Bear Test Jet Seats
51. In the Cold War era, America used bears to test ejector seats in supersonic jets.
52. In 1961, during the Cold War, the Soviets gave the child of one of their space dogs to Caroline, JFK’s daughter, and it later had puppies with an American dog that JFK jokingly called “pupniks”.
53. During the Cold War, the USSR could identify a Soviet passport as fake because the staples in authentic passports would corrode from the low quality of the metal.
54. During the Cold War, Chairman Mao conducted meetings in his swimming pool to humiliate Nikola Khrushchev, who had to wear a floaty because he could not swim. Khrushchev took offense, and the episode worsened relations between the Soviet Union and China.
55. During the Cold War, the USSR mapped the whole world in exact detail. The U.S. State Department continues to use those maps today because they are so accurate.
56. Congress inserted the phrase “Under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance during the Cold War. This represented opposition to communists, who were atheists.
57. Throughout the Cold War, MI5 intended to use gerbils at airports to assist in identifying terrorists, secret agents, and subversives.
58. One of the Cold War’s most effective KGB agents used the codename Fedora. He penetrated the UN and harmed the US by passing along false information, known as a Fedora tip.
59. In 1976, at the Cold War’s peak, Soviet pilot Viktor Belenko defected to the West and took the highly secret MiG-25 fighter with him.
60. Russia kept extremely detailed maps of the Canadian Arctic secret during the Cold War, and other ships now rely on them instead of official maps.
Color Words Expose Spies
61. During the Cold War, the Stroop effect, such as the word “blue” printed in red, was used to help identify Russian spies.
62. During the Cold War, the United States created a portable recoilless gun designed to fire a small nuke 2 to 4 km.
63. Chef Boyardee received the Order of Lenin from the USSR for providing rations to the Red Army. However, he could not accept the award because the Cold War was about to begin.
64. Gorbachev, the man who essentially brought the Cold War to an end, recorded a children’s music CD with Bill Clinton and won a Grammy for it.
65. Reagan and Gorbachev agreed to suspend the Cold War if an alien invasion occurred.
66. In the Cold War, CIA operatives relied on a way of communicating that depended on how their shoelaces were tied.
67. During the Cold War, pilots of a special US airborne command center had to wear an eye patch at DEFCON 2 or lower, so that at least one eye would remain usable if a nuclear flash came without warning.
68. In the Cold War, the RCMP created and used a “fruit machine” that tracked pupil dilation while showing pictures of men and women to decide whether a person was gay.
69. In 1987, Lynne Cox swam from the United States to the Soviet Union, from Little Diomede in Alaska to Big Diomede, and helped reduce Cold War tensions in the process.
70. During the Cold War, a Russian MIG pilot named Viktor Belenko defected with his aircraft. When he reached the USA, he was sure the CIA had specially stocked the grocery stores he visited because he could not believe how many products were available for sale.
Berlin Runs on Coal
71. During the Cold War, West Berlin was cut off from the European power grid, so several small coal-fired power plants had to serve the Western sector.
72. Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech, which first acknowledged the Cold War, was delivered at a college in Missouri in 1946. Mikhail Gorbachev spoke there in 1992 and said the Cold War had ended.
73. During the Cold War, the secret city of Zheleznogorsk produced plutonium for atomic bombs. One reactor supplied heat and electricity to the local population and could not be shut down. As a result, it kept making enough plutonium for a new bomb every three days until it was shut down in 2010.
74. During the Cold War, a US submarine attached a wire tap to Russian undersea cables to watch secret military communications, and it found the cable only after searching for a week because a shore sign read “Cable Here. Do Not Anchor.”
75. The US spent $20 million on a cat fitted out to spy on the Soviets during the Cold War, but it was hit by a taxi immediately.
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