100 Interesting Facts About the Cold War

The US Army conducted tests for a biological weapons program during the Cold War on impoverished St. Louis neighborhoods. Results were giving cancer to its own citizens.

77. 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

78. The CIA funded Creative-Writing Programs during the Cold War to promote American Exceptionalism & fight "Communist Ideals."

79. During the Cold War, the pilots of a special US airborne command center were each required to wear an eye patch at DEFCON 2 or below preserving at least one eye in case of surprise nuclear flash

80. In 1987 Lynne Cox swam from the United States to The Soviet Union (Little Diomede in Alaska to Big Diomede) and in the process eased Cold War tensions.

There was a Cold War Bunker Found in the Brooklyn Bridge.

82. 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

83. During the Cold War, the federal government planned for a scenario known as Plan C, which would have instituted martial law, arrested those connected to “subversive” organizations, implemented a censorship board, and prepared the country for life after nuclear attack. There was no Plan A or B.

84. During the Cold War, the secret city of Zheleznogorsk made plutonium for atom bombs. One reactor generated heat and electricity for the local populations and could not be turned off. So it continued to produce enough plutonium to make a new bomb every three days until it was shut down in 2010.

85. Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain speech that first recognized the Cold War was delivered to a college in Missouri in 1946. Mikhail Gorbachev gave a speech there in 1992, declaring the end of the Cold War.

During the cold war, Urho Kekkonen (the former president of Finland) negotiated with Soviet officials in the sauna, raising the temperature until he got what he wanted.

87. The US developed a portable recoilless gun for firing a small nuke 2-4km during the Cold War

88. During the Cold War, MI5 planned to use gerbils at airports to help detect terrorists, secret agents, and subversives.

89. During the height of the cold war, the US launched a hydrogen bomb into space resulting in the "greatest man-made light show.."

90. During the Cold War, most records were banned in the Soviet Union. This spawned an era of bootlegging in which the music was recorded onto x-rays films and smuggled in.

750,000 bunkers were built in Albania during the Cold War one for every four inhabitants. They were a drain on the economy and almost never used.

92. Project Pluto was a cold war era program to develop a nuclear-powered ramjet cruise missile which would have an unlimited range. One of its drawbacks was that it would spew fission material as exhaust.

93. During the cold war, America sent Romania 20,000 Bibles, which the Romanians subsequently turned into toilet paper because they had a shortage.

94. During the cold war, the Soviets would feed their soldiers an explosive feedstock as a dietary supplement to keep them warm.

95. During the Cold War, West Berlin was isolated from the European power grid; several small coal power plants had to supply the Western sector

Two families escaped East Germany during the height of the Cold War by designing and building a hot air balloon under the noses of the German Stasi secret police and flying it more than 20 miles across the border in the middle of the night.

97. Towards the end of the Cold War, the Soviet Union had an over-the-horizon radar system that was so powerful, it interfered with the world's electronics, and some people believed it to be a Soviet mind control experiment.

98. Turkey participated in the Korean war, despite not having any political conflicts during the cold war. Nevertheless; they sent soldiers to help the U.S. because they desperately wanted to be a member of the NATO and their previous membership requests were denied.

99. During the Cold War, Great Britain had so much trouble trying to develop a fusion bomb (H-Bomb), that they "faked it" by building and testing an extremely large fission bomb and let the world believe that it was a small H-bomb.

100. The IBM Combat Direction Central AN/FSQ-7 was a computerized command and control system for Cold War air defense and was largest computer system ever built, weighing 250 tons and requiring 60,000 vacuum tubes.