Basement Lab Goes Dark
26. During the Cold War, students at Stuyvesant High School assembled a particle accelerator in the basement of their school. But when they turned it on, it “tanked the electrical system for the building and surrounding area.” More than $10,000 was spent on the machine, yet nobody knows what became of it.
27. During the Cold War, President Nixon came up with a plan to convince the USSR that he was unstable and might launch nukes at any time. This was known as the “Madman Theory.”
28. At the height of the Cold War, two families got out of East Germany by building a hot air balloon while staying hidden from the German Stasi secret police, then flying it more than 20 miles across the border in the middle of the night.
29. At the height of the Cold War, the US Air Force created a secret plan to set off a nuclear bomb on the moon as a show of military power. Carl Sagan handled the mathematical modeling for the explosion.
30. In the 1930s, starlet Hedy Lamarr created a new technology to prevent Nazis from jamming Navy torpedoes, but the idea was not accepted until 1962 and was put into use during the Cold War. Her frequency hopping technology is also the foundation of modern Bluetooth.
31. Teddy Roosevelt’s grandsons, Archie, who spoke 16 languages, and Kim, served as senior CIA operatives in the early years of the Cold War.
32. In the Cold War, the federal government prepared for a situation called Plan C, which would have placed the country under martial law, detained people linked to “subversive” groups, set up a censorship board, and readied the nation for life after a nuclear strike. There was no Plan A or B.
33. NATO did not take part in any conflict until after the Cold War ended. It is now already its sixth conflict.
34. The Soviet Union and the United States had originally been discussing a joint trip to the moon during the Cold War. Nikita Khruschev was ready to agree to the proposal, but President Kennedy was then assassinated. Because the Soviets did not trust Vice President Johnson, Khrushchev turned down the plan.
35. During the Cold War, Great Britain struggled so much to create a fusion bomb, or H-Bomb, that it “faked it” by constructing and testing a very large fission bomb and allowed the world to think it was a small H-bomb.
Civilian Jet Sparks GPS Shift
36. A Korean civilian 747 was shot down by the Soviet Union after it unknowingly entered Soviet airspace during the Cold War, and all 269 passengers were killed. The event led the U.S. to allow GPS technology to be used by civilians.
37. During the Cold War, the CIA financed creative writing programs to advance American Exceptionalism and oppose “Communist Ideals.”
38. The IBM Combat Direction Central AN/FSQ-7 served as a computerized command and control system for Cold War air defense, and it was the largest computer system ever constructed, at 250 tons and using 60,000 vacuum tubes.
39. At the peak of the Cold War, the code used to authorize a nuclear missile launch was “00000000.”
40. Cold War defense computers had ashtrays.
41. During the 1971 World Ping-Pong Championship, a cordial interaction between an American player and a Chinese player led Mao Zedong to invite the American table tennis team to China, which helped restore Sino-American relations for the first time since the cold war.
42. During the Cold War, Albania had 750,000 bunkers constructed, one for every four residents. They were costly for the economy and were almost never put to use.
43. In 1959, while the Cold War was in progress, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev was refused entry to Disneyland during a visit to the US and had to content himself with SeaWorld.
44. During the Cold War, the Canadian government compelled Inuit people to move to the far northern regions of the country to reinforce its sovereignty there.
45. Hitler foresaw the Cold War. “there will remain in the world only two Great Powers capable of confronting each other the United States and Soviet Russia.”
Cold War World Labels
46. Whether a country was called first, second, or third world depended on which side it aligned with during the Cold War.
47. “In God, We Trust” was added to all U.S. bills during the Cold War to signal the United States’ anti-communist stance.
48. By the late Cold War, the Soviet Union had an over-the-horizon radar system so strong that it disrupted electronics around the world, and some people thought it was a Soviet mind control experiment.
49. Cold War nuclear bombers were usually painted white, or white underneath, to reflect light from the nuclear blast they would release; this coating was known as “anti-flash white.”
50. As part of its Cold War mind control experiments, the CIA secretly contaminated the bread from a bakery in the French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit with massive amounts of LSD.
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