Ok, so before we start this Cold War epic, we should probably explain to you what the
Cold War was.
The Americans and Soviets were more or less buddies during the Second World War, fighting
together against the Axis powers.
But the U.S. was very concerned about communism and the despotic Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.
To put it bluntly, America feared that the commies – as it liked to say – would take
over the world.
For that reason, the U.S. wanted to contain communist expansionism.
But the Soviets were building an arsenal of arms, including nuclear weapons.
Thus, an arms race was on the way.
It’s thought Bernard Mannes Baruch, an American financier and multimillionaire, coined the
term Cold War, which basically means a war without military action.
And so, without further ado, welcome to this episode of the Infographics show, 50 Facts
About Cold War You Didn't Know.
Fact #50.
So, as we said, it was Bernard Mannes that coined the term Cold War.
He was a rich man and also an advisor to all U.S. presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Harry
S. Truman.
He’s famous for saying this: “Let us not be deceived.
We are today in the midst of a Cold War.
Our enemies are to be found abroad and at home.
Let us never forget this: Our unrest is the heart of their success.”
49.
It was Winston Churchill who first used the term, “Iron Curtain” in relation to the
Cold War, which basically means the metaphorical divide between the Soviet bloc and the West.
48.
Churchill is often said to be one of the most mythologized leaders that ever existed.
He may have been a great orator during times of conflict, but he has also been accused
of being a bigot, a snob, a racist, and being not too sympathetic to those who suffered
at the hands of the British Empire.
Perhaps one of the reasons why he was good at talking was because he was a big fan of
amphetamines.
47.
Over on the other side of the iron curtain, Joseph Stalin was responsible for around 2.9
million deaths.
Those deaths, historians say, were related to Stalin’s oppression, the Gulag, and forced
resettlement.
But if we include total deaths due to poverty and famine while Stalin was in power, the
number could be as high as 60 million.
As far as evil dictators go, Stalin is often said to take the number two spot behind China’s
prolific paranoid practician of violence, Mao Zedong.
Surprisingly, Hitler only gets the bronze for evilness.
46.
Stalin wasn’t really named Stalin.
He was born Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili, but that doesn’t really have a cool ring
to it.
He changed his name to Stalin ‘cos it means Man of Steel.
Superman’s currently rolling over in his grave.
45.
The Cold War started under American president Harry Truman and ended while George Bush Sr.
was in power.
If you were around in 1989, you might have read the headline, “Bush and Gorbachev suggest
Cold War is coming to an end.”
44.
The Soviets drew amazingly detailed maps of the whole world during the Cold War.
In fact, the U.S. and the UK were astounded by how detailed and accurate they were, so
much so that the US State Department uses them today.
Wired wrote in 2015, “University libraries at places like Stanford, Oxford, and the University
of Texas in Austin have drawers stuffed with Cold War Soviet maps.”
43.
In 1956, President Eisenhower signed off on a resolution that made “In God We Trust”
the official American motto.
Some people didn’t like this, given America’s religious diversity, but the president saw
it as an important move against Communist materialism.
He also made it a law that the motto should appear on all American coins and bills, presumably
to make sure the American public would not forget who they trusted the most.
42.
“Under God” was added to the American Pledge of Allegiance for pretty much the exact
same reason.
41.
Even though the Soviets and the USA were involved in what was called the “Space Race,” at
one point they were thinking about teaming-up during the Cold War.
According to NASA’s website, “Eisenhower suggested creating a process to secure space
for peaceful uses.
Khrushchev, however, rejected the offer.”
40.
Chinese Communist Party leader, Mao Zedong, had been treated badly by the Soviets on many
occasions.
He got his own back, though, when he met Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
Mao loved swimming, and he had learned that Khrushchev couldn’t swim.
On one visit, the latter was met by Mao, who offered him some bathing shorts.
He took Khrushchev to a private swimming pool.
According to The Smithsonian, “Khrushchev, meanwhile, stood uncomfortably in the children’s
end of the pool until Mao, with more than a touch of malice, suggested that he join
him in the deeper water.”
The embarrassed Soviet leader needed a floatation device and apparently paddled like a dog.
Mao was a happy man.
Some years later, Khrushchev said, “It was Mao’s way of putting himself in an advantageous
position.”
