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)

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.

When the Soviets were planning their lunar program, they faced the same question NASA had faced: Did they want to go in one large rocket, or did they want to use several launches of smaller rockets to assemble a lunar spacecraft in Earth’s orbit before heading to the Moon? Launching everything aboard one rocket was a quicker option, and since beating America to the Moon was a high priority, that’s what the Soviets chose to do. They set to work developing a rocket big enough for the job, called the N-1.

DOWNSIZING

Soviet N-1 rocket

Using one rocket, no matter how big it is, severely limits the options on how to get to the moon and back, and because of this, the Soviets’ secret program ended up looking a lot like the Apollo program, which also used one rocket, the Saturn V. But because the N-1 was smaller than the Saturn V, the Soviet mission would be smaller in many respects. It would have less room for cargo, and only two cosmonauts would make the trip, not three as on the Apollo missions. And that meant that only one cosmonaut would get to walk on the Moon, instead of two.

* The Soviet plans called for the N-1 rocket to lift a command ship called the Lunniy Orbitalny Korabl (LOK) into Earth’s orbit. The command ship would then travel to the Moon and enter lunar orbit. An attached lunar lander, call the Lunniy Kabina (“Lunar Cabin,” or LK, for short), would then separate from the LOK and descend to the lunar surface with one of the cosmonauts aboard. The other cosmonaut had to remain on the LOK.

* After spending about 24 hours on the surface of the Moon, the cosmonaut would climb back into the LK, launch back into lunar orbit, and dock with the LOK. Once the cosmonaut was safety back aboard the LOK, the LK would be jettisoned, and the LOK would fire its rocket, putting the craft on a return course to Earth. Then, when the LOK arrived in Earth’s orbit, the crew compartment would split apart from the rest of the LOK and re-enter the atmosphere with the cosmonauts aboard, parachuting to a landing somewhere inside the Soviet Union. The rest of the LOK would burn up on re-entry.

A model of the Lunniy Orbitalny Korabl (LOK)

NOT QUITE APOLLO

For all its similarities with the Apollo program, the Soviet lunar program did have its differences.

* Would you want to land on the Moon all by yourself while wearing an unwieldy spacesuit that’s difficult to move around in? What if you fell down -who would help you up? The Soviets were so worried about this possibility that they attached a device to the spacesuit that looked like a hula hoop. If the lone cosmonaut did fall on his back while walking on the Moon, he could use the hula hoop to roll over on his knees and stand back up.

Lunniy Kabina (LK)

* The Soviets were also worried about the LK becoming so damaged during landing that it would be unable to blast off from the Moon -landing a man on the Moon just to watch him die there would have been a human tragedy, not to mention a public relations disaster. The Soviets made plans to send a second LK to the Moon in advance of the mission …just in case.

* The second LK would have been useless if the cosmonaut landed too far away from it or couldn’t find it after landing on the Moon, so the Soviets also planned to send an unmanned, remote controlled rover to the Moon in advance of the manned landing. Its job would be to select landing sites for both the primary LK and the unmanned backup, and then serve as a landing beacon for both LKs. The rover would also be equipped with oxygen tanks and a platform for the cosmonaut to stand on, to enable it to ferry the cosmonaut to the backup LK if necessary.

TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE

So why didn’t the Soviets make it to the Moon? Part of the problem was that the Soviet leadership didn’t take the challenge seriously until it was too late to catch up with the Americans. Premiere Nikita Khrushchev endorsed the idea of a lunar program in 1962, but it wasn’t until 1964, more than three years after JFK put NASA on a course toward the Moon, that the Soviet leadership started committing resources to the project.

By then it probably would have been too late for them to catch up with the United States even under the best of circumstances, and the Soviets made the situation worse by designing the giant N-1 rocket so that it used 30 smaller rocket motors instead of fewer, more powerful motors. (NASA’s Saturn V used five rocket motors -that’s how it got its name.) Getting 30 rocket motors to work together in perfect unison without shaking each other apart is next to impossible, and the Soviets never did pull it off. The N-1 was only test launched four times -twice before Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon and twice afterward. All four tests ended in failure; the rockets either exploded or malfunctioned and had to be destroyed by Soviet ground control.

SHHH!

Given the open nature of the Apollo program and subsequent NASA missions, it’s difficult to absorb just how covert the Soviet Union’s manned lunar program was. Launches took place in complete secrecy, although the United States did have an inkling that a Soviet lunar program was underway. The N-1 rockets were nearly 40 stories tall, and once they were rolled out onto the launch pads, it wasn’t hard for American spy satellites to find them or for the CIA to guess what rockets that big were designed for.

