Disturbing History - DH Ep:55 The Cold War

Episode Date: January 4, 2026

On the night of September 26th, 1983, a Soviet lieutenant colonel named Stanislav Petrov sat in a bunker monitoring early warning systems when alarms signaled the launch of American nuclear missiles. Alone with the decision, he had mere minutes to determine whether to report the strike and unleash retaliation that could have ended civilization. Petrov hesitated, trusting his gut over the machine.He was right—the alert was triggered by sunlight bouncing off clouds. His quiet defiance may have saved the world, but almost no one heard his name for another fifteen years. This episode takes you inside the Cold War as you’ve never heard it—a conflict waged not just with tanks and treaties, but with secrets, sabotage, and surreal moments that brought us terrifyingly close to annihilation.We unravel how the United States imported Nazi scientists to build rockets, how the CIA toppled elected governments and plotted the assassination of foreign leaders with gadgets straight out of a spy film, and how the military once seriously considered faking terrorist attacks on U.S. soil to justify war with Cuba. We dive into the stories of individuals who defied orders and changed history, like the Soviet submarine commander who refused to fire a nuclear torpedo during the Cuban Missile Crisis. You'll learn about the bloody, U.S.-backed purge in Indonesia, the accidental toppling of the Berlin Wall, and the global chessboard of proxy wars from Korea to Vietnam. Along the way, we confront the rise of a domestic surveillance state that didn’t just target enemies abroad but turned inward on civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. This is a story of unimaginable weapons built by brilliant minds and placed in the hands of flawed men. It’s a story where accidents, miscommunications, and sheer luck averted catastrophe again and again. For forty-five years, the world hovered at the brink, holding its breath. This is how we made it through.

some stories were never meant to be told others were buried on purpose this podcast digs them all up disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange the sinister and the stories that were never supposed to survive from shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact this is history they hoped you'd forget i'm brian investigator author and your guide through the dark corners of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself,

just to get to the truth. If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victim. Sometimes, it's rewritten by The Disturbed. September 26, 1983, just after midnight.

Lieutenant Colonel Stinislav Petrov sat alone in Serpukov 15, a secret Soviet bunker buried somewhere south of Moscow. His job was simple in theory, terrifying in practice. He monitored the satellites. The satellites monitored America. If America launched its missiles, Petrov would be among the first to know. And then the alarm screamed. The giant screen in front of him lit up with a single word that needed no translation.

Launch. An American Minuteman missile was incoming. Soviet protocol was crystal clear, reported immediately. The Kremlin would have perhaps 25 minutes to respond. 25 minutes to decide whether to end human. civilization. Petrov's hand hovered over the phone. His training told him to make the call. But something felt wrong. Why would America launch a single missile? That wasn't how nuclear war worked. You launched everything or you launched nothing. Then the system registered a second

launch, then a third, then a fourth, then a fifth. Five American ICBMs, according to the most sophisticated early warning system the Soviet Union had ever built, were now streaking toward the motherland. Petrov had perhaps three minutes to decide the fate of hundreds of millions of people. He didn't make the call. Instead, Petrov reported a system malfunction. He was gambling with his career, his freedom, possibly his life. If those missiles were real, if American warheads detonated on Soviet soil because Stanislav Petrov hesitated, he would be remembered as the greatest traitor in Russian history. But the missiles weren't real. The Soviet satellite had mistaken sunlight reflecting off high altitude clouds for the heat signature of rocket engines. The most

advanced nuclear detection system on Earth had been fooled by the weather. Stanislav Petrov had just saved the world, and almost nobody would know about it for another 15 years. This is the Cold War. Not the version you learned in school. Not the sanitized narrative of two superpowers staring each other down across a conference table. This is the real story. The story of how, for 45 years, humanity teetered on the edge of extinction. The story of brilliant men who built weapons

capable of killing everyone on Earth, and the flawed, frightened, sometimes drunk men who held the keys to those weapons. The story of proxy wars that killed millions, of covert operations that toppled governments, of scientific achievements born from terror, and of moments when pure, dumb luck was the only thing standing between us and nuclear annihilation.

Welcome to the disturbing history podcast, and tonight we're going deep into the conflict that shaped the modern world. This is the Cold War. To understand how the Cold War began, you need to understand how World War II ended, and the ending was stranger than most people realize. In May 1945, the most unlikely alliance in modern history had just accomplished the impossible. The United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union had destroyed Nazi Germany. The three powers could not have been more different. America was a capitalist democracy that had spent most of its history, avoiding European entanglements. Britain was a fading empire struggling to maintain its global influence.

And the Soviet Union was a communist dictatorship built on the ashes of the Russian Revolution, led by a man who had murdered more of his own citizens than Hitler ever would. Joseph Stalin was, by any reasonable measure, a monster. The exact number of people he killed will never be known. Estimates range from 6 million to 20 million. He had starved Ukraine. He had purged his own military, executing or imprisoning roughly 40,000 officers in the years before World War II, including three of five marshals and 13 of 15 army commanders. He had created a system of labor camps, the gulag, that worked millions to death in Siberian mines and Arctic construction projects.

And yet, for four years, Stalin had been America's ally. Franklin Roosevelt had called him Uncle Joe. American propaganda portrayed the Soviets as noble comrades in the fight against fascism. Newspapers ran stories about Soviet collective farms and the workers' paradise being built on the Eurasian steppe. The alliance was always a marriage of convenience. The Western powers and the Soviets had one thing in common. they both wanted Hitler dead. Beyond that, their interests diverged completely.

Here's something most Americans don't fully appreciate. The Soviet Union did most of the dying in World War II. When we think of the war, we think of D-Day, of American GIs storming the beaches of Normandy. But by June 6, 1944, the Soviets had already been fighting the Vermacht for three years. They had lost millions of soldiers. Entire cities had been reduced to rubble. Leningrad had endured a siege that lasted nearly 900 days and killed over a million civilians,

many from starvation. The numbers are staggering. The United States lost approximately 420,000 military personnel in World War II, a terrible sacrifice. But the Soviet Union lost between 8 and 11 million soldiers, plus somewhere between 14 and 20 million civilians. That's a minimum of 22 million people. possibly more than 30 million. Some historians believe the true number might be even higher, lost to the chaos and deliberate obfuscation of the Soviet record-keeping system.

Stalin never forgot this. He never forgot that the Western allies had delayed the Second Front for years, while Soviet blood soaked the Eastern step. He never forgot that Churchill had sent troops to fight against the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War. He never forgot that the West had hoped, at least initially, that Hitler and Stalin might destroy each other. And so, even before Berlin fell, even before Hitler's body was burning in a ditch outside his bunker,

the seeds of the Cold War were being planted. In February 1945, with victory in Europe finally within reach, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met at Yalta, a resort town on the Black Sea coast of Crimea. The photographs from that conference are haunting when you know what comes next. There's Roosevelt, gaunt and exhausted, just two months from death. There's Churchill, the Bulldog of Britain, already sensing that his moment has passed. And there's Stalin, the man of steel, playing the longest game of all.

The decisions made at Yalta would shape the next half century. Germany would be divided into occupation zones. Free elections would be held in the liberated countries of Eastern Europe. The United Nations would be established. The Soviet Union would declare war on Japan within three months of Germany's surrender. Roosevelt left Yalta believing he had secured peace for a generation. He was wrong. What he had actually done, though he didn't know it,

was draw lines on a map that would become the borders of a new kind of war. Here's a lesser-known fact that explains a lot about what happened next. When Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, Harry Truman had been vice president for all of 82 days. He had met with Roosevelt exactly twice during that time. He had not been briefed on the Manhattan Project. He did not know the United States was building an atomic bomb. Let that sink in for a second.

The man who would have to decide whether to use the most destructive weapon ever created didn't even know it existed until after he became president. Truman learned about the bomb on April 25th during a briefing from Secretary of War Henry Stimson. Two weeks later, Germany surrendered. and suddenly, the alliance that had defeated Hitler began to fall apart with astonishing speed. The Potsdam Conference in July 1945 was nothing like Yalta. Roosevelt was dead. Churchill would lose his election midway through the conference and be replaced by Clement Attlee.

