Here are 25 Interesting Facts About Cold War.
1-5 Interesting Facts About Cold War
1. Russia secretly had maps so detailed of the Canadian Arctic during the Cold-War that other ships even now use them over official maps. – Source
2. In the 1930’s starlet, Hedy Lamarr invented a new technology to stop Nazi’s from jamming Navy torpedoes, but the idea was rejected until 1962 and implemented during the Cold War. Her frequency hopping technology is also the basis for modern Bluetooth. – Source
3. During the Cold War, the USSR was able to tell a Soviet passport was a forged and fake because the staples in real passports would corrode due to the poor quality of metal. – Source
4. The USSR and the USA were originally in talks to jointly go into space together during the Cold War. The USSR almost accepted but then President Kennedy was assassinated and the Soviets didn’t trust Vice President Johnson, so the plan fell through. – Source
5. During the Cold War, the C.I.A. made a pornographic video featuring a lookalike of the Indonesian President in an attempt to discredit him, including designing a full-face mask resembling the President. – Source
6-10 Interesting Facts About Cold War
6. During the Cold War, USSR thought that the heavily trafficked building in the center courtyard of the Pentagon was a top-secret meeting room and pointed nukes at it. It was a hot dog stand. – Source
7. Congress added the “Under God” phrase to the Pledge of Allegiance during the Cold War. This symbolized the resistance to communists, who were atheists. – Source
8. During the Cold War, USA considered airdropping enormous condoms labeled “Medium” into USSR, to demoralize them against an anatomically superior American Army. – Source
9. The US Air Force developed a top-secret plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon as a display of military might at the height of the Cold War. The mathematical modeling for the explosion was done by Carl Sagan. – Source
10. The CIA secretly spiked the bread from a bakery in the French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit with enormous quantities of LSD as part of its cold war mind-control experiments. – Source
11-15 Interesting Facts About Cold War
11. During the Cold War, America used bears to test their ejector seats in supersonic jets. – Source
12. The Canadian government forcibly relocated Inuit to the most northern parts of the country during the Cold War in order to assert its sovereignty in the arctic. – Source
13. The term “Cold War” was first invented by George Orwell, author of the book satirizing Stalinism, “Animal Farm”. – Source
14. The term “Third World Country” does not mean poor, it refers to a country which was not aligned with either America/First World or Soviet/Second World during the Cold War. – Source
15. During the cold war, America sent Romania 20,000 bibles, which the Romanians subsequently turned into toilet paper because they had a shortage. – Source
16-20 Interesting Facts About Cold War
16. During the Cold War, Nikita Khrushchev said to Mao Zedong that “Berlin is the testicles of the West. Every time I want to make the West scream, I squeeze on Berlin.” – Source
17. In 1983, amidst the cold war, the world was a ‘Hairsbreadth from Utter Destruction’, but nuclear apocalypse was prevented by a single Russian Colonel. – Source
18. During the Cold War, the CIA launched Operation Kitty in which cats were surgically implanted with bugging devices to eavesdrop on Soviet conversations, after all, who would suspect a cat of wearing a wire. The 1st mission failed after the cat was run over and the $15million operation was dropped. – Source
19. During the Cold War, an 18-year-old German aviator (with only 50 hours’ worth of flying experience) illegally flew through the Soviet airspace, bypassed their air defenses and landed in Red Square, all in order to reduce tensions between the USA and USSR. – Source
20. The Soviet Union shot down a Korean civilian Boeing 747 that unknowingly entered its airspace during the Cold War, killing all 269 passengers. This incident prompted the U.S. to make the GPS technology available for civilian use. – Source
21-25 Interesting Facts About Cold War
21. Deer in the Czech Republic don’t cross into Germany, following the example of parents who learned to avoid the electrified fence there during the Cold War. – Source
22. In the 1960s at the height of the Cold War, the US continuously flew planes carrying nuclear bombs around the world as a precautionary measure in the event of an attack by the USSR. Five of these planes crashed, and nuclear contamination resulted in at least 2 instances. – Source
23. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union had many “closed cities” restricted for foreigners and tightly controlled for citizens and even today Russia keeps a great number of its cities closed. – Source
24. The most powerful air raid sirens ever built (during the cold war) was powered by an 180 horse Chrysler V-8 engine, were nearly 12 feet long and were rumored to be so powerful that they could start fires and turn fog into the rain. – Source
25. During the Cold War, maps distributed in the US utilized distorted map projections to make the USSR and Vietnam seem larger, closer and more “menacing.” – Source