39.
When Mao visited Moscow in 1949, Stalin pretty much left him in a hotel and kept feeding
him lots of food.
Little did Mao know that Soviet scientists were secretly collecting his poo so that they
could analyze it and see what he was made of.
38.
When Mao was 69, he had a 14-year old girlfriend.
37.
According to the BBC in 2017, for decades, the BBC hired MI5 to vet anyone who worked
for it.
If they were even slightly too left-leaning, they would soon be made unemployed.
The BBC writes that by hiring what they called subversives, it might lead to a left-leaning
government.
You must remember that many American and European intellectuals might not have been keen on
Soviet rule, but many were so-called Marxists.
36.
In the USA, Joe McCarthy created vast paranoia regarding Reds Under the Bed and communist
infiltration of good ole American society.
McCarthy was feared, and his stringent witch hunts pervaded all areas of society.
He didn’t seem to have any scruples either, but that may have been down to the heroin
that he was addicted to.
It’s said that America’s first “War on Drugs” czar, Harry Anslinger, made sure
McCarthy got his fix.
35.
It’s said one of the most successful spying operations from the UK and the U.S. was something
called Operation Tamarisk.
This involved rooting through Soviet trash to find documents.
The thing was, though, sometimes the Soviets ran out of toilet paper and had to wipe themselves
with said documents.
According to one writer, Tamarisk was British jargon for, “sifting through the detritus
of military exercises.”
34.
MI5 was almost as bad as McCarthy, believing anyone with slight communist links was a threat
to British security.
They monitored and spied on left-leaning politicians, anti-nuclear weapons groups, anti-apartheid
groups, members of Amnesty International, and Civil Liberties organizations.
33.
The US planned to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon in the 1950s.
It was known as Project A119 and Carl Sagan was on the team.
He was hired to study what the effect would be if you detonated such a bomb in a low gravity
vacuum.
It was thought that such a thing would boost American morale and demoralize the Soviets.
32.
The Soviets wanted to do the same thing.
Their plan was codenamed E-4.
Apparently, the E project had certain steps.
1 was to get a spacecraft to the moon.
2 and 3 were to orbit around it, and 4 was to bomb it.
What a world we live in, eh?
31.
The CIA used LSD on its own soldiers as mind control experiments.
They did the same to biochemist Frank Olsen, who nine days later mysteriously jumped to
his death from a 13-story New York City hotel.
30.
In 1951, there was a mass poisoning in a French town called Pont-Saint-Esprit.
People died, but others suffered from scary hallucinations and ended up in the madhouse.
It was said to be something in the bread.
There are many theories about what happened, and one is that the CIA spiked the bread with
massive amounts of LSD as part of its MKNAOMI chemical warfare program.
Writing about the incident of what became known as the “cursed bread,” the Telegraph
newspaper said, “One man tried to drown himself, screaming that his belly was being
eaten by snakes.
An 11-year-old tried to strangle his grandmother.
Another man shouted: ‘I am a plane’ before jumping out of a second-floor window, breaking
his legs.”
CIA 1 France 0.
29.
The United States Air Force in the 50s used drugged bears to test ejector seats in powerful
planes.
Apparently, Himalayan and American black bears were a good size.
No bears died, but some broke bones.
You can watch it on YouTube.
28.
And Canada was just as bad.
It forced some of its Inuit population to relocate further north, just so it could show
the Soviets it had sovereignty there.
27.
It’s actually sometimes said that the Cold War started in Canada.
That’s because a soviet cipher clerk named Igor Sergeyevich Gouzenko defected there just
after WWII and handed over 109 documents relating to Soviet espionage and future plans.
Some of those plans of course were to build massive bombs.
26.
According to the BBC, during the Cold War, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and US President
John F Kennedy wrote each other lots of letters.
They even sent each other gifts.
One such gift was given to Kennedy’s daughter.
It was a dog called Pushinka, who was the offspring of one of the Soviet space dogs.
It in turn had puppies which JFK called the pupniks.
25.
If you check out recently released secret files from the National Archive, there’s
a conversation with the CIA director in 1975 and an attorney.
The attorney asks, “Is there any information involved with the assassination of President
Kennedy which in any way shows that Lee Harvey Oswald was in some way a CIA agent.