Only Stalin remained, and he came to Potsdam with very different intentions than he had brought to Yalta. The Red Army now occupied most of Eastern Europe. Stalin had no intention of holding free elections in New York. Poland or Czechoslovakia or anywhere else. Why would he? Those countries were going to be his buffer zone, his insurance against another invasion from the West. The Soviet Union had been invaded twice in 30 years. It would not happen again. At Potsdam, Truman received word that the Trinity test had succeeded. America now possessed the atomic bomb. On July 24th, Truman casually mentioned to Stalin that the United States had developed a new weapon of unusual destructive force.

Stalin's response was equally casual. He said he hoped America would make good use of it against Japan. What Truman didn't know was that Stalin already knew about the bomb. Soviet intelligence had penetrated the Manhattan Project so thoroughly that Stalin probably had better information about the American nuclear program than most members of the U.S. Congress. This is one of the most remarkable espionage stories in history, and most Americans have never heard the full extent of it. The Soviet Union had spies inside the Manhattan Project from the very beginning. Klaus Fuchs, a German-born British physicist who worked at Los Alamos, passed detailed technical information to Soviet intelligence for years. He wasn't the only one.

Theodore Hall, a Harvard-educated physicist who was just 19 years old when he started working on the bomb, also spied for the Soviet. So did David Greenglass, a machinist at Los Alamos, whose sister was Ethel Rosenberg. The Rosenberg case would become the most famous atomic espionage trial in history, but here's something that often gets lost in the debate over whether Julius and Ethel deserve to be executed. The information they passed was almost certainly less important than what Fuchs and Hall provided. Fuchs in particular gave the Soviets detailed designs of the implosion mechanism that made the plutonium bomb work. He estimated his information accelerated the Soviet

nuclear program by at least 18 months, possibly several years. Fuchs was arrested in 1950 and confessed. He served nine years in a British prison and then moved to East Germany, where he continued his scientific career. He died in 1988, having never expressed remorse for what he did. Theodore Hall was never prosecuted. He also moved to Britain. and worked as a biophysicist until his death in 1999. On his deathbed, he told an interviewer that he had no regrets. He believed that giving the Soviets the bomb had prevented an American nuclear monopoly that might have led to a third world war.

Whether Hall was right or wrong about that is one of the great counterfactual questions of the 20th century. But here's what's not debatable. The American nuclear monopoly lasted exactly four years. On August 29th, 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb. American intelligence had predicted the Soviets wouldn't have the bomb until at least 1953. The news sent shockwaves through Washington. The atomic age had truly begun.

And with it, the Cold War moved into a new and more dangerous phase. While Soviet spies were stealing America's nuclear secrets, America was busy stealing something else. Nazi scientists. Operation Paperclip was one of the most morally compromised programs in American history, and most Americans have never heard of it. As World War II ended, American intelligence officers raced through Germany grabbing scientists who had worked for the Third Reich. Rocket scientists, chemical weapons experts, medical researchers who had conducted experiments on concentration camp prisoners, men who had been members of the Nazi party, the SS, even wanted war criminals.

The most famous was Werner von Braun, the father of the V-2 rocket. Von Braun had been an SS officer. The factories where his rockets were built used slave labor from concentration camps. At least 20,000 people died building the V2, more than were killed by the rockets themselves when they fell on London and Antwerp. After the war, von Braun surrendered to American forces. He was cleaned up. His Nazi past minimized or ignored, and he was put to work on America's missile and space programs.

He would eventually become a celebrity, appearing on Disney television shows to explain space travel to American children. He was the driving force behind the Saturn 5 rocket that took Americans to the moon. Von Braun wasn't alone. Operation Paperclip brought approximately 1,600 German scientists and technicians to the United States. Their Nazi party memberships were erased. Their war crimes were ignored. Their expertise was considered too valuable to waste on prosecution. The program was supposed to be secret, but it couldn't stay hidden forever. When journalists and activists exposed the backgrounds of some of these scientists in the 1980s,

the response from the government was essentially a shrug. The Cold War had required difficult choices. American security had to come first. The moral calculus, such as it was, had been made decades earlier. The Soviets did the same thing, of course. They grabbed their own German scientists and put them to work on Soviet missiles and weapons programs. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages.

The difference was that America claimed to be fighting for democracy and human rights. That claim was hard to square with giving refuge to men who had built weapons for Hitler. using slave labor from Auschwitz. On March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill stood before an audience at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, and delivered a speech that would define the emerging conflict. He said that from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,

an iron curtain had descended across the continent. Churchill wasn't the first person to use the phrase iron curtain. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had used it just a year earlier, but Churchill made it immortal. From that moment on, the division of Europe had a name. What was happening behind that curtain was grim. Stalin had promised free elections in Eastern Europe. Instead, he installed communist governments by force.

In Poland, the non-communist opposition was systematically destroyed. In Czechoslovakia, the communists seized power in a coup in February 1948. In Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, The pattern repeated. Democratic politicians were arrested, exiled, or simply disappeared. The methods were brutal, but effective. The Soviets didn't just install puppet governments. They created a new kind of state, one that controlled every aspect of its citizens' lives.

The secret police monitored everyone. Informers were everywhere. Opposition was not merely discouraged, but physically impossible. Try to form an independent political party, and you would feel find yourself in a labor camp if you were lucky enough to avoid a bullet. This was the reality behind the Iron Curtain. And in 1948, that reality came to a city that would become the most important symbol of the Cold War. Berlin in 1948 was still a ruin. Three years after the war, whole neighborhoods remained piles of rubble. Women called tremor-frowen, rubble women,

still worked with their bare hands to clear the debris, brick by brick. The city had been divided into four sectors, American, British, French, and Soviet, and it sat like an island in the middle of the Soviet occupation zone of Germany. That geography would become a problem, a big one. In June 1948, the Western Allies introduced a new currency in their zones of Germany, the Deutsche Mark, to replace the worthless Reichs mark that had been fueling hyperinflation. The Soviets saw this as a hostile act, a step toward the permanent division of Germany that would leave the Western zones economically powerful and aligned against them. Stalin's response was simple. He would starve West Berlin into submission. On June 24th, 1948, the Soviets cut all road,

rail, and water routes into the Western sectors of Berlin. Two and a half million people were suddenly trapped without access to food, fuel, or supplies. The Western Allies had stocks that might last a few weeks. After that, the people of West Berlin would have a choice. starve or accept Soviet rule. Or so Stalin thought. What happened next was one of the most remarkable logistical achievements in military history. The Western Allies decided to supply Berlin by air. Day and night, cargo planes flew into Templehof Airport, landing every few minutes with food, coal, medicine, and everything else a city needs to survive. The Berlin airlift lasted 318 days. American and British pilots flew more than 277,000 flights into the city. At the peak

of the operation, a plane was landing in Berlin every 30 seconds. They delivered more than 2 million tons of supplies. The pilots became heroes to the people of Berlin. One American pilot, Gail Halverson, started dropping candy attached to small parachutes for the children watching the planes come in. He became known as the candy bomber, and soon other pilots were doing the same thing. The Soviets never tried to shoot down the aircraft. That would have meant war, and Stalin wasn't ready for that. In May 1949, the Soviets lifted the blockade. They had lost. West Berlin would remain free, a glittering advertisement for capitalism sitting in the heart of communist East Germany. It would remain that way for the next 40 years, a constant

embarrassment to the Soviet system and a perpetual source of tension. The Berlin blockade changed everything. It convinced the Western powers that the Soviet threat was real and immediate. In April 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was founded. For the first time in its history, the United States committed to the permanent defense of Europe. An attack on any NATO member would be considered an attack on all of them. The battle lines of the Cold War were now drawn. For 12 years after the blockade, Berlin remained a wound in the side of the Soviet Empire. West Berlin was a showcase of capitalism, prosperous and free, sitting in the middle of communist East Germany. It was also an escape hatch. Between 1949 and 1961, approximately

3.5 million East Germans fled to the West through Berlin. That was roughly 20% of the entire East German population. The people fleeing were disproportionate. young, educated, and skilled. Doctors, engineers, teachers, anyone who could see a better future in the West. East Germany was literally bleeding to death. Something had to be done. On August 13, 1961, East German workers began laying barbed wire along the border between East and West Berlin. Within days, the barbed wire was replaced by concrete blocks. The Berlin wall was being built. The wall eventually stretched for over a hundred miles. miles, surrounding West Berlin completely. It wasn't just a wall. It was a system of death.

