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On a hill called Teufelsberg (Devil’s Mountain) near Berlin, an abandoned facility complete with “radar domes” stands. It was once used as a listening station for the US to intercept Soviet communications, and then abandoned when West and East Berlin were reunited. It was built over top the remains of a Nazi war college. Exploring this station is difficult, as it is deteriorating. One of the dangers is an open 10-story elevator shaft! See a set of pictures at Environmental Graffiti. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user Nate Bolt)
The following is reprinted from the book Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader.
For nearly twenty years after Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon in July 1969, the Soviet Union categorically denied having a manned lunar program of its own. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that we began to learn just how close they came to beating the United States to the moon.
HEARING IS BELIEVING
Not too long after 9:00 PM on the evening of April 11, 1961, a United States government listening post off Alaska picked up the sound of human voices speaking in Russian. That wasn’t unusual; in the early 1960s, the Cold War was at its height, and the listening post had been set up for the purpose of intercepting Soviet communications.
But as the analysts studied the transmission, they realized that one of the voices was coming from space -low-Earth orbit to be exact- and the other voices were transmitting from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Soviet Kazakhstan, headquarters of the USSR’s space program. As the entire world would learn in a few hours, the 27-year-old cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had just become the first human being to fly in space. As was typical with the Soviet space program, the launch had been kept a secret. The signals from space were probably the first inkling the United States had that it had been beaten in the space race once again.
SECOND PLACE
Gagarin had blasted off at 9:07 AM Moscow time on the morning of April 12th (Moscow was 12 hours ahead of Alaska). He made just one orbit around the Earth before landing back on Soviet soil at 10:55 AM. That’s not much of a space flight by modern standards, but in 1961 it stunned the world. Just as it had when it launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, in October 1957, the Soviet Union had demonstrated that it, not the United States, was leading the way into space. The United States wouldn’t be able to send an American astronaut, John Glenn, into orbit until February 1962.
JFK’s QUERY
No one felt the sting of second place more than president John F. Kennedy. “Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the Moon, or by a rocket to land on the moon, or by a rocket to go to the moon and back with a man?” the president asked in a memo to his vice president, Lyndon Baines Johnson. “Is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win?”
JFK dispatched Johnson to NASA to get an answer. Wernher von Braun, head of rocket development, suggested that America had a chance of beating the Soviets in a flight around the Moon, but that it had an even bigger chance at being the first country to land a man on the Moon’s surface. JFK weighed the options, and on May 25, 1961, made his famous speech committing the United States to landing a man on the Moon by the end of the decade.
NO CONTEST?
On July 20, 1969, the United States won the race to the Moon when astronaut Neil A. Armstrong became the first human being to set foot on lunar soil. But had the Soviets contemplated trying to beat the United States to the Moon? For more than two decades after the Moon landing, the official answer was a definitive, categorical “Nyet!” The Soviets claimed they skipped the Moon race in favor of the more practical challenge of putting a space station into Earth’s orbit. And they succeeded- between 1971 and 1986, they launched seven different space stations into orbit.
The Soviets stuck to their we-didn’t-shoot-for-the-Moon story until August 18, 1989, when the government’s official newspaper, Izvestiya, admitted that the USSR had indeed tried to send a cosmonaut to the Moon, in what was one of the most closely guarded secret programs of the Cold War. They had actually come pretty close to succeeding: Were it not for one large technical challenge that proved insurmountable, the Soviet Union might well have won the race.
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Twenty years after the Cold War ended, more and more classified documents from that era are being released, which means we are gradually learning about what really went on at the infamous Area 51. It was a serious game of concealing experimental aircraft (code named OXCART) from Soviet spy satellites. The military knew when the satellites were scheduled to pass over, and would hurry and hide the planes in sheds before they could be photographed.
It turned out that even laborious hooting and scooting weren’t enough. Spies had learned that the Soviets had a drawing of an OXCART plane—obtained, it was assumed, via an infrared satellite.
As a plane sat in the hot desert, its shadow would create a relatively cool silhouette, visible in infrared even after the plane had been moved inside.
“It’s like a parking lot,” Barnes told National Geographic News. “After all the cars have left you can still see how many were parked there [in infrared] because of the difference in ground temperatures.”
To thwart the infrared satellites, Area 51 crews began constructing fanciful fake planes out of cardboard and other mundane materials, to cast misleading shadows for the Soviets to ponder.
Find out more about the cat-and-mouse game at Area 51 in this article from NatGeo News. Link -Thanks, Marilyn!
(Image credit: Roadrunners Internationale via Pangloss Films)
The following is an article from Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader.
After World War II, the U.S. and Soviet Union engaged in a “cold” war: an ideological conflict that was waged through political rhetoric, military posturing, espionage, and an arms race. Would it lead to WWIII? It didn’t, but at the time, people weren’t so sure. Here’s an incredible story from that era.
