In November 1983, U.S. and NATO troops suddenly went on high alert. A small fleet of cargo planes
were moving thousands of American troops to Europe in complete radio silence. B-52s were
being armed with bombs as the Strategic Air Command raised its nuclear-threat
alerts to the highest level they could go. As the chaos unfolded, the Soviets observed the
whole thing—if the West was going to launch a surprise nuclear attack, the Soviets knew
their best bet was to beat them to the punch by launching one of their own first.
For a moment, it looked like the nuclear war everybody had been worrying about for decades was
finally at our doorstep. And the American public was completely unaware of it for years to come.
If you’re only familiar with the Cliff Notes version of the Cold War, you might assume that
the Cuban Missile Crisis was the only time the United States and the Soviet Union came within
a hair’s breadth of nuclear war. But it turns out there’s a lot we get wrong about America’s
decades-long standoff with the Soviets. Hi, I’m Justin Dodd, and today we’re talking myths
and misconceptions about the Cold War. East vs. West. Communism vs. capitalism. Pepsi vs. Coke.
That last one is a bit more literal than you might think.
The Cuban Missile Crisis is often remembered as the cautionary tale of how close we could come
to World War III in the blink of an eye. The long and short of it is that, following the Bay of Pigs
invasion, Cuba made a deal with the Soviet Union for nuclear weapons. The U.S. learned of the deal
and set up a “quarantine” around Cuba, which is sort of the non-combat version of a blockade,
to stop shipments of weapons. There was a standoff, a few tense phone calls were exchanged,
and we could have all been annihilated at the push of a button. Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed,
and President Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agreed to discuss their issues
rather than bomb us all back to the Stone Age. Though this event gets most of the historical
press, you might not be aware that it wasn’t the only time the Cold War almost boiled over
because of a petty squabble or misunderstanding. Another close call was the Able Archer incident
from November 1983. Able Archer was the name
of a military training exercise carried out by NATO that was meant to simulate what would have
to happen should a nuclear war break out. According to Slate, these war games involved
the movement of 19,000 troops and an arsenal of aircraft. Fake bombs were loaded into real planes;
radio silence maintained the illusion throughout. Everyone simulated DEFCON 5 through DEFCON 1
exactly as they would if there had been real nukes going off across the globe.
While the U.S. and NATO continued to gear up for what looked like an attack,
the Soviets followed suit, escalating their alert status as their foes did.
One tiny problem: the nuclear weapons they loaded onto aircraft were live.
Non-reconnaissance flights were grounded across the Warsaw Pact airspace,
and according to The Nation, Soviet nuclear subs headed for cover near the Arctic.
So why is the Earth still spinning? Well, for starters, you can thank Lt. Gen. Leonard Perroots.
He was the deputy chief of staff for intelligence for U.S. Air Forces in Europe. He watched how the
Soviets were responding and realized that this was a bit more than grandstanding in
the face of a military exercise—the Soviets were actually ready to go on the offensive.
Sensing that a real war could break out over some fake maneuvering, Perroots advised his
superiors not to escalate the exercise any further, defusing the situation before it
turned into a world-ending affair. Along with his warnings, a KGB double-agent working for the UK
got the word out to their government, which then contacted Washington about the situation.
Author Nate Jones, who wrote a book on the incident, would say, “Had Perroots mirrored
the Soviets and escalated the situation, the War Scare could conceivably have become a war.”
If you’re just learning about all this now, there’s a good reason for that. While the
public knew some of what was going on in Cuba as it happened, we didn’t really know a whole
lot about Able Archer until a report of its events was declassified in 2015.
It was such a secret that the year before the details came to light, Perroots barely got three
lines on his Wikipedia page, without a single peep about the incident. After the whole thing
was revealed, the Wiki was generously bumped to five lines. Though having your biography end with
“he is credited with helping to avert a nuclear war” is as good a capper as any.
If that isn’t unsettling enough, this incident came just two months after a computer glitch in
a Soviet satellite erroneously reported that the U.S. had launched five ballistic missiles
into Soviet territory. Again, lucky for us, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov had a quote
“funny feeling” in his gut that the computers were wrong and decided not to act on it.
Cold War spies Were All Secretly Placed Behind Enemy Lines
Spies have been used for political and military gain for as long as people have been seeking
political and military gain. Sun Tzu wrote on the benefits of espionage in The Art of War,
Roman emperors employed spies, and George Washington’s ring of spies
proved invaluable during the Revolutionary War. But none of those moments in history quite conjure
up the same vivid images as the Cold War-era spy, thanks to the fictionalized accounts of
their death-defying jobs from authors like John Le Carré and Ian Fleming. Fleming, of course, created
James Bond as the epitome of the debonair spy with sex appeal to spare—and for the last time,
I am not interested in taking over the role from Daniel Craig, I have my sights set higher.