. .” But mysteriously, that’s where the document ends.
24.
The term ‘Third World’ was not related to poverty or standards of living when it
was first used, but it meant any countries not in NATO.
23.
The British satirical puppet show “Spitting Image” showed Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev
with what looked like a hammer and sickle painted on his forehead.
It’s actually a port-wine stain, a discoloration of the skin.
22.
If you look at secret files, you can see what Gorbachev thought about 3,000 Chinese being
killed at Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989.
In a meeting, he discussed what would happen if his own government met with resistance.
“We must be realists.
They have to defend themselves, and so do we.
3,000 people, so what?” he said.
21.
Later in life, Gorbachev teamed-up with former U.S. President Bill Clinton to make a children’s
music CD.
They won a Grammy for their efforts.
20.
During the Cold War, the Americans devised a cunning plan.
They would portray President Nixon as crazy, so crazy he might press that red button at
any time and start a nuclear war.
They called this “The Madman Theory.”
The theory was that if they could make someone look so volatile, then other countries wouldn’t
provoke the U.S. Some media now say Donald Trump uses the madman theory, or at least
it looks like that.
19.
The USA spent 20 million dollars on a cat…We should probably just leave you to think about
that…But we won’t.
Called the acoustic kitty, this cat was designed to spy on Soviets, as it had a listening device
implanted in its ear canal.
On its first mission to spy on two gents in a Soviet Compound in the US, it got hit by
a taxi and died.
Some people refute this and say the cat was just useless.
Either way it’s amusing if you don’t pay taxes in the U.S. Declassified documents show
how the CIA resigned themselves to failure, stating that spying cats were just not practical.
18.
The CIA didn’t stop at felines.
They also trained ravens, pigeons, and goats.
In fact, as was revealed years later, animal training for spying purposes was a huge project
at Langley.
17.
In 2017, the New York Times wrote a story about a man who had just died at 77.
His name was Stanislav Petrov and it was a decision he made that saved us from an all
out nuclear war.
In 1983, his missile early warning system informed him that the U.S. had launched 5
Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles at Russia.
Protocol was an immediate retaliatory strike, but the man just couldn’t believe it was
real.
And it wasn’t, the machine was malfunctioning.
“Twenty-three minutes later, I realized that nothing had happened.
If there had been a real strike, then I would already know about it.
It was such a relief,” he told the press.
16.
This is the first line of an article in The Guardian, “If you were born before October
27th, 1962, Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov saved your life.”
At the height of the cold war, during the Cuban missile crisis, the Soviets were about
to strike with nuclear weapons.
They believed America was about to strike a submarine with a nuclear weapon and so the
giant USS Randolph became the target for a ten kiloton nuclear torpedo.
You need three high-ranking officers to launch, and Arkhipov said no.
It turned out the U.S. wasn’t thinking about its own launch.
Phew.
15.
LA Times headline, July 25th, 1986: “U.S. and Soviets May Stage Joint Mars Mission.”
Apparently, Reagan changed his mind, which must have been a bummer for the then child,
Elon Musk.
14.
in 1983 Korean Airlines Flight 007 was on its way from New York to Seoul.
It didn’t get there because the Soviets shot it down, killing all 269 passengers and
crew.
It was thought to have been a spy plane, but it was just a regular old 747 carrying mostly
vacation-goers.
This created a lot of anti-Soviet sentiment around the world.
13.
The reason we first got the Global Positioning System (or GPS) was because of that plane
getting hit.
After the event, President Reagan made sure that GPS became a technology available to
anyone in the world.
Prior to that, only the military had it.
12.
In the 60s in the USA, planes would fly around all the time carrying nuclear bombs.
This was a ‘just-in-case’ scenario.
5 of these planes with the bombs on board crashed.
That included a B-52 that crashed in North Carolina in 1961, and it was carrying two
3–4-megaton Mark 39 nuclear bombs.
Two people died, but you won’t have heard about it.
This was classified information.
And little did North Carolina residents know, that the bombs almost detonated…Do you think
they would have blamed Russia?
11.
As is often the case, the Russian threat was overblown.
While it was reported that Russia had scores of intercontinental ballistic missiles in
the 50s and 60s, it was later revealed they only had 4.
10.
If you look at the CIA field agent training manual from the 50s, you’ll find the secret
CIA shoelace code.