THE PEACE CONFERENCE
In the late 1940s, Joseph Stalin, dictator of the Soviet Union, ordered a prominent Russian film director named Sergei Gerasimov to go to New York to attend a left-wing gathering called the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace.
Gerasimov dutifully attended the conference, and that’s pretty much all there was to the story for the next 50 years. Then in 2003, British film critic Michael Munn wrote a book entitled John Wayne: The Man Behind the Myth, in which he tells a more sinister tale of Gerasimov’s trip to the United States and its aftermath. Munn says he got the story from actor/director Orson Welles, who heard it through contacts in the Soviet film industry.
MARKED MAN
According to Munn, while Gerasimov was in New York he learned of the leadership role that John Wayne, one of America’s biggest movie stars, was playing in driving communists out of Hollywood. Wayne was the president of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a right-wing group dedicated to compiling a “blacklist” of communists working in the film industry. The blacklist was used to destroy the careers of hundreds of actors, screenwriters, and directors, either because of alleged communist sympathies or simply because they refused to testify before Congressional investigating committees.
When Gerasimov returned home and reported the havoc that Wayne was wreaking on communist efforts to infiltrate the film industry, Munn’s story goes, Staling became so angry that he dispatched a team of KGB hit men to California. Their orders: kill John Wayne.
BACKLOT JUSTICE
The KGB killers really did come to California, Munn writes, and they even made it onto the Warner Brothers lot, where “Duke” Wayne had an office. Disguised as FBI agents, they checked in at the front gate and were given directions to Wayne’s office. (This part of the story, says Munn, was told to him by Yakina Canutt, a Hollywood stuntman and one of Wayne’s closest friends.)
Luckily for the Duke, FBI informants had already learned of the plot. As the fake FBI agents made their way across the studio lot, real FBI agents hid in the back rooms of Wayne’s office whle he and a screenwriter named James Grant sat in the front room, pretending to be working. When the hit men entered, the FBI agents pounced, disarming and handcuffing the killers before they could harm Wayne.
Those G-men must have been big John Wayne fans, because they let him deal with the killers his own way: at Wayne’s direction, the FBI men loaded the KGB agents into cars and drove them to a secluded beach north of Los Angeles. At the beach the KGB men, still handcuffed, were marched down to the surf and were made to kneel in wet sand. Then as the FBI agents looked on approvingly, Wayne and Grant drew pistols and aimed them at the heads of the KGB men. “On the count of three,” Wayne told Grant. “One…two…THREE!”
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The Soviet Union used their space program as one of the front line battles of the Cold War. And for a time they were ahead, as anyone who remembers Sputnik and Gagarin will tell you. They had an edge in that reaching their goals was more important to the nation than the lives of the cosmonauts. Documentation on the cosmonauts is limited, and some evidence has been altered, such as the disappearing cosmonaut in the photo here. Then there was Voskhod 2, the mission featuring the first space walk.
The launch went up safely, got into an orbit, and a cosmonaut, Alexei Leonov, became the first human to perform a spacewalk. Super. But that was about when things took a turn for the cataclysmic.
On his way back in, Leonov’s spacesuit inflated due to the vacuum of space, which, apparently, the guys who designed the suit had never heard of. His suit was so laughably ballooney, in fact, that he could barely move and most definitely couldn’t fit back in the spaceship door. Leonov was forced to let some air out, all the while suffering from heatstroke and the bends. By the time his little 12 minute walk turned into a 20 minute walk, he was up to his knees in sweat. But he made it back in to the ship, safe and sound.
However, things got worse for Voskhod 2 after that. Read all about it at Cracked. NSFW text. Link -via reddit
Power of Decision is a short film obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. This four-minute preview is only a part of the 12-minute video you can watch at the link.
Washington, D.C., February 19, 2011 – “The Power of Decision” may be the first (and perhaps the only) U.S. government film depicting the Cold War nightmare of a U.S.-Soviet nuclear conflict. The U.S. Air Force produced it during 1956-1957 at the request of the Strategic Air Command. Unseen for years and made public for the first time by the National Security Archive, the film depicts the U.S. Air Force’s implementation of war plan “Quick Strike” in response to a Soviet surprise attack against the United States and European and East Asian allies. By the end of the film, after the Air Force launches a massive bomber-missile “double-punch,” millions of Americans, Russians, Europeans, and Japanese are dead.
In this scenario, the “success” of a nuclear war was defined as not having the will of the enemy imposed on the US, despite millions of citizens killed. Link -via Metafilter
From the 1958 until 1992, the Greenbriar Resort in White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia sat on top of a secret. Underneath was a huge fallout shelter designed to accommodate members of the US Congress and their aides in case of a nuclear attack.
The 18 dormitories could sleep 60 people each on metal bunk beds. Each had a shower, toilets, and small lounge.