In the real world, where, frustratingly, no one has asked me to play James Bond,
not all spies were pulling off covert and illegal operations
unbeknownst to their adversaries—some spies were actually welcomed on each side with open arms.
This is all thanks to something called the Military Liaisons Missions. This was an agreement
between the Soviets and the West that allowed for a certain number of opposing intelligence officers
to be let in on both sides in Germany to keep tabs on things and keep communication flowing.
It was meant to actually relieve tensions among the superpowers, as there would be
less paranoia and tension if you were allowed to peep on the other guy in plain sight. In effect,
it basically turned into legal spying on both sides, according to Atlas Obscura.
From this rather strange agreement came one of the most successful operations of the entire Cold War.
And it just so happened to revolve around used toilet paper.
It was called Operation Tamarisk, and it all started because Soviet troops working in the
field in East Berlin weren’t issued actual toilet paper when going about their business.
Instead, they had to improvise by using any sort of paperwork they found to wipe their supple
Commie behinds. Sometimes these would be blank sheets, other times they would use letters and
other harmless bits of stationery. But sometimes, they were forced to use top-secret documents to
do the dirty work. And since you can’t flush paper like this without wreaking havoc on your plumbing,
these sheets were put into the garbage after use and moved to a dumpster.
When the U.S., UK, and France learned of this, they had their perfectly legal officers infiltrate
these spots to fish through the Soviet garbage and pull out the stained documents. They’d be given
a good cleaning and pieced back together. The documents, not the spies. Or, both, hopefully…
The point is, there was a time in the history of military intelligence where, if you drew
the short straw, it could mean dumpster-diving for poopy papers that could contain information
on Soviet supply dropoffs, tank schematics, delivery schedules, and other highly sensitive
information. Historian Richard J. Aldrich called the smeared intel “gold dust to the growing army
of analysts in London and Washington.” On the subject of number two, the West was
kind of obsessed with it during the Cold War. In 1959, while Nikita Khrushchev was on a visit
to the U.S., some poor soul at the CIA was tasked with salvaging some of the Soviet Premier’s, um,
leavings, after he used the bathroom. It was studied, analyzed, and admired,
only to find that—and we’re quoting The Washington Post here-—Kruschev
“was in excellent health for a man of his age and rotundity.” How’s that for U.S. hospitality?
Most Americans Supported the Space Race. The Space Race is often portrayed as one of
the most agreeable causes of the 20th century. When President John F. Kennedy promised that
the U.S. would land a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, it was a rallying
cry for the nation and something that would inspire a new generation to quite literally
reach for the stars. Plus, it would really stick it to the Soviets.
The U.S. finally made one giant leap for mankind in July 1969,
but it wasn’t cheap. All told, the final cost of the Apollo program that got us to the moon was $25
billion in 1960’s money. That’s more like $152 billion today. And, as it turns out, the effort
and expense to land on the moon didn't enjoy particularly widespread approval in the States
According to polls throughout the ‘60s, most people believed getting to the moon wasn’t
worth the ever-increasing cost. In 1965, only 39 percent of people thought the U.S.
should get to the moon first, regardless of expense. Did that change once people
finally witnessed man slip the surly bonds of Earth and play golf among the stars?
Nope—in 1979, 53 percent of people said the space program wasn’t worth what we were spending.
By 1994, the number of yays and nays was finally even at 47 percent. It wouldn’t be
until 1999 that the majority of people finally believed the cost was justified—and even then,
only 55 percent agreed. The Cold War was always tense.
When we think of the Cold War, it’s easy to view it as a never-ending tension from the 1940s to the
late ‘80s that encompassed pretty much the entire planet. And yes, the ‘50s and ‘60s had their
fair share of scary moments; and yes, we were almost all killed because of a misunderstanding
in 1983—but there was a period in the ‘70s when everything calmed down to a mild simmer. And for
that, among other things, you can thank President Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev,
two men who worked hard for peace and not so hard at maintaining their eyebrows. GOT EM.
This time of relative serenity really kicked off in May 1972,
when Nixon became the first U.S. President to visit Moscow. During this time,
the two men talked about how lowering tensions could benefit both nations,
and then they signed a number of agreements on arms control while promising future
cooperation for areas like space research. That was actually a promise they fulfilled:
Within three years of this meeting, the two powers collaborated on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project,
which saw their respective space programs come together to develop a compatible
rendezvous and docking system that could be used by U.S. and Soviet ships in case of an emergency.
Space scientist ​​Roald Sagdeev and his then-wife, Susan Eisenhower—Ike’s
granddaughter—later wrote an essay explaining that the impetus behind this rare group project
was a movie called Marooned, starring Gene Hackman and Gregory Peck, which focuses on a group of
American astronauts who get stranded in space and have to be rescued by their Soviet counterparts.
For historians, this period of relative calm is known as detente (day-taunt),
and for all its good intentions, it began to fray after Nixon resigned in 1974. The easing
of tensions is often said to have ended with the fallout from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
in 1979. In 1981 President Ronald Reagan took a hard line and explicitly said that
“Detente has been a one-way street that the Soviet Union has used to pursue its aims.”