There were guard towers, searchlights, attack dogs, anti-vehicle trenches, and a strip of raked sand called the death strip, where guards had orders to shoot anyone trying to cross. At least 140 people died trying to cross the Berlin wall. The first was Ida Seekman, a 58-year-old woman who jumped from her apartment window, which faced West Berlin on August 22nd, 1961. She died from her injuries. The last was Chris Geffroy, a 20-year-old who was shot while trying to cross in February 1989, just nine months before the wall came down. Here's a detail that captures the brutality of the wall. Peter Fector was an 18-year-old bricklayer who tried to escape on August 17, 1962. He made it over the first barrier but was shot by

East German guards as he tried to scale the final wall. He fell back into the death strip, wounded but alive, and lay there bleeding for nearly an hour while crowds on both sides watched helplessly. West Berlin police threw bandages over the wall, but they couldn't reach him. East German guards eventually retrieved his body, but by then he was dead. Fector's death caused international outrage. It became a symbol of everything the wall represented, the willingness of the communist system to kill its own people rather than let them leave.

The Cold War wasn't just fought with missiles and spies, it was also fought with jazz musicians, abstract painters, and traveling exhibitions of American Kitchen Appliances. Both superpowers understood that the battle for hearts and minds mattered as much as the battle for territory. The Soviets promoted their system as the champion of the working class, of anti-colonialism, of scientific progress. The Americans promoted theirs as the champion of freedom, opportunity, and consumer abundance. The CIA secretly funded cultural organizations, literary magazines, and arts programs.

The Congress for Cultural Freedom, which operated in 35 countries and published prestigious intellectual journals, was secretly bankrolled by the CIA. So were exhibitions of American abstract expressionist painting, which the agency saw as a symbol of American freedom and creativity. In contrast to the original, socialist realism demanded by Soviet ideology.

Yes, you heard that right. Jackson Pollock's drip paintings were, at least in part, a weapon of the Cold War. The State Department sent jazz musicians on tours of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Lewis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, and Dave Brubeck, all served as cultural ambassadors, performing in countries where America was competing with the Soviet Union for influence. The irony wasn't lost on anyone. Black American musicians were representing a country that still practiced segregation. Some of them, like Lewis Armstrong, spoke out publicly against American racism while serving as American ambassadors.

The most famous cultural confrontation of the Cold War happened in Moscow in 1959. Vice President Richard Nixon was in the Soviet Union for an American exhibition showcasing American products and technology. At a model American Kitchen, Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev got into a heated argument about the merits of their respective systems. The kitchen debate, as it became known, was broadcast on television in both countries. Nixon pointed to American consumer goods as evidence of American superiority. Khrushchev dismissed them as frivolous. Beneath the absurdity of two world leaders arguing about dishwashers was a serious question.

which system could deliver a better life for ordinary people. In 1959, with the Soviet economy still growing and Sputnik fresh in everyone's memory, the answer wasn't obvious. It would take another 30 years for that question to be definitively answered. The Cold War was never really cold. It just wasn't fought directly between the superpowers. Instead, it was fought through proxies, in places most Americans couldn't find on a map,

with weapons supplied by Washington and Moscow, and bodies supplied by the local populations. The first major proxy war erupted on June 25, 1950, when North Korean troops poured across the 38th parallel into South Korea. Korea had been divided almost arbitrarily at the end of World War II. Two young American officers, Dean Rusk and Charles Bones Steel, had been given 30 minutes to find a line that would separate the Soviet and American occupation zones. They chose the 38th parallel because it was a nice round number, and it left Seoul in the American zone. Neither of them knew much about Korean geography or history. They just needed a line.

That line became a border, and like so many borders drawn by distant powers, it became a wound. The North Korean invasion was swift and devastating. Within three days, Seoul had fallen. The South Korean army was shattered. American forces rushed in from Japan, but they were undermined. manned, under-trained, and under-equipped. By August, the defenders had been pushed into a tiny perimeter around the port of Pusan. Then came one of the most audacious gambles in American military history. On September 15, 1950, General Douglas MacArthur launched an amphibious assault

at Incheon, far behind enemy lines. The landing site was considered nearly impossible, with enormous tides, narrow channels, and high seawalls. MacArthur's own staff gave it a one in five thousand chance of success. It worked brilliantly. Within two weeks, Seoul was liberated. The North Korean army was in full retreat. MacArthur, intoxicated by victory, pushed north across the 38th parallel. His goal now was the complete destruction of North Korea

and the reunification of the peninsula under a pro-Western government. What MacArthur didn't know or didn't want to know was that China had drawn a red line. As American forces approached the Yalu River, the border between North Korea and China, Mao Zedong prepared to intervene. The Chinese attack came on November 25, 1950. 200,000 Chinese soldiers came screaming out of the mountains in what remains one of the largest military surprises in modern history. American intelligence had failed catastrophically. MacArthur had assured Truman that Chinese intervention was unlikely. He was wrong. followed was one of the most harrowing retreats in American military history.

The temperature dropped to 35 below zero. Weapons froze. Vehicles wouldn't start. Frostbite casualties outnumbered combat casualties. At the Chosen Reservoir, surrounded and outnumbered, the First Marine Division fought its way out through 17 miles of frozen hell, carrying its wounded and even its dead. By January 1951, the war had settled into a bloody stalemate,

roughly along the 38th parallel, right where it had started. The fighting would continue for two more years, killing millions. The final death toll is still disputed. South Korea lost perhaps 138,000 military dead. North Korea lost somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000. China lost between 180,000 and 400,000. The United States lost 36,574, and civilian deaths. mostly Korean, probably exceeded two million.

Here's something that often gets forgotten. The Korean War never officially ended. The armistice signed on July 27, 1953, was just that, an armistice, a ceasefire. Technically, North and South Korea are still at war. The 38th parallel remains one of the most heavily fortified borders on Earth. American troops are still there, 70 years later, watching and waiting. MacArthur wanted to use nuclear weapons against China. He was serious.

He requested 34 atomic bombs. He wanted to create a radioactive barrier along the Chinese border that would make invasion impossible. Truman refused and eventually fired MacArthur in April 1951, one of the most controversial decisions in American military history. But the fact that nuclear weapons were even discussed tells you something important about this era. Stay tuned for more disturbing history.

We'll be back after. these messages. These weapons existed. They could be used. And there were people in positions of power who thought they should be used. Here's a fact that rarely makes it into the history books. During the Korean War, American forces were responsible for some of the worst massacres of civilians in the conflict.