The clinic covered 600 square feet and had 12 beds, an operating
and intensive care room. It would be manned by military doctors and nurses.During its life, it was constantly maintained in a state of readiness. Communications, electronics, and mechanical equipment was updated as needed. Supplies were cycled to insure freshness.
A complete TV and radio studio was equipped with modern facilities including a 75′ telescoping antenna hidden on the top of the rise beside the new West Virginia Wing. Congressmen and Senators would broadcast to survivors important information, most importantly that the central government was still in operation.
The project was abandoned after a 1993 Washington Post article brought it to the public’s attention. Link -via Atlas Obscura
Fallout Protection for Homes with Basements is a pamphlet produced by the US Department of Defense to help the average family deal with nuclear attack. The 1967 revision is available online for your edification and …amusement, yes, because even during the dark days of the Cold War, most people knew that preparing a fallout shelter was akin to rearranging chairs on the deck of the Titanic. However, this booklet has some handy tips for fortifying your basement, or improvising a shelter out of household items, as shown above. Link -Thanks, Steven Johnson!
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In American culture, the standardized fallout shelter sign is an icon of Cold War life. Bill Geerhart of Conelrad, a website specializing in the social history of the Cold War, wrote an article that can be called the definitive history of the sign. The project was headed up by an Army Corps of Engineers manager named Robert Blakely, who navigated the sign through the bowels of the US federal bureaucracy. The earliest version was created by a graphic arts company in Virginia:
Blair, Inc. frequently worked on government contracts and the ideas generated in Blakeley’s office were shared with their designers. Blakeley stated to CONELRAD that he provided the following basic guidelines to his people to convey to Blair, Inc.: “I gave them the fact that it had to be a simple reproducible image…and I did say ‘tell them that in the design they had to have a place for us to print directional arrows.’” Blair, Inc. was also instructed by Blakeley that the sign “had to be something that would get people’s attention and give them direction to the location.” To this end, Blakeley said that he asked a representative from the company what the best color combination was for this purpose. The response that came back as quoted by Blakeley was: “orange or yellow and black is the one that is most dominantly used in the graphics field.” He added “And I said ‘if that’s right, let’s do that and it was that simple.”
Link via Ace of Spades HQ | Conelrad
If so, a recent report at CBS News offers a cautionary reminder that improper disposal of copy machines may pose a security threat, because the copied images may be stored on the machine’s hard drive. For demonstration purposes, CBS purchased four used, discarded machines:
The results were stunning: from the sex crimes unit there were detailed domestic violence complaints and a list of wanted sex offenders. On a second machine from the Buffalo Police Narcotics Unit we found a list of targets in a major drug raid.
The third machine, from a New York construction company, spit out design plans for a building near Ground Zero in Manhattan; 95 pages of pay stubs with names, addresses and social security numbers; and $40,000 in copied checks.
But it wasn’t until hitting “print” on the fourth machine – from Affinity Health Plan, a New York insurance company, that we obtained the most disturbing documents: 300 pages of individual medical records.
Photocopy machine hard drives are supposed to be encrypted or wiped before resale, but obviously such is not being done. And, as CBS notes -
The day we visited the New Jersey warehouse, two shipping containers packed with used copiers were headed overseas – loaded with secrets on their way to unknown buyers in Argentina and Singapore.
In a related story, during the Cold War, the CIA collaborated with the Xerox Corporation to install a camera inside a machine used at the Soviet embassy. The project was so successful that dozens more such camera were installed in embassies around the world (embassies of friends and foes). That fascinating story is recounted at Edit International.
Fifty-two years ago today (November 3, 1957), Sputnik 2 launched from the Soviet Union with a dog named Laika {wiki} on board. It was a tremendous political coup for the USSR to launch a living being into orbit. Unfortunately it wasn’t so tremendous for Laika, as they made no plans for her to ever return to earth. Several stories were told of how long Laika survived in space, but the full story was finally revealed in 2002. Laika only lived a few hours before the stress and heat did her in. Her remains orbited the earth for five months until the capsule burned up on re-entry in April of 1958. In honor of the anniversary, here’s Space Doggity by Jonathon Coulton. -via Metafilter
Update: The video footage is from the song Moan by Trentemøller. -Thanks, waldemar!
A well-insulated 20,000 square foot home complete with an airstrip and a Jacuzzi sounds really nice. This one is underground in an abandoned missile silo! It was once the home of an Atlas-F missile built for the Cold War, but it’s been converted into a luxury home. See seven such military installations now used as living spaces. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend
Need a cool hideout or a secret lair for all your evil plans? A mile long tunnel under central London is up for sale right now for only $7.4 million. This Cold War relic is perfectly suited for all super villians in need of a good “underground” hideout, especially since it comes with a bar, two canteens and a billards room.
Link Via BoingBoing
