Cold War Conversations Podcast

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NEW EPISODE - "A World where Monty Python meets le Carré" with @RoryCormac & @OxUniPress Listen here 🎧🎧 coldwarconversations.com/episode456/ #coldwar #disinformation #propaganda #blackops

Possibly the most British photo ever. Plane lands on the house - Oh well, best get a brew on.

Once upon a time…

Street scene from the city of Bratsk in Siberia, USSR, 1967.

A fantastic image of Piccadilly, 1979

Former command station at the Helmstedt-Marienborn border crossing, the main checkpoint between East and West Germany.

On this day in 1955, the Austrian State Treaty was signed. The treaty was signed by the Allied powers (including the Soviet Union) and Austria. It established Austria as a neutral country and ended the occupation zones seen below.

The Cambridge Spy Ring: 75 Years since the first defections. open.spotify.com/playlist/3TXyA…

HMS Victorious The reduction of Britain's naval commitment in 1967, the end of the Indonesia–Malaysia confrontation, and a fire while under refit, prompted her final withdrawal from service, three to five years early, and she was scrapped in 1969.

Photographer Karlheinz Jardner took fascinating photos during a trip through East Germany in the spring of 1990, the year of German reunification, and in doing so he documented a world that would soon disappear forever. spiegel.de/fotostrecke/ph…

"Under the leadership of the SED, forward to new successes in the Karl Marx Year 1983!", propaganda board marking the 100th anniversary of Karl Marx's death, Thuringia, 1983.

15 May 1957. ‘Operation Grapple’ Vickers Valiant B.1 XD818 piloted by Kenneth Hubbard released the first British air-drop hydrogen bomb from 39,000 ft. over Malden Island.

When you look at the face of an F-4E, you are looking at the face of both failure and success. The sleek, heavy nose represents a hard lesson learned in the heat of combat. As you know, early Phantoms were designed for a push-button war where missiles did all the work from a distance. Designers thought the age of the dogfight was over, so they left the gun out. But as they say, plans rarely survive contact with the enemy. Pilots soon found themselves trapped in close-range scraps with AAMs that refused to track, leaving them with the perfect shot but no way to take it. 1/2

Cabin service onboard JAT Yugoslav Airlines, 1970s.

Theres a British government nuclear bunker hidden in a posh neighbourhood in Belfast. In Mount Eden Park at the junction with Malone Hill Park, among the leafy 1930s detached gaffs is a cream-painted concrete structure with a flat roof and three ventilation towers clad in corrugated metal. This was the secret home of the Northern Ireland Regional War Room. It was built between 1952 and 1953 at a total cost of around £70,000, which was insance money at the time (as now). It was one of thirteen facilities constructed across the UK to ensure that if the Soviet Union turned the Cold War hot and London was obliterated, local government could continue to function. The site on Mount Eden Park was chosen because it was close enough to Stormont to be reached quickly by politicians and military leaders, but far enough from Belfast city centre to be outside the primary and secondary blast radius of any atomic weapon aimed at the urban core. The buildings walls and roof are at least a metre and a half of reinforced concrete which reduces the nuclear radiation by a factor of four hundred. It had blast doors, a pressurised ventilation system designed to keep contaminated air out, an industrial diesel generator, comms equipment, accommodation and a canteen. At its heart was a double height map room, surrounded by smaller working rooms for about forty-five designated officials, including the heads of police, fire services, and key government departments to coordinate the civil response to the nuclear catastrophe. Now if your a nuke nerd like me you`ll already have seen a big issue, cause by the time the yoke was finished hydrogen (H) bombs of a different order were threatening human existence. The Mount Eden Park bunker had been designed for nuclear fallout, but a H bomb would leave the site and the surrounding area as solid as a far in the wind rendering it obselete. By 1958 or 1959, the Regional War Room's operational role had been transferred to a larger facility at Gough Barracks in Armagh. From around 1962, the former site served as the Belfast Corporation Control, after the disbanding of the Civil Defence Corps in 1968, it went onto care and maintenance, kept ticking over but largely dormant. In the early 1980s, with the Cold War entering one of its more dangerous phases the Mount Eden Park bunker was reactivated and refurbished as the Northern Ireland Regional Government Headquarters. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was very active during this period, and in December 1983 a group of CND activists broke into the building, a gesture of protest that also inadvertently drew public attention to the fact that a nuclear war bunker was sitting quietly in a south Belfast suburb. The facility remained in use as a regional headquarters until 1990, when it was superseded by a new purpose-built facility in Ballymena, and the Malone Road bunker was stood down for the last time.After 1990, it settled into the role of secure records storage archive for the Courts Service. Its is now a Grade B1 listed building, public access to the interior remains restricted. Buy the Dublin Time Machine a pint and support the DTM Book ko-fi.com/buchanandublin…

Portaaviones Soviético Minsk. Actualmente se encuentra abandonado en el río Yangtse, China. Fue comprado tras la caída de la URSS para hacer un parque temático, pero la empresa impulsora quebró y actualmente está abandonado.

East Germany versus West Germany at the 1974 FIFA World Cup at the Volksparkstadion in Hamburg. East Germany won 1-0.

Bruno Barbey's photographs of daily life in Poland, 1980s.

THAT BACKHEEL FROM ALAN HUDSON OH MY FUCKING WORD.

Die #Stasi im Palast: Das MfS installierte Abhörtechnik & Kameras im Palast der Republik, um jederzeit über die Vorgänge im Inneren informiert zu sein. Das Foto zeigt zwei Offiziere des MfS vor der Hauptschaltanlage & den Observationsmonitoren im Palast: stasi-mediathek.de/medien/stasi-m…