At No Gun Re in July 1950, American soldiers killed hundreds of South Korean refugees, who they feared might include North Korean infiltrators. Survivors described being strafed by aircraft and shot by soldiers over the course of several days. The U.S. military denied the massacre for nearly 50 years until an associated press investigation in 1999 finally forced an acknowledgement. The Korean War also saw extensive bombing of North Korean cities that killed hundreds of

thousands of civilians. General Curtis LeMay, who commanded the strategic. strategic bombing campaign, later estimated that American bombing killed about 20% of North Korea's population. The North Korean capital of Pyongyang was virtually leveled. This is one reason why hatred of America runs so deep in North Korea to this day. If Korea was the forgotten war, Vietnam was the war that America couldn't forget, no matter how hard it tried. American involvement in Vietnam began so gradually that it's hard to identify a starting point. Military advisors arrived in the 1950s. By 1963, there were 16,000 of them. After the Gulf of Tonkin

incident in August 1964, an alleged attack on American destroyers that may or may not have actually happened, President Lyndon Johnson secured congressional authorization for full-scale military intervention. Let's pause on that Gulf of Tonkin incident, because it deserves more attention than it usually gets. On August 2nd, 1964, North Vietnamese, Vietnamese torpedo boats did attack the USS Maddox in international waters. That much is not disputed. But on August 4th, the Maddox and the USS Turner Joy reported a second attack. This attack formed the basis for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave Johnson the authority

to escalate the war. The problem is that the second attack probably never happened. The radar operators that night were inexperienced. The weather was rough. The ships were jumpy after the real attack, too. days earlier. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara himself later admitted that he had doubts about whether the August 4th attack was real. Declassified documents from the National Security Agency, released in 2005, confirmed that the second attack was essentially a phantom. American

sailors had been shooting at shadows, but by then, a war that would kill 58,000 Americans and somewhere between one and three million Vietnamese had already been authorized based on those shadows. Vietnam was different from Korea in almost every way. There was no clear front line. The enemy didn't wear uniforms. The people America was supposedly helping often didn't want to be helped, at least not by foreigners who couldn't tell a farmer from a gorilla. The South Vietnamese government was corrupt, brutal, and frequently changed through coups that Washington tacitly or openly supported. The war devoured American resources and American lives for a decade. It destroyed Lyndon Johnson's presidency. It tore American society apart. The draft meant that the war

touched every community in America, and the television cameras meant that Americans could watch the horror unfold in their living rooms every night. Here's a lesser-known fact. The United States dropped more bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia than all the bombs dropped by all sides in World War II combined. We dropped more bombs on tiny Laos than we dropped on Nazi Germany. The Ho Chi Men Trail, the supply route that ran through Laos and Cambodia, was subjected to the heaviest aerial bombardment in history. It didn't work. The supplies kept flowing. The bombing of Cambodia was particularly consequential.

Richard Nixon ordered secret B-52 strikes on Cambodia starting in 1969, targeting North Vietnamese sanctuaries. The bombing destabilized Cambodia and contributed to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, the communist movement that would later kill approximately 2 million Cambodians in one of the worst genocides of the 20th century. Agent Orange is another legacy of Vietnam that haunts us still. American forces sprayed approximately 20 million gallons of herbicides, including Agent Orange, over Vietnam to deny cover to the enemy and destroy crops.

The chemicals contain dioxin, one of the most toxic substances known to science. Birth defects and cancers linked to Agent Orange, orange continue to affect both Vietnamese civilians and American veterans to this day. The Ma Lai Massacre in March 1968 exposed the darkest side of the war. American soldiers killed between 347 and 504 unarmed Vietnamese civilians, including women, children, and elderly people. The massacre was covered up for a year until a journalist broke the story. Only one person, Lieutenant William Cali, was convicted. He served three and a half years, of house arrest. The Pentagon Papers, leaked by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971, revealed that the government

had systematically lied to the American public about the war. The papers showed that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations knew the war was unwinnable even as they sent more troops. They showed that the bombing campaigns had been ineffective from the start. They showed that the government's public optimism was a deliberate deception. The war ended on April 30, 1975. when North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon. The last Americans had already evacuated by helicopter from the embassy roof in scenes that became an indelible symbol of defeat. Vietnam was the Cold War's most costly proxy conflict,

but it was far from the only one. While soldiers fought and died in Korea and Vietnam, another kind of war was being waged in the shadows. This was the world of spies, coups, assassinations, and covert operations. And the primary weapon in this war was not a gun or a bomb. It was the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA was created in 1947, born from the Office of Strategic Services that had operated during World War II. Its original mission was intelligence gathering, but very quickly, it became something more. It became an instrument for changing the world

in ways that could never be admitted publicly. In 1951, Iran elected a prime minister, named Mohamed Mossadegh. He was a nationalist, not a communist, but he made a decision that put him in the crosshairs of Western powers. He nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the British-controlled enterprise that had been extracting Iranian oil and sending most of the profits to London. Britain wanted Mossadegh gone, so did the Eisenhower administration, which feared that Iran might drift into the Soviet orbit. In 1953, the CIA and British intelligence launched Operation Ajax, a covert operation to overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran. The operation was run by Kermit Roosevelt Jr., the grandson of Theodore Roosevelt.

The plan involved bribing Iranian military officers, organizing street demonstrations, and spreading propaganda designed to turn the population against Mossadegh. It very nearly failed. At one point, the Shah fled the country, and Mossadegh seemed to have prevailed. But then paid mobs took to the streets. The military turned against Mossada. Within days, he was under arrest, and the Shah was back in power, this time as an absolute monarch dependent on American and British support. The coup was considered a stunning success in Washington and London.

It seemed so easy. Spend a few million dollars, pull the right strings, and you could reshape the political landscape of an entire nation without sending a single soldier. The long-term consequences were catastrophic. The Shah's regime became increasingly repressive. His secret police, Savok, tortured and murdered opponents. Resentment built for 25 years until it exploded in the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

The hostage crisis that followed poisoned American-Iranian relations for generations. The current standoff over Iran's nuclear program can be traced in a direct line back to that coup in 1950. But in 1953, none of that was visible. All that was visible was success, and success bred imitation. A year after Iran, the CIA tried again. This time the target was Guatemala, where President Jacobo Arbens had committed the unforgivable sin of land reform. He had expropriated unused land from the United Fruit Company, a massive American corporation that essentially controlled the Guatemalan economy.

Arbans wasn't a communist. He was a moderate reformer who wanted to modernize Guatemala's feudal agricultural system. But the United Fruit Company had powerful friends in Washington. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA director Alan Dulles had both worked for the law firm that represented United Fruit. The connections were impossible to ignore. Operation P.B. success was the result. The CIA armed and trained a small force of Guatemalan air. exiles, broadcast fake radio reports of a massive invasion, and flew a handful of planes over

Guatemala City to create the impression of overwhelming force. The Guatemalan military, unwilling to die for Arbans, turned against him. He resigned and went into exile. The coup installed a military dictatorship that would last in various forms for decades. Guatemala descended into civil war. Over the next 36 years, approximately 200,000 people would be killed. The majority of them indigenous Mayans massacred by government forces that had been trained and equipped by the United States. A Truth Commission later found that the Guatemalan military had committed genocide. The American role in making that genocide possible is one of the darkest chapters in Cold War history. It wasn't just coups. The CIA also got into the assassination business.

The church committee, a Senate investigation in 1975, revealed that the agency had plotted to kill foreign leaders, including Patrice Lumumba of Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, and most famously, Fidel Castro. The plots against Castro bordered on the absurd, exploding cigars, poison pens, a wet suit contaminated with fungus, seashells rigged with explosives that would detonate when Castro went diving. There were at least eight serious assassination plots, possibly many more. None of them worked. Castro would outlive ten American presidents and die in his bed at the age of 90. Here's something that doesn't get talked about enough. The CIA wasn't just trying to kill

foreign leaders. It was also conducting experiments on American citizens. Project M.K. Ultra, which ran from 1953 to 1973, was the agency's attempt to develop mind. control techniques. The project involved experiments with LSD, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and psychological torture. Many of the subjects didn't know they were being experimented on. CIA operatives slipped LSD into the drinks of unsuspecting Americans to see how they would react. At least one man, Frank Olson, died under suspicious circumstances after being dosed with LSD without his knowledge. His family believes he was murdered because he knew too much about the program's biological weapons research. When M.K. Ultra was finally exposed in the 1970s, CIA director

Richard Helms had already ordered most of the program's records destroyed. We'll never know the full extent of what was done in the name of national security. This one is going to sound like a conspiracy theory, but it's documented fact. In 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff presented President Kennedy with Operation Northwoods, a proposal for false flag operations that would justify an American invasion of Cuba. The plan included staging terrorist attacks on American soil, sinking boats of Cuban refugees, hijacking planes, and even orchestrating a fake attack on the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay. American assets would commit acts of terrorism against American citizens, and Cuba would be blamed. Let me repeat that.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest-ranking military officers in the United States, proposed that America-stage terrorist attacks against its own people to justify a war. Kennedy rejected the plan. He was apparently appalled by it. But the fact that it reached his desk at all, that the nation's top military leaders thought this was a reasonable proposal, tells you something about the mindset of the Cold War. The enemy was so dangerous, the stakes were so high,

that almost anything could be justified. Operation Northwoods remained classified for decades. It was only released in 1997 as part of a review of Kennedy assassination records. When people today dismiss concerns about government overreach as paranoid conspiracy theories, it's worth remembering that in 1962, America's top generals proposed staging terrorist attacks against American citizens. Sometimes the conspiracy theories turn out to be true. October 1962.

