‘And so, believing that the Russians and the communists were doing it, the United States embarked upon M K Ultra – a multi-million dollar program to enlist psychics, hypnotists, charlatans, physicists, anyone they could get their hands on to investigate mind control.’ ibid. Michio Kaku
Forty years ago, at the height of the Cold War, these nuclear submarines were locked in battle against the Soviet navy. Their crews were bound by a code of silence. The Silent War, BBC 2013
Submarine crews were now on the frontline of the Cold War. ibid.
In 1966 the Royal Navy joined the nuclear club. ibid.
The Hunter Killer was smaller and stealthier than a missile submarine. ibid.
Throughout the 1970s and ’80s the nuclear balance between East and West was constantly shifting. And the front line of the Cold War was now hidden beneath the ocean. This was a war of espionage and intimidation. The Silent War II, BBC 2013
There seemed to be no end to Soviet investment and technological innovation. ibid.
The highly ramified Pentagon system has been the major instrument for achieving these goals at home and abroad, always on the pretext of defense against the Soviet menace. Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy introduction
We can, then, identify a period from World War II, continuing into the 1970s, in which the US dominated much of the world, confronting a rival superpower of considerably more limited reach. We may adopt conventional usage and refer to this as the Cold War era, as long as we are careful not to carry along, without reflection, the ideological baggage devised to shape understanding in the interests of domestic power. ibid.
Military spending nearly quadrupled shortly after, on the pretext that the invasion of South Korea was the first step in the Kremlin conquest of the world – despite the lack of compelling evidence, then or now, for Russian initiative in this phase of the complex struggle over the fate of Korea. ibid.
Relevant data are presented in such a way as to obscure direct comparisons and selected to exaggerate the enemy’s strength, the standard pattern throughout the Cold War era. ibid.
For the United States, the Cold War has been a history of subversion, aggression and state terrorism. ibid. pp20-21
The threat of Soviet aggression was exaggerated, the problems were misconstrued, and the idealism that guided the actions was misplaced. But the requisite beliefs remained prominently on the shelf. However fanciful, they could be served up to the public when needed – often with perfect sincerity. ibid. p23
One early example was in 1952, when the Kremlin put forth a proposal for reunification and neutralization of Germany, with no conditions on economic policies and with guarantees for ‘the rights of man and basic freedoms, including freedom of speech, press, religious persuasion, political conviction and assembly’ ... The US and its allies objected. ibid. p24
In the mid-1970s Soviet military spending began to level off, as later conceded, while the US lead in strategic bombs and warheads widened through the decade. President Carter proposed a substantial increase in military spending and a cutback on social programs. ibid. p26
From an early stage in the Cold War, and for deep-seated reasons, the United States was set on a course against self-determination and democracy, rhetorical commitments aside. ibid. p48
Its apparent termination is an ideological construction more than a historical face, based on an interpretation that masks some of its essential functions. For the United States, much of the basic framework of the Cold War remains intact. ibid. p59
To safeguard markets, raw materials, and investment earnings in the Third World. Revolutionary nationalism had to be thwarted outside Europe, just as the fight against indigenous communism had to be sustained inside Europe. In this interconnected attempt to grapple with the forces of the left and the potential power of the Kremlin resides much of the international history, strategy, and geopolitics of the Cold War era. Malvyn Leffler
Throughout the 1950s American and British services pursued the Cold War with clarity of purpose and single-minded dedication. It was not a subtle war, and there were precious few complications. But in the early 1960s a rash of defectors began to arrive in the West from the heart of the Russian intelligence machine, each carrying tales of the penetration of Western security. Peter Wright, Spycatcher p163
This operation took place in Cold War Berlin ... After sixty years the CIA has finally declassified its files ... The secret construction of a five-hundred-metre spy tunnel. Spies Beneath Berlin, Quest 2015
The British were also partners in this tunnel ... The year is 1952: West Berlin is an island in a communist sea. East and West are squaring up over the barbed wire. Berlin had become a city of spies. ibid.
The Soviets already know what they are up to. ibid.
Jim, just how much do you know about Ice Station Zebra? Ice Station Zebra 1968 starring Rock Hudson & Ernest Borgnine & Patrick McGoohan & Jim Brown & Tony Bill & Lloyd Nolan & Alf Kjellin & Gerald S O’Loughlin & Ted Hartley et al, director John Sturgess, boss to Hudson
We don’t believe in going on a mission totally blindfolded, Mr Jones. ibid. Hudson to McGoohan
What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of man’s ideological evolution and the universalism of Western liberal democracy. Francis Fukuyama, cited Independent 20th September 1989
He [Kennedy] led his country boldly through the treacherous shoals of Cold War crises. Ed Herlihy, Universal International News
Out there somewhere under the sea is a British submarine ready to launch an atomic strike. Continuously on patrol its job is to hide, to wait and to deter ... Four new Trident submarines that are expected to last a generation. A Very British Deterrent, BBC 2016
In 1957 Britain was one of only three nuclear powers in the world ... Macmillan had staked his reputation on Britain remaining a member of this elite club. ibid.
The Soviet Union has put as satellite into space and stunned the free world ... would bring the Cold War to boiling point. ibid.
As America’s crisis of confidence deepens, Macmillan reaches out to Eisenhower ... Macmillan travels to America for his summit with Eisenhower. ibid.
This top-secret project was called Blue Streak ... drained millions from the public purse, but it didn’t go as planned ... Blue Streak took half hour just to get its engine ready. ibid.
[Admiral] Burke has come up with a brilliant idea: put nuclear missiles into submarines ... called Polaris. ibid.
‘There was a great deal of anger in Scotland about this.’ ibid.
Harold Macmillan has turned the Clyde into a major Soviet target ... Skybolt has been promised to Macmillan by president Eisenhower. ibid.
Skybolt begins to cloud the relationship between their two countries. ibid.
Kennedy won’t hand this [Polaris] over without strings. ibid.
Nothing like the RAND of the early 1950s has existed before or since. It was the original think tank, a strange hybrid of which the unique mission was to apply rational analysis and the latest quantitative methods to the problem of how to use the terrifying new nuclear weapons to forestall war with Russia – or to win a war if deference failed. The people of RAND were to think the unthinkable, in Herman Khan’s famous phrase. Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind
Fuchs was a German émigré scientist who fled to Britain during the war and eventually wound up working with Von Neumann and Edward Teller at Los Alamos. A clandestine member of the British Communist Party, Fuchs subsequently confessed in January 1950 to passing atomic secrets to the Russians and was tried and convicted in London that February. ibid.
The age that we have just left – the 45 years since the end of the Second World War, was overshadowed by a strange partnership between Science and Fear. It began with a weapon created by scientists that threatened to destroy the world. But then a group of men who were convinced they could control the new danger began to gain influence in America. They would manipulate terror; to do so they would use the methods of science. Out of this would come a new age free from the chaos and uncertainties that had led to terrible wars in the past. Adam Curtis, Pandora’s Box II: To the Brink of Eternity, BBC 1992
Research and Development: RAND was funded by the air force, but staffed by young academics who believed the scientific method could help bring the Cold War back under America’s control. ibid.
They were no longer advisers to the military, they had become the masters. ibid.
In a controlled nuclear war populations of cities would become like pawns in a game of bargaining with nuclear weapons. So the strategists persuaded America’s leaders to take civil defense seriously. ibid.