our shores, we possessed the arsenal and willpower to decimate those enemies was a tenuous, but powerful, way to assure a public that grew up with the threat of […]