The moment when the Cold War came closest to becoming a hot one. The Cuban Missile Crisis is the most studied 13 days in modern history. Every decision, every conversation, every moment has been analyzed and re-analyzed. We have transcripts of the secret White House meetings. We have testimony from participants on both sides. And yet, even now, the more you learn about what happened, the more terrifying it becomes. The crisis began on October 16, 1962, when President John F. Kennedy was shown photographs taken by a U-2 spy plane over Cuba.

The photographs showed something that should not have been there, medium-range ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads to most major American cities. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Nikita Khrushchev, who had succeeded Stalin as Soviet leader, had made a gamble. He would place nuclear missiles in Cuba just 90 miles from American shores. The missiles would deter any future American attempts to invade Cuba, which had become a Soviet ally after Castro's revolution.

They would also partially redress the massive imbalance in nuclear forces. The United States had missiles in Turkey, right on the Soviet border. Now the Soviets would have missiles next to America. Kennedy assembled a group of advisors called the Executive Committee, or XCOM. For 13 days, they debated what to do. The options ranged from doing nothing to launching a full-scale invasion of Cuba. In between were air strikes against the missile sites and a naval blockade, which Kennedy ultimately chose, though he called it a quarantine to avoid the legal implications of blockade.

But the American decision makers didn't know almost got everyone killed. They didn't know that in addition to the medium-range missiles, there were already tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba. These were battlefield nukes, designed to be used against an invading force. If America had launched the invasion that many of Kennedy's advisors wanted, Soviet commanders in Cuba had authorization to use these weapons. An American invasion force might have been vaporized on the beaches. They also didn't know about B-59.

B-59 was a Soviet submarine lurking near the quarantine line. It was armed with a nuclear torpedo. On October 27, the most dangerous day of the crisis, American destroyers detected the submarine and began dropping practice depth charges to force it to surface. Inside B-59, conditions were hellish. The air conditioning had failed.

Temperatures exceeded 100 degrees. Carbon dioxide levels were rising. The crew was exhausted and disoriented, and they had no way to communicate with Moscow. For all they knew, World War III had already begun. The submarine's captain, Valentin Savitsky, wanted to fire the nuclear torpedo. He believed they were under attack. The political officer aboard agreed, under normal Soviet naval procedures. That would have been enough.

But B-59 wasn't a normal submarine. By sheer accident, it was also carrying Vasili Arkapov, the commander of the entire submarine flotilla. Archipov had the authority to veto the launch, and he refused. Archipov argued that they should surface and await orders. He didn't know what was happening on the surface. He wouldn't start a nuclear war based on assumptions. After a heated argument in the sweltering control room,

the captain backed down. B-59 surfaced. The nuclear torpedo stayed in its tube. If Vassili Archipov had not been on that submarine, If he had been assigned to any of the other boats in the flotilla, we might not be here to tell this story. The crisis ended on October 28th. Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba.

In exchange, Kennedy publicly pledged not to invade Cuba and secretly agreed to remove American missiles from Turkey. Both leaders had looked into the abyss and stepped back. A direct communication line, the famous hotline, was established between Washington and Moscow, so that in future crises, the leaders could talk directly instead of relying on slow diplomatic channels. The limited test ban treaty,

prohibiting nuclear tests in the atmosphere, was signed the following year. Here's something else that wasn't known until years later. Kennedy had secretly agreed to remove American Jupiter missiles from Turkey as part of the deal. This was kept secret because Kennedy didn't want to appear weak or like he was giving in to Soviet blackmail. The Soviets got a significant,

concession, but they agreed to keep quiet about it. There's another near miss from the Cuban missile crisis that deserves attention. On October 27th, the same day Arkapov prevented the torpedo launch, an American U-2 spy plane accidentally strayed into Soviet airspace over Siberia. Soviet mig fighters scrambled to intercept it. American fighter jets, armed with nuclear air-to-air missiles, took off from Alaska to escort the U-2 home. At the height of the Cuban missile crisis, with both sides on hair-trigger alert, American planes armed with nuclear weapons were flying toward Soviet interceptors over the Arctic. One nervous pilot, one itchy trigger finger, and the situation could have spiraled out of control. When Kennedy learned about the U-2 incident,

he reportedly said, there is always some son of a bitch who doesn't get the word. The comment captures the terrifying reality of the crisis, even with the best intentions, even with the most careful management, things can go wrong. But the lesson that both sides should have learned, the lesson that we were all very nearly killed by a combination of miscalculation, miscommunication, and bad luck, that lesson was quickly forgotten. After the Cuban missile crisis, you might think the superpowers would have decided that maybe, just maybe, they had enough nuclear weapons. You would be wrong. The arms race actually accelerated after Cuba. Both sides built more missiles, more bombers, more submarines. They developed multiple independently targetable

re-entry vehicles, or Mar V's, which allowed a single missile to carry multiple warheads aimed at different targets. They built ICBMs that could reach anywhere on Earth in 30 minutes. They built submarine-launched missiles that could be fired from underwater, impossible to find and impossible to stop. By the 1980s, the United States and the Soviet Union had a combined total of approximately 70,000 nuclear warheads. That's not a typo. 70,000 nuclear weapons. Enough to destroy human civilization many times over.

Enough to render the earth uninhabitable. The logic of the arms race was called mutual assured destruction, appropriately abbreviated as mad. The idea was that if both sides had enough nuclear weapons to completely destroy the other, even after absorbing a first strike, then neither side would ever dare to attack. attack. Peace through terror. Here's a fact that should keep you up at night. The Soviets built

a system called Perimeter, known in the West as dead hand. It was an automated nuclear retaliation system. If Soviet leadership was wiped out in a first strike, Perimeter would automatically launch a retaliatory strike. The system is believed to still be operational today. The arms race consumed vast resources on both sides. The United States' States spent trillions of dollars on nuclear weapons and delivery systems. The Soviet Union spent an even larger percentage of its smaller economy. Some historians argue that this military spending helped bankrupt the Soviet system. Others argue that the money would have been better spent on almost anything else. What's certain is that both sides built weapons they could never use.

The nuclear arsenals were so large that any actual nuclear war would have been civilizational suicide. The weapons existed to prevent themselves from being used. It was a strange kind of logic, and it worked, but just barely, and with far more close calls than most people realize. We've already talked about Stanislav Petrov in 1983. He wasn't alone. The Cold War was full of moments when the world came terrifyingly close to nuclear war. In January 1961, a B-52 bomber carrying two hydrogen bombs broke apart over North Carolina. Carolina. One of the bombs went through several stages of its arming sequence. A single low voltage switch was all that prevented a four megaton nuclear explosion over Goldsboro. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara later said that the bomb was just one switch away from detonating.

