Cold War

We were doing something that was exciting and important. We’re going to also do something very important for national security. We are going to go look behind the Iron Curtain … defend the nation while doing the exciting things of manned spaceflight.

A special operations air assault exercise that demonstrated forced entry. It rounded off an exercise that included training on the land, at sea and in the air. An opportunity for Poland to prove that it not only can defend itself, but that it can also work with its NATO allies and partners, testing their ability, readiness and interoperability.

Combined with extensive and frequent submarine patrols throughout the North Atlantic and the Norwegian Sea, and forward-deployed forces in Syria, Russia has the capability to hold nearly all NATO maritime forces at risk.

The CIA is planning to offer details about four previously undisclosed covert actions conducted during the Cold War, a federal advisory committee declared in a report. It is unclear which actions will be detailed, however they will be from the Ronald Reagan administration or earlier. The disclosures will be published in upcoming volumes of an […]

It is July 1965, and President Lyndon B. Johnson has made the decision to send troops into Vietnam. U.S. strategy in Vietnam demands a necessary escalation of force. American policy, stemming from Cold War doctrine, and events in Vietnam since at least 1954 have gone unchecked for too long. Yet, U.S. policy is destined to […]

The Russian Military secretly mapped the entire world, but few outsiders have seen the maps—until now. A manual produced by the Russian Army, translated and published in 2005 by East View, a Minnesota company with a large inventory of Soviet maps, gives some insight into how the topographic maps could be used in planning or […]

United States Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson considered sharing the atomic bomb; in his plan to President Harry Truman. Secretary Stimson expressed a prophetic understanding of the global dynamics of what would soon become an international arms race for dominance of atomic and nuclear armament: The Cold War.  Secretary Stimson’s plan addressed the fundamental […]

President Vladimir Putin on Friday described the development of NATO’s U.S.-led missile defense program as a threat to global security and vowed that Russia will take the necessary steps to maintain a strategic parity. Putin, speaking at a meeting with military officials, scoffed at U.S. claims that the shield isn’t aimed against Russia but instead […]

Team Putin is talking up fearsome new hardware that could accelerate a nuclear contest not seen since the Cold War. Russia has a new nuclear missile—one that Zvezda, a Russian government-owned TV network, claimed can wipe out an area “the size of Texas or France.” Actually, no, a single SS-30 rocket with a standard payload […]

The Russian battle-sphere is expanding, but it’s nothing new. Russia has simply recycled a few old tricks from the good old days, and Cold War 2.0 is on the rise.

It’s happened again. Last Friday, a Russian Air Force fighter jet intercepted an American Reconnaissance Plane over the Baltic Sea, in international airspace, and engaged in a dangerous game of high-speed intimidation. The message was clear: get out of here. At one point, the Russian jet did a barrel roll over the American plane at […]

In 1975, the USSR actually fired a cannon from an orbiting space station. Forty years later, we finally got a good look at this gun. A quarter of the century after the end of the Cold War, the only cannon that has actually fired in space finally comes to light. Installed on the Almaz space […]