Reclaimed Land
Inside Colorado’s Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge, a former Superfund site that embodies the painful past and uncertain future of nuclear cleanup in America. Continue reading Reclaimed Land
Category Archives: cold war
Spy Tech: Stealing a Moon Probe
Ever hear of the Soviet Luna program? In the west, it was often called Lunik, if you heard about it at all. Luna was a series of unmanned moon probes launched between 1959 and 1976. There were at least 24 of them, and 15 were successful. Most of the failures were not reported or named. Luna craft have a number of firsts, but the one we are interested in is that it may have been the first space vehicle to be stolen — at least temporarily — in a cold war caper worthy of a James Bond novel.
Around 1960, …read more
Retrotechtacular: Radio to Listen to When you Duck and Cover
CONELRAD may sound like the name of a fictional android, but it is actually an acronym for control of electronic radiation. This was a system put in place by the United States at the height of the cold war (from 1951 to 1963) with two purposes: One was to disseminate civil defense information to the population and, also, to eliminate radio signals as homing beacons for enemy pilots.
How CONELRAD Worked
Here’s how it worked: In case of an attack, certain key stations were notified. They would use a very simple sequence to indicate there was an alert. All FCC-licensed …read more
Continue reading Retrotechtacular: Radio to Listen to When you Duck and Cover
Retrotechtacular: Radio to Listen to When you Duck and Cover
CONELRAD may sound like the name of a fictional android, but it is actually an acronym for control of electronic radiation. This was a system put in place by the United States at the height of the cold war (from 1951 to 1963) with two purposes: One was to disseminate civil defense information to the population and, also, to eliminate radio signals as homing beacons for enemy pilots.
How CONELRAD Worked
Here’s how it worked: In case of an attack, certain key stations were notified. They would use a very simple sequence to indicate there was an alert. All FCC-licensed …read more
Continue reading Retrotechtacular: Radio to Listen to When you Duck and Cover
How a Solar Storm Almost Caused World War III
Crisis averted. Continue reading How a Solar Storm Almost Caused World War III
Memo to Trump: We’re Already Updating the US Nuclear Arsenal
Recent rhetoric from the US President-elect was ‘baseless and reckless,’ and we already have more nukes than necessary. Continue reading Memo to Trump: We’re Already Updating the US Nuclear Arsenal
Retrotechtacular: [Walt] Builds A Family Fallout Shelter
In the 1950s it seemed likely that the Cold War could at any minute take a turn for the worse, and we might all be consumed in the fiery conflagration of nuclear war. Fortunately neither the leaders on our side of the fence nor those on the other were the dangerous unpredictable lunatics their opponent’s propaganda might have portrayed them as, and instead we continued on our way uneasily gazing at each other over the Iron Curtain.
For civilian America, the Government created a series of promotional efforts to prepare them for the effects of nuclear war and equip them …read more
Continue reading Retrotechtacular: [Walt] Builds A Family Fallout Shelter
‘On the Silver Globe’ Is the Best Sci-Fi Film Never Made
The story of how one of the most stunning sci-fi films ever made was (almost) swallowed by history. Continue reading ‘On the Silver Globe’ Is the Best Sci-Fi Film Never Made
Greenland Is Very Mad About the Toxic Waste the US Left Buried Under Its Ice
Climate change threatens to melt the ice and expose chemicals and radioactive material. Continue reading Greenland Is Very Mad About the Toxic Waste the US Left Buried Under Its Ice
Hacking When It Counts: Spy Radios
World War II can be thought of as the first electronic war. Radio technology was firmly established commercially by the late 1930s and poised to make huge contributions to the prosecution of the war on all sides. Radio was rapidly adopted into the battlefield, which led to advancements in miniaturization and ruggedization of previously bulky and fragile vacuum tube gear. Radios were soon being used for everything from coordinating battlefield units to detonating anti-aircraft artillery shells.
But it was not just the battlefields of WWII that benefitted from radio technology. From apartments in Berlin to farmhouses in France, covert agents …read more
