The Cold War Vault

EP46: Mishaps and Missile Men Part2

In this episode we'll look at the most serious mishaps at NORAD during the most tense days of the War Scare years and compare the very similar crisis faced by Stansilav Petrov in the Soviet Union in 1983. 

EP43: Mishaps and Missile Men part 1

A techno-thriller, exploring the technological background of many of the nuclear near misses and close calls of the Cold War. Inferior computer systems and common sense battled it out for the survival of human kind. 

EP44: 1983 Part 4 - The 1984 Addendum

Could it have been that the most dangerous year of the Great War Scare wasn't 1983 with Able Archer, but 1984, when the danger receded into the mechanisms of the Soviet intelligence apparatus? Yes it could. For nearly a full year, the Soviet Union continued to operate on the assumption that the United States was going to launch a surprise attack. And the U.S. didn't seem to have a clue.

EP43: 1983 Part 3 - Able Archer

In part three of the 1983 series, we go deeper into what Exercise Able Archer actually was and why it scared the Soviet Union. After all this, was the war scare real? Recently released documents answer the question. 

EP42: 1983 Part 2 - The Hammer and the Nail

The second part of the series on the Great War Scare goes into even more incidents and accidents that heightened tensions in advance of the events of Autumn Forge 1983. Reagan's rhetoric, the Star Wars Program, Operation RYaN, and the shootdown of KAL 007 all play a role in setting the stage for the real drama...and the real danger.

EP41: 1983 Part 1 - The War Scare

We explore the 1981-83 nuclear war scare, what caused it, and what almost set the missiles flying during the Able Archer 83 exercise. This episode offers some background, and an introduction to Operation RYaN, the Soviet effort to predict a U.S. first strike. Very dangerous days. This time on the Vault. 

EP40: Cults of Personality

The stories we tell about ourselves are all fiction. Especially when you are the god-king of a cult of personality. Doing research on a few interesting stories, these outrageous characters needed a little narrative. These aren't all, of course, just a few little tales I wanted to tell. Papa Doc Duvalier, the infamous Turkmenbashi, and the changing Cult of Kim.

EP39: Lessons in Imagined Disasters, Part 2 - Doomtown

Doomtown. Ah, my home address. This time, we look at the rise and fall of civil defense in the United States, with all of the virtual nuclear wars at the center. From irradiating cans of peaches to tens of millions of Americans evacuating the cities, the civil defense project truly was a lesson in imagined disaster. 

EP38: Lessons in Imagined Disasters, Part 1 - CoG

In Part 1 of this series, the Vault looks at early attempts by the U.S. federal government to save itself in the face of nuclear war. What started out as a hopeful scheme was eventually abandoned when the Soviet weapons technology outpaced the ability of the government to survive. 

EP37: The Moscow Youth Festival of 1957

In this episode we discover Moscow’s “Summer of Love” of 1957, when Khrushchev, 30 years ahead of his time, attempted a social and cultural “opening.” Nothing embodied this more than the Sixth Festival of Youth and Students, a cultural and political free for all that descended on Moscow for two weeks in July and August and forever changed the sociopolitical landscape of the Soviet Union, no matter how hard later leaders tried to suppress what the Festival had unleashed.