Cold War History

One of the great vestiges of the Cold War is the Greenbrier bunker, a facility built to house all 535 members of Congress in the event of a nuclear attack.

During the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan initiated the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), otherwise known as "Star Wars," an anti-ballistic missile program that was designed to shoot down nuclear missiles in space.

During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union were largely prevented from engaging in direct combat with each other due to the fear of mutually assured destruction (MAD). In 1962, however, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world perilously close to nuclear war.

In 1995, Russian officials briefly misinterpreted a Norwegian scientific rocket to be a nuclear attack.

The election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980 saw the return of heightened Cold War tensions after a period of détente during the previous decade. The zenith of this escalation arguably came in 1983, when a NATO training exercise almost prompted nuclear war.   Operation RYAN At a secret meeting of top Soviet officials in […]

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev decided that the time had come to erect a wall between the eastern and western portions of Berlin. In 1961, preliminary construction of the Berlin Wall began.

The sprawling nuclear complex across the Soviet Union included entire cities that were kept closely guarded secrets.

Since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, people in the United States and around the world have developed cultural expressions of the atomic bomb.

On March 1, 1954, the United States carried out its largest nuclear detonation, “Castle Bravo,” at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The Bravo explosion was more than two and a half times greater than expected and caused far higher levels of fallout and damage than scientists had predicted.

The Atomic Energy Commission succeeded the Manhattan Engineer District in January 1947, when the Atomic Energy Act went into effect.