We’ve come close to discussing the Warsaw Pact several times in past episodes and today it finally gets a stand-alone show! It’s easy to look at the Warsaw Pact as solely a counterbalance to NATO, but we’re going to discuss a few other nuances that a...

  I don’t have a real historical topic today, but I’ve been thinking about why I’ve always been fascinated with the Cold War and I think it has something to do with my historical perspective catching the tail end of it as a young child and then growing...

  Today we’re discussing a true Cold War curiosity and perhaps the most famous pigeon of the Cold War, Leaping Lena. As the story goes, the pigeon got lost behind the Iron Curtain during a race and came back with a message for the west to continue the ...

A few months ago I was able to sit down and go through the local library’s archives of articles they collected about the city’s civil defense planning for the nuclear war.  In this episode we’ll look at how Des Moines, Iowa, a good “Anytown,

We’ve been discussing Cold War geography and today we’re talking about the most enduring interface of the Cold War – the DMZ between North Korea and South Korea.   The DMZ is the most tense border area on the planet.

We’ve been discussing Cold War geography and today we’re talking about the most enduring interface of the Cold War – the DMZ between North Korea and South Korea.   The DMZ is the most tense border area on the planet.

Today we’re talking about a stretch of ocean between the UK and Greenland (with Iceland in the middle) that is pretty much the only access point for the Soviets to hit the high seas of the Atlantic and potentially cut off NATO supply lines…as well as p...

Over the next couple of episodes we’re going to look at some key points on the Cold War map.  Appropriately we’re going to start with the Fulda Gap in Germany, an extremely important pass through rugged terrain during the Cold War.

The B-52 Stratofortress was the “tip of the spear” for the American arsenal during the Cold War (well, along with the ICBM) and really one of the most remarkable planes in the history of aviation. Today we’re going to look at the history of the B-52,

Today we’re talking about one of the most iconic bits of pop culture from the Cold War, “Duck and Cover”. This 1952 short features an ever-vigilant cartoon turtle named Bert who shows America’s schoolchildren various ways to react to an atomic bomb inc...