On a few occasions, the U.S. government was even spooked into thinking they were about to lose the race to the Moon. In September 1968, for example, the U.S. detected the launch of a rocket from Baikonur and traced its course all the way to the Moon. They even detected the sound of a human voice in a radio signal transmitted from the spacecraft. Was this another Yuri Gagarin moment? This time, NASA got lucky -the voice was only a recording designed to test the spacecraft’s radio equipment.

NASA was so concerned about losing the space race that it sped up the pace of its operations. The Apollo 8 mission (December-21-27, 1968), only the second manned mission of the Apollo program, was originally intended to test equipment in Earth’s orbit. But the CIA was so convinced the the USSR was about to send cosmonauts on a flight around the Moon, NASA changed it to a circumlunar mission to keep the Soviets from beating them to the punch. Less than a year later, the Soviets -along with the rest of the world- watched the United States win the race.

NOW WHAT?

With that, the Soviet lunar program lost much of its purpose. For a time, the Soviets considered expanding the program to include a base on the Moon -if they couldn’t get there first, they reasoned, they could still get there best. But the lunar program was canceled in 1974 as the Soviet Union shifted its emphasis to building space stations.

In the early 1970s, NASA began work on a reusable space shuttle. When informed that the United States’ shuttle would be able to carry military cargo over the Soviet Union, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev ordered up a space shuttle of his own. “We are not country bumpkins here!” he is said to have shouted. The first American space shuttle, the Columbia, flew on April 12, 1981; the first Soviet shuttle, named the Buran, or “Snowstorm,” flew on November 15, 1988. The Buran only made a single, unmanned flight before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 caused the program to be canceled.

Today the rivalry between the United States and Russian space programs is over, perhaps for good, as they work together with other countries in the International Space Station.

This NASA photo shows astronauts from the US, Russia, Japan, Canada, and Belgium together aboard the International Space Station (ISS)

CABIN FEVER

Not much remains of the Soviet manned lunar program more than 35 years after it was canceled. Remember, it wasn’t just canceled; it was officially, categorically denied until the late 1980s, and by then nearly everything that could be recycled or reused by the Soviet space program had long since disappeared. Some parts that couldn’t be used for anything else were made into storage sheds, airplane hangars, and even bandstands and children’s playgrounds in and around the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Four of the LKs did survive, however. If you ever make it to France, you can see one of them on display at EuroDisney.

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The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader.

The Bathroom Readers’ Institute has sailed the seas of science, history, pop culture, humor, and more to bring you Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader. Our all-new 21st edition is overflowing with over 500 pages of material that is sure to keep you fully absorbed.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute has published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute.

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)

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!”

HOLLYWOOD ENDING

Both Wayne and Grant fired their guns, but the KGB men didn’t die. It took a moment for them to realize they were still alive; when they opened their eyes, Wayne held up his gun and exclaimed, “Blanks!” The Duke had never killed a man (except in the movies), and he wasn’t about to start now. “I just wanted to scare the living s*** out of them,” Munn says Wayne told him.

The KGB men’s lives were spared, but probably not for long, and they knew it: if the FBI deported them back to the U.S.S.R., Stalin would surely have them executed. The KGB men decided to defect to the United States right then and there, and tell the FBI everything they knew. “Welcome to the land of the free,” Wayne told them. Then he and Grant got into their car and drove off.

Yakima Canutt

Wayne was safe, but would the commies try again? To guard against future attempts on Wayne’s life, Yakima Canutt and his stuntmen friends organized themselves into a private intelligence gathering force for Wayne and began infiltrating communist cells operating in southern California. On the basis of the information they gathered, Munn writes, the stuntmen were able to break up at least two more attempts on Wayne’s life, the first one in the summer of 1953, while Wayne was in Mexico filming Hondo. They thwarted a second attempt in 1955 by storming the communists’ hideout in the back room of a Burbank printing company and beating them to a bloody pulp.

Those would-be assassins didn’t fare as well as the two that Wayne and Grant “killed” on the beach after the first attempt, Munn writes: The stuntmen bought them tickets on the next plane to Russia… and they were never seen or heard from again.

