86 Important Cold War Facts For The History Enthusiasts

During the Cold War, the USSR was able to tell a Soviet passport was a forgery because the staples in real passports would corrode due to the poor quality of metal.

2. The US ignored war crime charges against many Nazis and recruited them in their cold war efforts.

3. Russia secretly had maps so detailed of the Canadian Arctic during the Cold-War that other ships now use them over official maps.

4. Congress added the "Under God" phrase to the Pledge of Allegiance during the Cold War. This symbolized the resistance to communists, who were atheists.

5. 1930's starlet Hedy Lamarr invented a new technology to stop Nazi's from jamming Navy torpedoes, but the idea was rejected until 1962 and implemented during the Cold War. Her frequency hopping technology is also the basis for modern Bluetooth.

From the 30s to the end of the Cold War, MI5 had an officer working at the BBC to ensure they wouldn't hire communists.

7. The most successful intelligence operation (Operation Tamarisk) in the Cold War was emptying supplies of Soviet Union toilet paper, forcing them to use documents, and retrieving these documents after use.

8. During the Cold War, the US considered airdropping enormous condoms labeled “Medium” onto the Soviets, to demoralize them against an anatomically superior American Army.

9. During the Cold War, Chrysler built air raid sirens powered by V8 engines. They produced 138dB, could be heard for 16 miles and remain the loudest sirens ever built.

10. Because of Hiroshima/Nagasaki/Cold War Testing, the steel used for radioactive-sensitive purposes must be harvested from pre-WWII naval vessels: modern steel production is all tainted with radioactivity

The US Air Force developed a top-secret plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon as a display of military might at the height of the Cold War. The mathematical modeling for the explosion was done by Carl Sagan.

12. The height of the Cold War the titanium used in building the legendary SR-71 Blackbird was sourced by the CIA (via dummy companies) from the completely oblivious the Soviet Union.

13. The CIA secretly spiked the bread from a bakery in the French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit with enormous quantities of LSD as part of its cold war mind-control experiments.

14. During the Cold War America used bears to test their ejector seats in supersonic jets.

15. A friendly exchange between an American and Chinese player in the 1971 World Ping-Pong Championship prompted Mao Zedong to invite the American table tennis to China, helping re-open Sino-American relations for the first time since the cold war.

In 1963, at the height of the Cold War, the US military launched a ring of 480 million needles into orbit around the earth. It was hoped they would more reliably bounce radio signals back to earth in case the Soviets cut through undersea cables. Multiple clumps of these needles are still up there

17. The Third World was so named during the Cold War to describe countries not aligned with the US or USSR and had nothing to do with poverty

18. The Canadian government forcibly relocated Inuit to the most northern parts of the country during the Cold War in order to assert its sovereignty in the area

19. The Soviets gave the offspring of one of their space dogs to JFK’s daughter Caroline during the Cold War in 1961, which went on to have pups with an American dog that JFK jokingly dubbed ‘pupniks’

20. A molten-salt reactor, a piece of technology conceived during the Cold War that forgoes solid nuclear fuel for a liquid one, can generate energy with far greater efficiency than any power technology in existence.

The Cold War is credited to have started in Canada after a Soviet Cipher Clerk defected to Canada and revealed Stalin's attempts to steal nuclear secrets.

22. Sidney Shachnow walked 2,000 miles for six months across Europe to escape a Nazi concentration camp, joined the US Army, volunteered for the Green Berets in Vietnam, served in a clandestine unit of cold war commandos, received a master's and doctoral degree and attained the rank of Maj. General.

23. The term Third World arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either NATO or the Communist Bloc.

24. Gorbachev, the guy who pretty much ended the cold war, made a children music CD with Bill Clinton and won a Grammy for it

25. The Stroop effect (e.g. the printed word "blue" colored in red) was used to help detect Russian spies during the Cold War.