Collaborate Disseminate
On July 4th, 1976, as Americans celebrated the country’s bicentennial with beer and bottle rockets, a strong signal began disrupting shortwave, maritime, aeronautical, and telecommunications signals all over the world. …read more Continue reading The Russian Woodpecker: Official Bird of the Cold War Nests in Giant Antenna
The early Cold War years may have been suffused with existential dread thanks to the never-ending threat of nuclear obliteration, but at least it did have a great look. Think …read more Continue reading Boat Anchor Nixie Clock Plays the Cold Warrior Role Convincingly
The date was September 26, 1983. A lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defence Forces sat at his command station in Serpukhov-15 as sirens blared, indicating nuclear missiles had been …read more Continue reading The False Alarm That Nearly Sparked Nuclear War
Old Civil Defense survey meters like the V-715 are interesting conversation starters, but of very little practical use today. These devices were intended to be a sort of litmus test that survivors of a nuclear blast could use to determine …read more
Many ham radio operators now live where installing an outdoor antenna is all but impossible. It seems that homeowner’s associations are on the lookout for the non-conformity of the dreaded ham radio antenna. [Peter] can sympathize, and has a solution based on lessons of spycraft from the cold war.
[Peter] …read more
Normally we like hearing about old military gear going on the surplus market. But if you encounter some late-model Russian radio and crypto equipment for sale you might want to make sure it isn’t hot (English translation). If you prefer not picking through the machine translation to English, the BBC …read more
It’s a common enough Hollywood trope that we’ve all probably seen it: the general, chest bespangled with medals and ribbons, gazes at a big screen swarming with the phosphor traces of incoming ICBMs, defeatedly picks up the phone and somberly intones, “Get me the president.” We’re left on the edge …read more
Continue reading AUTOVON: A Phone System Fit for the Military
Dear blog readers,
I wanted to take the time and effort and personally present the “crown jewels” of my research into Bulgaria’s involvement in Cold War Espionage in the context of writing and distributing computer viruses using educational institut… Continue reading Exposing Bulgaria’s Involvement in Cold War Espionage – Who Stole the PC and Build a Fake Pro-Western Empire? – An OSINT Analysis
Talk about buried treasure: archeologists in Germany have – literally – unearthed a pristine Soviet spy radio, buried for decades outside of Cologne. While searching for artifacts from a Roman empire settlement, the archeologists found a pit containing the Soviet R-394KM transceiver, built in 1987 and apparently buried shortly thereafter …read more
All through the cold war, there was a high-stakes game of cat and mouse in play. Nuclear powers like the United States and the Soviet Union would hide submarines armed with nuclear missiles underwater. The other side would try to know where they were so they could be targeted in …read more
Continue reading Hide Silent, Hide Deep: Submarine Tracking Technologies of the Cold War