A DICTATOR MEETS THE DUKE

Wayne didn’t learn that the threat to his life had been abated until 1959, when Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, visited the United States. (Stalin died in 1953.) The Duke met him at the reception hosted by Twentieth-Century Fox It was there, according to Munn, that Wayne pulled Khrushchev aside during a quiet moment and asked him through an interpreter why the Soviets were trying to kill him. “That was the decision of Stalin during his last five mad years,” Khrushchev supposedly told the Duke. “When Stalin died, I rescinded the order.”

That took care of the threat posed by Soviet communists, but Khrushchev warned him that Mao Zedong, leader of Communist China, had been in on the plot to assassinate him, and was likely still trying to do so.

ONE LAST TRY

Wayne learned how serious Mao’s threat was when he made a three-week goodwill tour of Vietnam in the summer of 1966. Munn claims that during a visit to one village, Wayne was nearly shot by a sniper, who was later caught by U.S. troops. The sniper wasn’t Vietnamese, he was Chinese- and he said he’d been sent to the village on Mao’s orders, specifically to kill John Wayne.

STRANGER THAN FICTION

The tale that Michael Munn tells in his book John Wayne: The Man Behind the Myth is more exciting than the plots of many of Duke Wayne’s own films.And it raises some interesting questions. Did Stalin really send agents to kill Hollywood’s most outspoken enemy of communism? And if so, how did the Duke’s other biographers miss the story?

One thing that makes Munn’s story difficult to verify is the fact that it’s based entirely on circumstantial evidence. Wayne died in 1979, a quarter century before Munn’s book was published, so he can’t vouch for any of the things that Munn claims he said and did. All the other firsthand witnesses to the events described -Orson Welles, Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, stuntman Yakima Canutt, and others- have been gone for many years as well. Another problem: Wayne’s 48-page FBI file, made public as a result of the Freedom of Information Act, makes no mention of any communist conspiracies against him, let alone a KGB hit ordered by Stalin and thwarted by FBI agents.

THE DICTATOR

Munn’s story does seem to fit with what historians know about Joseph Stalin’s personality, his interests, and the bizarre way he ruled the Soviet Union after World War II. Stalin turned 70 in 1948, and although Soviet propaganda still presented him as a vigorous man with an iron constitution, his health was failing and he had just five more years to live. He never really recovered from the strain of waging war against Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945, and within weeks of the war’s wend he suffered what was either a heart attack or a stroke. More attacks soon followed, and by 1948 visitors to the Kremlin began to notice what one described as “conspicuous signs of his senility.” By then, Nikita Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs, the Soviet government had “virtually ceased to function” at the highest level as the failing Stalin lost interest in the day-to-day business of governing. He almost never convened meetings of the Politburo, the Central Committee, or other formal organs of government. Instead, Stalin hosted informal gatherings of his cronies several nights a week in the Kremlin movie theater.

SHOWTIME

Movies, not affairs of state, were the first order of business at these gatherings. What little work that could be done had to be done between the film screenings, or at the drunken dinners Stalin hosted at his country house after the movies were over.

Stalin liked Soviet films and had a large collection of European and American films, many of which were seized from the collection of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels at the end of WWII. Among his favorites: detective films, boxing films, and any Charlie Chaplin comedy (except The Great Dictator, which he despised). He also liked Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy, and was a big fan of James Cagney gangster movies.

But most of all, said Khrushchev, Stalin liked cowboy movies. “He used to curse them and give them a proper ideological evaluation and then immediately order new ones.” Stalin especially liked Westerns by director John Ford, who gave John Wayne his breakthrough role in 1939′s Stagecoach. Ford cast Wayne in more than 20 films, eight of which were released during Stalin’s lifetime, and though few records of the Kremlin’s screenings survive, it’s a pretty safe bet he’d seen at least a few of the Duke’s films and knew who he was.

NO WONDER THEY CALL HIM MARSHAL

Stalin identified with the characters in Western films. He saw himself as the Soviet equivalent of a town sheriff or U.S. Marshal, biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore writes in Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. “Stalin regarded himself as history’s lone knight, riding out, with weary resignation, on another noble mission, the Bolshevik version of the mysterious cowboy arriving in a corrupt frontier town.”

Stalin’s contemporaries reported that he had trouble distinguishing between reality and life as it was depicted in the movies. Soviet filmmaker Grigori Kozintsev learned this when he was invited to a Kremlin screening in the 1930s: “Stalin didn’t watch movies as works of art,” he wrote in Sight and Sound magazine, “he watched them as though they were real events taking place before his eyes, the real actions of people -beneficial or destructive- and he immediately gave vent to his irritation if the people on the screen didn’t work well, and praised them when they acted correctly.”

