Cold War

Titan Missile base Amy Heiden Arizona is apparently the place to be if you're in the market for an underground lair. Last month, a Titan II Missile complex that was decommissioned in the 1980s lasted only ten days on the market before it was bought above a…

Key point: The Tomahawk is still a Cold War subsonic cruise missile that seems a bit of a dinosaur when compared to the supersonic and hypersonic weapons that are being developed today. Heres a tip: if you dont want the enemy to capture your weapons, then do…

The book spans events including the Spanish Civil War and the collapse of the Berlin Wall.During the Cold War, authors walked a tightrope between the competing ideas of capitalism and communism. If they offended those in power, they could face possible exile …

Every year, roughly 4 million people visit the Ellis Island immigration station, wandering the manicured museum grounds and gazing at the nearby Statue of Liberty. But today’s experience visiting the tiny speck of land off the southern tip of Manhattan is a f…

In the 1970s, the Soviets managed to intercept top secret communications in the US embassy in Moscow and nobody could figure out how. While an antenna was eventually found hidden in the embassy's chimney, it took years to determine how what data was being col…

Image copyrightAFPImage caption The Runit Dome houses tonnes of nuclear waste The US Congress has demanded an investigation into a concrete dome full of nuclear waste, threatened by rising sea levels in the Marshall Islands. Dubbed "the tomb", it holds t…

Key point: Russia is acting out of fear that a U.S. first-strike that would decapitate the Russian leadership before it could give the order to retaliate. Russia has a knack for developing weapons thatat least on paperare terrifying: nuclear-powered cruise m…

Image copyrightGetty ImagesImage caption A still from the defence ministry video shows an Avangard warhead (computer simulation) Russia's first regiment of Avangard hypersonic missiles has been put into service, the defence ministry says. The location was…

Many historians consider the division of Europe in the aftermath of World War II inevitable, because, they believe, Soviet leader Josef Stalin was eager for communism to sweep the continent. But historian Norman Naimark disagrees. Stalin didn’t plan to have …

BONE MUSIC In the USSR during the cold war era, the music people could listen to was ruthlessly controlled by the State. But a secret underground subculture of music lovers and bootleggers defied the censor. Incredibly, they built their own recording machine…