Still, it’s important not to think of the Cold War as one continuous geopolitical crisis that
went on for decades without end. It ebbed and flowed, with periods of heightened tension
and times when most average citizens probably didn’t give it a second thought.
The Soviet Union Was Completely Cut Off From Western Influences
If the propaganda of the time, and the comedic oeuvre of Yakov Smirnoff, is to be believed,
you’d imagine the Soviet Union as something of a hermit kingdom, completely cut off from the
creature comforts of the West in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Turns out, that’s not exactly the case.
In addition to their own film industry, the Soviet government would often purchase a handful
of American movies at a time for theatrical distribution. Their choices might not be
what you’d expect: the Soviets had a soft spot for lavish comedies like Tootsie and Some Like
It Hot (although in the USSR the latter film was shown under a title that could be translated into
something like Girls Only in Jazz, not as catchy). If you were a kid who wanted to see Star Wars,
you’d just have to hope that your local black-market VHS van had an
illegal copy to sell you for a few rubles. One familiar American brand that came to the
Soviets in a big way was Pepsi. This was the first U.S. consumer good to exist in the Soviet Union,
and it came onto the scene in 1974. But since the company couldn’t receive payment for their
product with the ruble being restricted, the Soviets simply traded their own Stolichnaya vodka
to Pepsi to distribute in the U.S., while the soft-drink giant provided the syrup concentrate
to the Soviets to make the soda on their own. It’s estimated that the Soviet Union consumed
more than a billion servings of Pepsi every year by the late ‘80s. And although you could
get Fanta earlier, Coca-Cola was largely locked out by the Soviets until 1985.
As the Soviet Union really began falling apart in the early ‘90s,
the floodgates opened, and you could soon find McDonald’s and Pizza Huts
springing up around Moscow, providing perhaps the clearest sign that the times were a-changing.
And on the subject of Pizza Hut, in 1997, none other than Mikhail Gorbachev himself,
former Soviet Leader, starred in a commercial for the fast-food chain. As for why he took the gig,
I’m sure the reported payday of nearly $1 million didn’t hurt. Which, by the way,
if the James Bond gig doesn’t take off, I’d be happy to portray Ronald Mcdonald, just call me.
The Collapse of the Soviet Union Ended the Cold War
On Christmas night, 1991, the familiar red flag of the Soviet Union was lowered at the Kremlin
in Moscow for the final time, and in its place rose the red, white, and blue tricolor flag of
the newly independent Russian state. The moment was a romantic historian’s dream,
a symbol of the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the decades-long Cold War with the West.
Realistically, the Cold War was pretty much over years before the Soviet Union officially
dissolved. By the end of the '80s, Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev had been slowly communicating
more openly with the West on issues like arms control and human rights. In May 1988, when a
reporter asked if the president still thought of the Soviet Union as the quote-unquote Evil Empire
like in his infamous 1983 speech, Reagan responded “I was talking about another time, another era.”
That type of cheeriness from the Gipper would have been unthinkable even a few months earlier.
By the next year, the Berlin Wall came down. When President George H.W. Bush met with Gorbachev
at the Malta Summit in December ‘89, there was a lot of talk about working together and
cooperating for a better tomorrow—it certainly didn’t sound like war-time bravado anymore.
But you’ll still routinely see historians and media outlets saying the Cold War
dragged on until 1991. So what gives? Well, one possibility is that it’s all about storytelling.
In a 2010 lecture at the Carnegie Council, former ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock
recalled a time when a producer invited him to watch the closing moments of a Cold War
documentary that was in the works. It proudly stated that the fall of the Soviet Union on
that December night in 1991 was the end of the war. When Matlock told the producer that he had
gotten it wrong and that the war ended in 1989, the producer just looked at him and said “Yes,
but that’s not dramatic.” Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, as it were.
And while I think it’s fair to say the Cold War was over, in a meaningful way,
before the official dissolution of the Soviet Union, It wasn’t necessarily smooth geopolitical
sailing from 1989 onwards. In January 1991, months after Lithuania declared independence,
the Soviets cracked down on the Baltic states, killing over a dozen people and sparking a Western
backlash that Gorbachev said was reminiscent of “the worst moments of the Cold War.”
Since there was no declaration of war to officially kick off the Cold War, and no
treaty at the end to give us a satisfying finale, it kind of makes sense that so many textbooks and
documentaries latch onto the symbolism of that Christmas night in 1991 as the final
day of the conflict. But, really, by this point, America was already thinking about its next war.
Thanks for watching Misconceptions! We have an upcoming episode debunking myths about robots,
and we’d like to know, what frustrating misconception do YOU want tackled? Let us know
in the comments for a chance to be featured in that episode. Until then, stay vigilant, comrades.