CECIL B. DE STALIN

For years, Stalin had been, in all but name, the head of the entire Soviet film industry as well as its chief censor. He personally assigned film projects to directors and actors, instructed screenwriters on the ideologically “correct” means of presenting historical events, made editorial changes to screenplays, and even composed lyrics for songs used in films. He had the final say on everything. If there was something he didn’t like about a film, it was done over. Period. No film was released to the public without Stalin’s personal approval.

Even foreign films -which were almost never shown outside of the Kremlin walls- had to meet Stalin’s approval: Once when Minister of Cinema Ivan Bolshakov showed a foreign film containing a brief nude scene, Stalin pounded the table and yelled, “Are you making a brothel here, Bolshakov?” then stomped out of the the theater. Bolshakov was luckier than his two predecessors- when they displeased Stalin, they were taken away and executed. (Bolshakov never showed Stalin a nude scene again. From then on, he previewed every film before showing it to Stalin and cut out any scene containing even a hint of nudity.)

WHITE HATS VS. RED HATS

It’s conceivable that Stalin could have ordered John Wayne killed. After all, Stalin was nuts -”not quite right in the head,” as Khrushchev put it. He certainly had no hesitation when it came  to killing people: Stalin is believed to have murdered as many as 20 million of his fellow citizens during his 30 years in power, and he wasn’t shy about reaching beyond the borders of the Soviet Union to kill them, either. In 1940, for example, Stalin dispatched KGB agents to kill his rival Leon Trotsky in Mexico.

John Wayne was one of the most popular film stars in Hollywood, but he was an outspoken opponent of communism -an anticommunist cowboy who publicly and vehemently opposed everything that Stalin stood for. He was someone Stalin could not control -a “black hat” or villain, perhaps, in the crazy Western movie that was playing in Stalin’s failing, paranoid mind. And what does a sheriff do when a villain arrives in town? It’s conceivable that U.S. (S.R.) Marshal Joe Stalin could have decided, as the Western cliche goes, that “this town ain’t big enough for the both of us” and ordered John Wayne killed.

STAR TREATMENT

The pieces might seem to fit… until you learn more about Michael Munn, who turns out to be the weakest link in his own chain. Had Munn stopped with the Wayne biography in 2003, he might have retained the credibility he had when the book was first published. But he didn’t stop: In 2008 he wrote a biography of actor Richard Burton, and it, too, is filled with claims that are hard to believe and harder to prove. Munn writes, for example, that Burton had affairs with Lana Turner and Marilyn Monroe (he’d never been linked to them before) and was once caught in a brothel with actor Errol Flynn. (“Sensationalist nonsense,” a Burton family member told the South Wales Evening Post. “We’ve read his diaries and he never mentions Errol Flynn. I don’t think they met.”)

Then in 2009, Munn published a biography of British actor David Niven. In it, Munn claimed he was at the dying actor’s bedside in 1982 when Niven confessed to attempting suicide after his first wife died in a freak accident. Munn says Niven also confessed to having affairs with Grace Kelly and Princess Margaret, the sister of Queen Elizabeth II. As if that were not enough, he says Niven also claimed that his second wife contracted a venereal disease after sleeping with John F. Kennedy.

HERE COME THE SONS

Niven’ sons had never heard any of these stories before, and they’d never heard of Munn, either, even though Munn billed himself as an intimate family friend. Even more puzzling: Niven’s sons couldn’t figure out how Niven could have even been able to tell Munn any of these stories. Niven died from Lou Gehrig’s disease, which by 1982 had robbed him of the ability to speak -and that would have made such “confessions” very difficult. (Munn says he taped his conversations with David Niven. So why doesn’t he just produce the tapes and put the controversy to rest once and for all? Because, he says, the tapes got “chewed up” by his tape recorder and he threw them all away.)

So why would Munn wait until 2009 to publish things that Niven had supposedly told him 25 years earlier? Niven’s son, David, Jr. has a theory that could apply to all three of Munn’s biographies: “Everyone featured in these stories is rather conveniently dead, so we can’t ask them to verify them,” he says.

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The article above was reprinted with permission from the Bathroom Institute’s newest book, Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader. Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!

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!

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

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.

Link, via.

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

Link Via BoingBoing