Exaggerated Missile Gap
76. At the peak of the Cold War, the supposed “missile gap” was greatly overstated; the Soviets may have possessed only 4 ICBMs.
77. At the height of the Cold War, the United States sent a hydrogen bomb into space, creating what was called the “greatest man-made light show..”
78. During the Cold War, Ted Turner recorded a videotape to be aired on CNN if the world came to an end.
79. During the Cold War, Nikita Khrushchev told Mao Zedong that “Berlin is the testicles of the West. Every time I want to make the West scream, I squeeze on Berlin.”
80. Turkey took part in the Korean War even though it had no political disputes during the Cold War. However, it sent troops to assist the U.S. because it strongly wanted to join NATO and its earlier applications for membership had been rejected.
81. The closest the world ever came to all-out nuclear war was not during the Cuban Missile Crisis or even the Cold War itself, but in 1995, when a scientific rocket was mistaken for an American ICBM.
82. The most effective intelligence operation of the Cold War, Operation Tamarisk, involved removing supplies of Soviet toilet paper, making them use documents, and then recovering those documents afterward.
83. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union had many closed cities that were off-limits to foreigners and tightly regulated for citizens, and even now Russia still maintains many of its closed cities in the former Soviet republics.
84. In the Cold War, a Czechoslovakian pilot hijacked his own aircraft, requested asylum in West Germany, and later became a commercial pilot for Continental Airlines.
85. During the Cold War, maps circulated in the United States used distorted projections to make the USSR and Vietnam appear larger, nearer, and more menacing.
Cold War Alignment Label
86. The expression Third World originated during the Cold War to describe countries that stayed unaligned with either NATO or the Communist Bloc.
87. Spy satellites from the 1960s, used during the Cold War, captured images of 10,000 ancient cities and ruins in the Middle East that no one knew existed until they were reviewed again in 2014. These pictures were taken before modern cities had covered many archaeological sites.
88. During the Cold War, Urho Kekkonen, the former president of Finland, met with Soviet officials in the sauna and turned up the heat until he obtained what he wanted.
89. In 1983, during the Cold War, the world was a ‘Hairsbreadth from Utter Destruction’, but a single Russian Colonel stopped nuclear apocalypse.
90. Due to Cold War rules, every street in China appears slightly misplaced on Google Maps.
91. George Orwell created the expression “cold war” to refer to the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union.
92. A molten-salt reactor, a technology imagined during the Cold War that uses liquid fuel instead of solid nuclear fuel, can produce energy with much greater efficiency than any power technology now in existence.
93. The Third World got its name during the Cold War to identify countries that were not aligned with the US or USSR, and it had nothing to do with poverty.
94. During the Cold War, the CIA spent $3.8B building a ship with a 16,000ft underwater claw arm so it could recover a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine.
95. At the peak of the cold war, Neil Armstrong’s last duty on the moon was to set down memorial items honoring fallen Russian cosmonauts.
Cuban Troops Shape Africa
96. Fidel Castro and 500,000 Cubans took part in Cold War proxy and anti-Colonialism wars in Africa, leading to independence of Guinea, Mozambique, and Angola from Portuguese rule
97. Due to Cold War A-Bomb attack fears, some school children in NW Indiana were given blood-type tattoos as a “walking blood bank” program
98. There was a Cold War Bunker Found in the Brooklyn Bridge.
99. During the cold war, the Soviets would feed their soldiers an explosive feedstock as a dietary supplement to keep them warm.
100. The Russian “Dead Hand” fail-deadly nuclear retaliatory system developed during the cold war is suspected to still be operational.
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