In 1979, NORAD's computers indicated that the Soviet Union had launched a full-scale nuclear attack. Bombers were scrambled. The president's airborne command post was prepared for takeoff. Then someone realized that a training tape simulating a Soviet attack had been accidentally loaded into the live system. It was a false alarm. But for several terrifying minutes, American commanders believed World War III had begun. In November 1983, just two months after the Petrov incident, NATO conducted a military exercise called Abel Archer. It was designed to practice the procedures for using nuclear weapons. The Soviets already paranoid after the Korean Airlines shoot down.

earlier that year convinced themselves that Abel Archer was cover for an actual first strike Soviet forces went on high alert nuclear-capable aircraft were armed and ready the situation was so dangerous that a KGB defector later reported that the Soviets had genuinely believed they were about to be attacked only when the exercise ended without incident did the tension begin to ease these incidents didn't become public knowledge until years or decades later during the Cold War, neither side wanted to admit how close they had come to disaster. The illusion of control had to be maintained, even when there was very little control at all. Not everything

about the Cold War was grim. Out of the fear and competition came one of humanity's greatest achievements, the exploration of space. The space race began on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. It was a source. small metal sphere, not much bigger than a beach ball that did nothing but emit radio beeps. But those beeps changed everything. Americans were shocked. The Soviets, whom they had assumed were technologically backward, had beaten them into space. If the Soviets could put a satellite in orbit, they could put a nuclear warhead there too. The psychological impact was enormous. The American response was panicked and often embarrassing. The first American attempt to launch a satellite in December

1957, exploded on the launch pad in front of television cameras. Newspapers called it flopnik and kaputnik. The humiliation was complete. The Soviets kept winning. They sent the first living creature into orbit, a dog named Lyca. They sent the first probe to the moon. And on April 12th, 1961, they sent the first human being into space. Yuri Gagarin was a 27-year-old test pilot who became overnight, the most famous person.

on Earth. His single orbit of the planet lasted 108 minutes and made him an international hero. Gagarin's flight demonstrated that humans could survive in space. It also demonstrated once again that the Soviets were winning. President Kennedy needed a way to change the narrative. On May 25, 1961, just six weeks after Gagarin's flight, Kennedy stood before Congress and made one of the most audacious promises in history. He said that America should be able to be in history. He said that America should commit itself to landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth before the end of the decade. At that point, the total time Americans had spent in space was 15 minutes. Alan Shepard had just completed a suborbital flight. The idea that the United States

could go from that to landing on the moon in less than nine years seemed absurd. But they did it. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon while Michael Collins orbited above. Armstrong's words as he stepped onto the lunar surface, that one small step for man became perhaps the most famous sentence of the 20th century. Here's something that's often overlooked. The technology that took men to the moon was originally developed to deliver nuclear weapons. The Saturn 5 rocket that launched Apollo 11 was a direct descendant of the missiles designed to carry warheads across continents. The German scientists who developed the V2 rocket for Hitler, including Werner von Braun, had been brought to America after the war and put to work

on the space program. The space race was born from military competition, staffed in part by former Nazis, and funded because beating the Soviets mattered more than almost anything else. And yet, it produced genuine wonder. It expanded human horizons. It gave us photographs of Earth from space that changed how we saw ourselves. The Cold War could inspire greatness even as it threatened annihilation. That paradox lies at the heart of the entire era. Here's another lesser-known story from the space race. Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, almost didn't make it back. During re-entry, the cables connecting his descent module to the instrument module failed to separate properly. The spacecraft tumbled wildly as it plunged

through the atmosphere, subjecting Gagarin to extreme forces. He reportedly saw flames through his window and thought he might be about to die. The cables eventually burned through from the heat of re-entry, and the modules separated. Gagarin ejected from the capsule and parachuted safely to the ground in a farmer's field. The first human being to orbit the earth landed in a potato patch, startling a woman and her granddaughter who thought they were seeing an alien. The Soviets kept the technical problem secret for decades. Gagarin was a hero, and heroes didn't have near-death experiences caused by equipment failures. Gagarin would never go to space again.

He died in 1968 when his MIG-15 training jet crashed under circumstances that have never been fully explained. The first human in space was dead at 34. The space race had casualties. Three American astronauts, Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee, died in a fire during a launch pad test in January, 1967. The Apollo one disaster nearly derailed the entire moon program. Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Kamarov died when his Soyuz won spacecraft's parachute failed during re-entry in April 1967.

According to some accounts, Kamarov knew the spacecraft was unsafe but flew anyway because the alternative was to let his backup, Yuri Gagarin, die in his place. The race to the moon was a competition between two nations willing to risk men's lives for national prestige. That it succeeded, that American astronauts walked on the moon and returned safely, was a triumph. That it was driven by fear and rivalry rather than pure scientific curiosity was a reflection of the era that produced it. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. The Cold War wasn't just fought overseas. It transformed American society in ways that are still with us today. The most obvious manifestation was the Red Scare. From the late 1940s through the mid-1950s,

fear of communist infiltration gripped the nation. The House Un-American Activities Committee investigated suspected communists in Hollywood, academia, and government. Thousands of Americans lost their jobs, were blacklisted, or had their reputations destroyed based on accusations that were often groundless. The face of this era was Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. From 1950 to 1954, McCarthy claimed to have evidence of communist infiltrators at the highest levels of the American government. He never produced this evidence. His

accusations were reckless, often contradictory, and frequently false. But for four years, he terrified Washington. McCarthy's rise began on February 9, 1950, when he gave a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, claiming to have a list of 205 known communists. working in the State Department. The number changed every time he repeated the claim, sometimes 205, sometimes 57, sometimes 81. He never showed anyone the list. He never identified a single genuine Soviet agent.

But the charges were so explosive and the fear of communist infiltration so real that no one wanted to be seen defending the people McCarthy attacked. The irony is that there were actual Soviet spies in the American government. The Venona Project, a secret program that decrypted Soviet communications, had identified several. But McCarthy's wild accusations made it harder, not easier, to deal with the real threat. His shotgun approach, accusing everyone he disliked of being a communist, obscured the genuine cases of espionage. Thousands of Americans lost their jobs during the McCarthy era.

The Hollywood blacklist destroyed careers. actors, writers, and directors who refused to name names before congressional committees found themselves unemployable. Some like the Hollywood Ten, went to prison for contempt of Congress. Others fled to Europe to continue working. Still others committed suicide. The loyalty oath became ubiquitous. Government employees, teachers, even workers at private companies were required to swear they were not

communists and had never been communists. Refusing to sign could mean, losing your job. Universities fired tenured professors. Libraries removed books deemed subversive. The atmosphere was poisonous. McCarthy's downfall came during the Army McCarthy hearings in 1954 when Army lawyer Joseph Welch asked him the question that captured the nation's growing disgust. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency? McCarthy was censured by the Senate later that year. He died in 1957, largely discredited,

his liver destroyed by alcoholism. But McCarthyism left scars. The term itself became shorthand for baseless accusations and guilt by association. And the apparatus of domestic surveillance that was built during this era would long outlast McCarthy himself. J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI for 48 years, from 1924 until his death in 1972. During the Cold War, he transformed the Bureau

into a domestic intelligence agency that monitored, infiltrated, and sabotaged organizations he deemed subversive. Cointel Pro, the counterintelligence program, was Hoover's weapon of choice. Launched in 1956, Cointel Pro targeted the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party,

the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Panther Party, and the civil rights movement. The FBI used wiretaps, informants, forged documents, and psychological warfare to disrupt these organizations. The most infamous target was Martin Luther King, Jr. Hoover despised King and was convinced wrongly that he was a communist agent.

The FBI bugged King's hotel rooms, recorded his private conversations, and sent him an anonymous letter suggesting he commit suicide. The letter arrived shortly before, King was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Cointel Pro wasn't revealed to the public until 1971, when a group of activists broke into an FBI office in Pennsylvania and stole files that documented the program. The Church Committee investigation in 1975 exposed the full extent of the FBI's activities.

But by then, Hoover was dead, and the damage had been done. Here's a disturbing fact that's often forgotten. During the Cold War, the United States government conducted radiation experiments on American citizens without their knowledge or consent. From the 1940s through the 1970s, prisoners, hospital patients, and even pregnant women, were exposed to radiation to study its effects. The experiments were part of the effort to understand nuclear warfare and its aftermath. They were also a profound betrayal of the people who trusted their government and their doctors. The full scope of these experiments wasn't revealed until the 1990s, when the Clinton administration launched an investigation. The Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments documented hundreds of experiments involving thousands of subjects.

