The Not-So-Cold War

The Not-So-Cold WarThe Cold War was supposed to be a battle of wits between two superpowers.Instead, it was forty-four years of spy cats, weaponized psychics, accidental nuclear disasters, absurd military schemes, diplomatic musical chairs, and governments spending billions of dollars on ideas that occasionally sounded like they had been invented after lunch.The Cold War is usually remembered as an era of terrifying brinkmanship: Kennedy and Khrushchev staring each other down, nuclear missiles pointed at cities, spies trading secrets in the shadows, and the world waiting for someone to push the wrong button.But behind all that seriousness was another Cold War.A stranger one.The Not-So-Cold War explores the operations, conflicts, blunders, experiments, and spectacularly questionable decisions that somehow made it past the desks of highly educated people with security clearances and enormous budgets.The United States tried to weaponize animals, experimented with psychic phenomena, dropped millions of gallons of chemical defoliants, and occasionally misplaced nuclear weapons.The Soviet Union kidnapped scientists, reorganized entire countries, backed wars thousands of miles from home, and discovered that replacing a dying leader with another dying leader was apparently an acceptable succession strategy.And both sides repeatedly came up with solutions to problems that created entirely new problems.From Operation Paperclip and the bizarre postwar scramble for Nazi scientists to MKULTRA, Vietnam, Cuba, nuclear accidents, the Ogaden War, the neutron bomb, Broken Arrows, the Able Archer scare, and the final collapse of the Soviet Union, this is the Cold War as you have probably never been taught it.Every event in this book actually happened.Some dialogue and narrative details have been reconstructed for readability. The absurdity, however, belongs entirely to history.Because when you give governments unlimited budgets, enormous militaries, top-secret laboratories, and absolutely no shortage of confidence, reality doesn’t need much help becoming ridiculous.The Cold War was terrifying.It was also, occasionally, completely insane.