This showed how you could tie your laces in certain ways to tell someone something.
It might mean I have some information, or keep following me.
9.
In 1959, Soviet Premier Khrushchev wanted to take his family to visit Disneyland when
he was visiting the U.S. He found out he was barred.
The State Department was later apologetic, saying he could take his family another day
to see Mickey Mouse and co.
The U.S said the reason for the snub was only because of safety reasons.
Soviet leaders weren’t exactly popular in the states in those days.
Putin didn’t go either; he just made his own version of Disneyland in Russia.
8.
If your job is related to the destruction of the world and you know how tenuous our
safety is, you might as well have some bad habits, eh?
Well, check out the 1960s Semi-Automatic Ground Environment computer for the department of
defense.
It’s got built-in ashtrays.
7.
But health of citizens wasn’t a big concern of the USA in those days.
Indeed, during the 50s and 60s, the military secretly used biological weapons on parts
of the country to see what would happen.
People got sick in San Francisco, but it was worse elsewhere, especially if you were poor.
A sociologist named Lisa Martino-Taylor said St. Louis was particularly used for these
experiments, and the reason was because there were plenty of poor black neighborhoods you
could spray with radioactive particles.
Live Science says no one would have died because of the experiments, but people were definitely
exposed to toxic particles.
“The Army exposed St. Louis residents to a maximum of 14.4 cigarettes' worth of cadmium
over 31 months,” said the website.
6.
During the cold war, U.S. air force pilots were given eye patches.
They were told that a nuclear explosion would blind them and make flying impossible.
So, if they got the Defcon 2 or “DEFense readiness CONdition 2” alert, which means
“Next step to nuclear war.
Armed Forces ready to deploy and engage in fewer than 6 hours,” they should put on
the patch and save one eye.
5.
The military had programs in the 50s and 60s whereby they would tattoo children with their
blood group.
It seems the programs were only in Indiana and Utah.
These kids then became walking blood banks, which is handy if everyone around you is dying.
“I still have my atomic tattoo (O-), but, as I grew it got distorted, so it's pretty
illegible today,” said one person, now an adult.
4.
Back to animals and a bright idea from the Brits.
MI5 didn’t need exceptionally expensive cats, what they used were the entirely expendable
rodents called gerbils.
“MI5 sleuths planned to use gerbils to trap secret agents, terrorists, and subversives
during the cold war,” writes the Guardian.
The plan was simple.
Gerbils can smell sweat easily.
Bad people at airports sweat and release an adrenalin scent.
So, gerbils were left at airport counters.
Theses crafty creatures had been trained to push a lever if they smelled someone releasing
lots of adrenalin scent.
And yes, this is real.
3.
In 1962, the U.S. detonated a hydrogen bomb in space, creating what it called a spectacular
light show.
Why did the U.S. do this?
Just to see what would happen, of course.
The test was given a cool name: “Starfish Prime.”
2.
When the Brits weren’t training gerbils to work at airports, they were busy lying
about H-Bombs.
In the 90s, the US Department of Energy released archives from 1958.
In those archives were documents pertaining to the British bluffing about an H-Bomb test
in the 50s.
H-Bombs are known as fusion bombs, while atomic bombs are fission bombs.
The former is much more powerful.
The Brits wanted to be seen as a superpower that shouldn’t be messed with, so they faked
the whole thing – in that they blew up an A-Bomb and said it was an H-Bomb.
1.
We are going to end on something funny.
The story goes that a man called Frank Wisner who was managing psychological warfare for
the US planned to drop thousands of condoms over the Soviet army from the air.
The condoms would be labeled ‘medium’, and this was supposed to demoralize Soviet
troops as they contemplated their well-endowed American foes.
Wisner was said to have had a great sense of humor, but that didn’t stop him from
killing himself in 1965.
Hmm, I guess that story wasn’t as funny as it was supposed to be…
So, there you have it.
50 lesser known facts about the the Cold War.
There are so many more secrets we didn’t speak about today, but maybe we’ll come
back to this another time.
Can you think of a cold war fun fact that we failed to mention?
Let us know in the comments!
Also, be sure to check out our other video called Average American vs Average Russian!
Thanks for watching, and, as always, don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe.
See you next time!