Most of the victims were never told what had been done to them. If you grew up in America during the Cold War, you remember the drills. You remember hiding under your desk, covering your head, waiting for the all-clear signal. You remember being told that this would somehow protect you from nuclear war. The duck and cover campaign began in 1951 with an animated film featuring Burt the Turtle. Burt demonstrated the proper response to a nuclear attack. Duck under something sturdy and cover your head. The film was shown in schools across America for decades.

Was it useless? Not entirely. If you were far enough from the blast, ducking and covering might actually protect you from flying glass and debris. But if you were close enough to see the flash, you were probably already dead. The gap between the reassuring message and the terrifying reality was enormous. The government also encouraged Americans to build fallout shelters in their backyards. These were supposed to protect families from radioactive fallout in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. Some people took this seriously. They stocked their shelters with canned food, water and guns to keep out desperate neighbors.

The ethical questions were troubling. If your neighbor didn't have a shelter, were you obligated to let them in? What if letting them in meant your own family would run out of supplies? Religious leaders debated whether it was morally acceptable to shoot your neighbor to protect your family's survival. These were the questions that Cold War America wrestled with. The psychological toll of growing up under the shadow of nuclear annihilation is hard to measure. For 45 years, Americans lived with the knowledge that everything they knew and loved

could be destroyed in an afternoon. Some people pushed the fear to the background and went on with their lives. Others were shaped by it in ways they might not have even recognized. While Europe remained frozen along the Iron Curtain, the real fighting of the Cold War happened in what was then called the Third World, Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East. These were the places where the superpowers competed for influence, often with catastrophic results for the people who lived there. When the Belgian Congo gained independence in 1960, Patrice Lumumba became its first democratically elected prime minister.

He was young, charismatic, and nationalist. He wanted Congo's vast mineral wealth to benefit Congolese people rather than foreign corporations. That made him a target. The CIA viewed Lumumba as a potential. potential Soviet ally. Director Alan Dulles sent a cable authorizing his assassination. CIA scientists prepared a poison that was to be placed in Lumumba's toothpaste. In the end, the poison wasn't used. Instead, Lumumba was captured by Congolese forces loyal to his rival, Joseph Mobutu, and turned over to his enemies in Katanga province. On January 17, 1961,

Lumumba was beaten, tortured, and executed. Belgian officers were present. His body was dissolved in acid to prevent it from becoming a martyr's shrine. He was 35 years old. Mobutu would go on to rule Congo, which he renamed Zaire, for 32 years. His regime was spectacularly corrupt. He stole billions while his people starved. And throughout his reign, he enjoyed American support because he was anti-communist.

In 1970, Chile elected Salvador Allende, a Marxist who won through peaceful democratic means. He was the first socialist to be elected president of a Latin American country in a free election. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were not going to accept this. Nixon ordered the CIA to make the Chilean economy scream. Economic pressure was applied. Opposition groups were funded. Military officers were courted. On September 11, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet led a military coup against Allende.

The presidential palace was bombed. Allende died inside, apparently by his own hand, though questions about his death persist. Thousands of Chileans were arrested, tortured, and killed in the days that followed. Many were taken to the national stadium, which became an improvised prison camp. Pinochet would rule Chile for 17 years. His regime killed at least 3,200 people and tortured tens of thousands more. The United States supported him throughout. Declassified documents have confirmed the extent of American involvement.

Kissinger himself acknowledged that the United States helped create the conditions for the coup, though he maintained that America did not directly participate in it. The semantic distinction was cold comfort to Alinda's widow and the families of the disappeared. In December 1979, Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan to prop up a communist government that was losing a civil war against Islamic insurgents. It was supposed to be a quick operation. It lasted 10 years and became the Soviet Union's Vietnam. The United States saw an opportunity.

Through the CIA, America funneled weapons, money, and training to the Afghan Mujahideen, the Islamic fighters battling the Soviets. The operation, codenamed Operation Cyclone, became the largest covert operation in CIA history. The key weapon was the Stinger missile, a portable surface-to-air missile that allowed guerrilla fighters to shoot down Soviet helicopters. The Stinger changed the war. Soviet air power had been crucial to their strategy. Without it, they were fighting blind. The Soviets withdrew in 1989, having lost approximately 15,000 soldiers.

Afghan casualties were catastrophic, somewhere between one and two million people dead. Millions more became refugees. The American intervention succeeded in bleeding the Soviet Union. But the aftermath was complicated, to put it mildly. Many of the fighters America had supported went on to form or join organizations that would later target the United States. The Taliban, which would shelter Osama bin Laden, emerged from the chaos of post-Soviet Afghanistan. The weapons America had provided ended up in hands America had never intended.

This is one of the recurring patterns of Cold War intervention. Actions taken for short-term advantage created long-term consequences that proved devastating. The Cold War's end didn't end those consequences. We're still living with them today. One of the largest mass killings of the 20th century happened with American support, and most Americans have never heard of it. In 1965, Indonesia was led by Sukarno, a nationalist who had been flirting with the powerful Indonesian Communist Party, the PKK.

On September 30th, a group of military officers attempted a coup, killing six army generals. The army, led by General Suharto, blamed the coup on the PKK, and launched a campaign of extermination. Over the next year, between 500,000 and 1 million Indonesians were killed. Communist Party members suspected sympathizers, ethnic Chinese, and anyone else deemed a threat were rounded up and slaughtered. The army organized death squads, civilian militias, often Islamic youth groups, did much of the killing. Rivers ran red with blood, bodies clogged waterways. Mass graves appeared across the archipelago.

The United States knew what was happening and supported it. The CIA provided the Indonesian Army with lists of suspect. communists. American officials cheered the killings as a victory against communism. Time magazine called it the best news for the West in Asia in years. Suharto ruled Indonesia for the next 32 years, one of the longest serving dictators of the Cold War era. He was a reliable American ally. The massacre that brought him to power was rarely mentioned in polite company. When Portugal's African colonies gained independence in 1975, Angola descended into civil war. The Soviet Union and Cuba backed the MPLA, the Marxist faction that controlled

the capital. The United States and apartheid South Africa backed Unita, a rebel movement led by Jonas Savimbi. The war lasted 27 years. It killed somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million people. Cuba sent 50,000 troops, the largest Cuban military deployment overseas. South Africa invaded multiple times. American weapons flowed to Unita through the CIA. Jonas Savimbi was a brutal warlord who used child soldiers and diamond smuggling to fund his insurgency. But because he was fighting communists, America supported him. Ronald Reagan called him a freedom fighter. Savimbi was received at the White House. The Cold War ended, but the Angolan Civil War continued until 2002, when Savimbi was killed in a firefight with government forces.

Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. By then, the original ideological justification for the war had long since evaporated. It had become a war about power, resources, and revenge. Angola, Indonesia, Guatemala, Chile, Congo. These are just some of the places where the Cold War was fought with real bullets and real bodies.

The superpowers kept their own territories safe by exporting violence to the developing world. The people who lived in those countries paid the price. By the early 1980s, the Cold War seemed frozen in place. The superpowers had been staring at each other across the iron curtain for nearly 40 years. The Berlin Wall built in 1961 to stop the flow of East Germans fleeing to the west had become a permanent fixture of European geography. The nuclear arsenals had grown to obscene proportions. Nothing ever seemed to change.

