Project 112 was a secret, cold-war era project to determine vulnerabilities of US warships to various chemical and biological attacks. While lots is known about what happened, there's still a lot of information that hasn't been released yet. In the early 1950s, the US Army sprayed the bacteria Serratia Marcesens over San Francisco. While the government thought that it was safe, many people ended up checking into the hospital. One elderly man even died as a result of the US testing chemical and biological agents against it's own citizens.
posted by manero on Jan 22, 2003 - 4 comments

Down-to-Wire Deal Heads Off Book Burn
As a follow up on This Thread, Victor Kamkin Inc., the Rockville bookstore that became a mecca for those in search of materials on the Soviet Union during the Cold War, got a three-week reprieve so the Library of Congress can look through the bookseller's 1 million-piece collection to determine what should be saved.
posted by Blake on Mar 17, 2002 - 0 comments

The US may have killed 15,000 of it's own with nuclear tests. Somewhere around 100,000 people died as a result of the bombs dropped by the US over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A new study shows that back home in the heart of the U.S., fallout from Cold-War nuclear tests may have killed as many as 15,000 people. This would be front page news everywhere if it had happened all at once - but since it took years for these people to die - it will barely be a blip in the history books.
posted by stevengarrity on Feb 28, 2002 - 8 comments

Actor Ralph Meeker portrayed hardboiled private dick Mike Hammer in the Robert Aldrich film "Kiss Me Deadly", a celluloid masterpiece of brutal cold-war paranoia that introduced the filmgoing public to the concept of suitcase nukes back in 1955. For some reason, I find the thought of Conway Twitty films far more disturbing.
posted by MrBaliHai on Nov 13, 2001 - 9 comments

Bob Kolody vs. Coca-Cola
"Throughout the late 1950’s and early 60’s the CIA began expanding its operations. In order to effectively fight the Cold War on a global scale, it needed to establish bases in every major country. This meant that agents would need a plausible cover in order to penetrate the borders of international frontiers. They couldn’t just show up with CIA stamped on their passport ... As a solution to the problem the CIA was able to convince Coca-Cola, one of the first truly globalized companies with product distribution operations in virtually every corner of the world, to be used as a cover for the U.S. intelligence agency."
posted by bytecode on Jun 21, 2001 - 27 comments

The first really interesting cold war relic sale I've seen. It's big ... it's pretty ... it can pummel the sound barrier and NASA spent $30mil retrofitting it. Now if I can just find $10 million I don't need. Maybe if I look under the couch cushions or something.
posted by foist on May 19, 2001 - 4 comments

At the end of the Cold War, a lot of people professed to believe that the USSR's collapse "proved" that communism/socialism/egalitarianism (delete according to the size of claim you want to make) can never work.

Maybe. But this got me thinking you could say the same about neoliberalism.
posted by Mocata on Apr 24, 2001 - 17 comments