And then, in the space of just a few years, everything changed. Ronald Reagan came to the presidency in 1981 as a fierce cold warrior. He called the Soviet Union an evil empire. He launched the largest peacetime military buildup in American history. He proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative, a space-based missile defense system that critics derided as starry. wars. Reagan's rhetoric was aggressive, but his ultimate goal was peace. He believed that America could negotiate from strength, that the way to end the Cold War was to win it so decisively

that the Soviets would have no choice but to give up. In 1985, he found a negotiating partner. Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union, and he was unlike any Soviet leader who had come before. He was young at 54, compared to the gerontocracy that had preceded him. He was reform-minded, and he understood that the Soviet system was failing. Gorbachev introduced two concepts that would define his rule. Glasnost, meaning openness, and perestroika, meaning restructuring. He wanted to reform the Soviet system, to make it more efficient and less repressive, without abandoning socialism. He believed the system could be saved if it could be changed. Reagan and Gorbachev met four times. Their relationship was complicated,

sometimes contentious, but they developed a genuine rapport. At their summit in Reykjavik in 1986, they came remarkably close to agreeing to eliminate all nuclear weapons. The deal fell apart over Reagan's refusal to abandon the Strategic Defense Initiative, but the fact that they came so close was extraordinary. In 1987, they signed the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, eliminating an entire class of nuclear weapons. It was the first treaty that actually reduced the nuclear arsenals rather than just limiting their growth. Here's something that's often forgotten. Reagan almost died before any of this could happen. On March 30th, 1981, just 69 days into his presidency, a mentally disturbed young man named

John Hinkley Jr. shot Reagan outside a Washington hotel. The bullet came within an inch of Reagan's heart. He survived, barely, and joked with his surgeons that he, he hoped they were Republicans. The shooting had a profound effect on Reagan. He became more religious, more convinced that he had been spared for a purpose. Some historians believe this contributed to his willingness to negotiate with Gorbachev later in his presidency. A man who had looked death in the face might be more inclined to seek peace than one who hadn't. The Strategic Defense Initiative, meanwhile, remains controversial. Many scientists believed it was technologically impossible, at least with 1980s technology. The Soviets, however, took it seriously. They feared that even a partially

effective missile defense could upset the balance of mutual assured destruction. Whether SDI actually contributed to the Soviet collapse or was just an expensive bluff remains debated. While Reagan and Gorbachev negotiated, the Soviet empire was beginning to crumble. Poland's solidarity movement led by electrician Lech Walisa challenged communist rule and eventually won, elections. Hungary began dismantling its border fence with Austria. Citizens of East Germany began flooding west through the newly opened Hungarian border. The pressure on the Berlin wall was becoming unsustainable. On November 9th, 1989, an East German official named Gunter Shabowski gave a press conference announcing new travel regulations. When asked when

the new rules would take effect, Shabowski, who hadn't been fully briefed, shrugged and said immediately, without delay. It was a mistake. The regulations were supposed to take effect the next day, with orderly processing at the border. But Shabowski's words were broadcast live on television. East Berliners heard them and rushed to the checkpoints. The guards overwhelmed and without clear orders eventually just opened the gates. That night, thousands of people streamed across the border. They danced on the wall. They attacked it with hammers and picks. Strangers embraced. Champagne flowed. It was one of those rare moments when history pivots visibly,

when you can see the world changing in real time. The wall didn't fall because of any grand strategy or decisive battle. It fell because of a bureaucrat's mistake and a population that had simply had enough. Sometimes that's how history works. The fall of the Berlin Wall triggered a chain reaction. Within two years, every communist government in Eastern Europe had fallen. The Warsaw Pact, resolved. The Soviet Union itself began to fragment as its constituent republics declared independence.

Gorbachev tried desperately to hold the union together. In August 1991, communist hardliners launched a coup against him, trying to reverse the reforms and restore the old order. The coup failed, defeated by popular resistance led by Boris Yeltsin, who famously stood on a tank outside the Russian Parliament building and called for defiance. The failed coup destroyed what remained of the Communist Party's legitimacy. One by one, the Soviet republics declared independence. On December 25th, 1991, Gorbachev resigned as president of a country that was ceasing to exist. The Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time. The Russian tricolor rose in its place. The Cold War was over. The Soviet Union, which had seemed eternal, had vanished almost

overnight. The ideological struggle that had defined the second half of the 20th century had ended with the complete victory of one side, or so it seemed. Here's a sobering fact that's often overlooked in the triumphalist narratives of the Cold War's end. When the Soviet Union collapsed, it left behind approximately 27,000 nuclear weapons spread across four newly independent countries, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. The task of securing the these weapons and preventing them from falling into the wrong hands became one of the most urgent challenges of the 1990s. The Nunn Lugar program, also known as cooperative threat reduction, spent billions of American dollars helping former Soviet states dismantle nuclear weapons,

secure nuclear materials, and find new employment for weapon scientists who might otherwise have sold their expertise to the highest bidder. It was one of the most successful foreign policy initiatives in American history, and almost nobody knows about it. The collapse of the Soviet Union was also a human catastrophe for millions of people. The Russian economy contracted by 40% in the 1990s. Life expectancy for Russian men fell from 64 years to 57. Crime rate soared, oligarchs looted state assets. The social safety net evaporated. For many Russians, the 1990s were a time of poverty, humiliation, and chaos. This is the context from which Vladimir Putin emerged. He promised to restore Russian greatness after what he saw as the humiliation of the Soviet

collapse. He called that collapse the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. Understanding Putin requires understanding how traumatic the end of the Cold War was for millions of Russians, even if it was a victory for the West. The Cold War ended more than 30 years ago, But its consequences are still with us. The nuclear weapons are still with us. Despite significant reductions, the United States and Russia still possess thousands of nuclear warheads, enough to destroy civilization many times over.

Other countries have joined the nuclear club. The risk of nuclear war, while lower than during the Cold War's darkest moments, has never gone away. The conflicts are still with us. Korea remains divided along the same line where the armistice was signed in 1953. The Middle East still bears the scars of Cold War interventions.

Afghanistan, where America armed the Mujahideen, became America's longest war. The blowback from Cold War decisions continues to shape global politics. The mistrust is still with us. Russia, under Vladimir Putin, has grown increasingly hostile to the West. NATO has expanded to include former Soviet republics, something Russia views, as a betrayal of promises allegedly made during German reunification.

The invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has brought great power conflict back to Europe in a way that seemed unthinkable just a few years ago. And the questions are still with us. Was the Cold War necessary? Could it have been avoided? Were the costs, the trillions of dollars, the millions of lives, the constant fear, worth it? Did America's actions during the Cold War make the world safer,

or more dangerous. These are questions that historians will debate for centuries. What we can say with certainty is this. For 45 years, humanity lived with the knowledge that it could destroy itself. The weapons existed. The plans existed. The mistakes almost happened more than once. That we survived was partly due to wise leadership, partly due to good luck,

and partly due to individuals like Stanislav Petrov and Vasili Archipov, who, In moments of crisis, chose not to fire. The Cold War was a near-death experience for human civilization. We came through it, but we should never forget how close we came to not coming through it at all. Stanislav Petrov died in 2017, largely unknown outside of circles that study nuclear history. He never received a medal from the Russian government. He never got rich. He lived out his days in a small apartment in a town outside Moscow,

visited occasionally by journalists and historians who wanted to thank the man who saved the world. In one interview, Petrov was asked if he considered himself a hero. He said no. He was just doing his job. He had been trained to think, and on that night in 1983, thinking was what saved us all. The Cold War is a reminder of what happens when nations stop trusting each other, when fear becomes the basis for policy, when the logic of deterrence leads to the construction of weapons that can never be used without destroying everything. It's a reminder of the costs of ideological conflict and the dangers of believing that your

enemy is so evil that any means are justified in fighting them. But it's also a reminder that even in the darkest times, individuals can make a difference, that the arc of history isn't fixed, that the worst doesn't have to happen. The Cold War lasted 45 years. In the end, what mattered most wasn't the missiles or the spies or the proxy wars. What mattered was that when the moment of maximum danger arrived, there were people who chose not to push the button. That's a lesson worth remembering. You're high, I'm seeking, watch out, I'm coming for you. Ooh, you better run now.

The moon is out now. Ooh, you're gonna hear my house. Oh Oh Oh Blood skies Red eyes Can't get enough for it

My dream is Your nightmare You'll see me Coming for you I'm coming for you I'm coming for Ooh, you better run now. Ooh, for no result now.

Ooh, you're gonna hear my heart. Oh, ho. Oh, ho. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh.

Oh. Oh, oh. Ooh, you better run now. Ooh, for the morning's out now. Ooh, you're gonna hear my hell. Thank you.