Free Republic

On the evening of 23 March, 1983, Ronald Reagan delivered a televised address about defence and national security. "Let me share with you a vision of the future," the president began in what was a last-minute addition to the half-hour speech. In Reagan's vision, we would "embark on a program to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive." It was the first mention of Reagan's Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), the plan to change America's nuclear posture from offensive to defensive. His goal was to render the Soviet nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete." Reagan's admirers praised SDI...

A camera hidden inside of a coat jacket, controlled by a hand held mechanism. A wrist–gun that is attached to a glove, can be hidden under a sleeve. A special listening device. A 4.5mm gun hidden inside of a lipstick. A gun hidden inside of a tobacco pipe. A camera hidden inside of a pen. This gun fires a dual cyanide charge that can kill almost instantly. Cufflinks with recessions to hide things An ancient coin that has a recess in it to hide things. A jacket button that can be turned into a compass. A transmitting device inside of...

Margaret Thatcher, one of the most significant leaders of the 20th century, died yesterday at age 87. A model of convictional leadership, Margaret Thatcher became almost universally known as Britain's "Iron Lady." In May 1979, Margaret Thatcher moved into No. 10 Downing Street and changed the course of British history. Beyond this, Lady Thatcher changed the terms of debate on both sides of the Atlantic and left a legacy of leadership that should inspire generations to come. Born October 13, 1925 in the village of Grantham, Margaret Roberts was soon recognized as an unusually bright and forceful child. Her father,...

STUTTGART, Germany — The U.S. Army’s 69-year history of basing main battle tanks on German soil quietly ended last month when 22 Abrams tanks, a main feature of armored combat units throughout the Cold War, embarked for the U.S. The departure of the last M-1 Abrams tanks coincides with the inactivation of two of the Army’s Germany-based heavy brigades. Last year, the 170th Infantry out of Baumholder disbanded. And the 172nd Separate Infantry Brigade at Grafenwöhr is in the process of doing the same. On March 18, the remaining tanks were loaded up at the 21st Theater Sustainment Command’s railhead...

Cancelled: BritainÂ’s High-Mach Heartbreak The TSR-2 bomber was a case of aeronautical genius foiled by political foolishness. For an American teenager, 1963 was a great year to be living in London. Thanks to my dadÂ’s job in international marketing, I was a Beatles fan six months before my pals back home knew there was such a thing as a Beatle. And as a budding airplane buff, I had a front-row seat for the emergence of another symbol of British national pride: the TSR-2 supersonic bomber, a twin-engine, low-level hotshot that I thought was the coolest-looking airplane ever. Shivering in my...

'It was one of the most audacious acts of the Cold War which could have come straight from the pages of a spy novel. Georgi Markov was jabbed with an umbrella which fired a poison pellet into his leg as he crossed Waterloo Bridge. He died three days later – and for almost 35 years mystery has surrounded the whereabouts of his killer. Now the prime suspect has been tracked down to a small Austrian town where he works as an antiques dealer. Francesco Gullino, 66, who was known by his Communist handlers as 'Agent Piccadilly', lives in a rundown...

The British government sought on Tuesday to limit the information it would disclose at a planned inquest into the death of Alexander V. Litvinenko, a former officer in the K.G.B. who succumbed to radiation poisoning in London more than six years ago. The coroner hearing the case said that it may now be postponed. “Due to the complexity of the investigation which necessarily precedes the hearings,” the coroner, Sir Robert Owen, said, “it may not be possible to adhere” to the planned May 1 start date for the hearings. The inquest would be the first — and probably the only...

Have we waged the wrong war against North Korea? Then, can our new President Park Geun-hye redirect our strategy and finish that feral beast once and for all? These are complicated questions but the ghost of one “complicated simple” man may beg to answer from his grave: Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States who is credited with giving the Soviet Union a final push toward the brink of collapse during his 1981-1989 reign.

That an Ivy League historian takes exception to the idea of American Exceptionalism may not surprise. That the skeptic is not a man of the Left is rather noteworthy. “The term did not even exist until the middle of the Twentieth Century,” University of Pennsylvania historian Walter McDougall claimed in remarks at the libertarian Cato Institute. “Alexis deTocqueville used it as an adjective but it did not get picked up,” McDougall said. The Catholic Church and the Communist International used the term in the early 20th Century, according to McDougall. Both the Church and the Communist party fretted over it...

Whittaker Chambers and Totalitarian Islam Playwright David Mamet recently acknowledged that he had been profoundly influenced by Communist apostate Whittaker Chambers’s 1952 anti-Communist memoir, Witness. Mamet described how reading Chambers’s opus inspired “the wrenching experience� of forcibly reevaluating the way he thought, particularly his confessed leftist-herd co-dependence. Also, echoing the delusive herd mentality of the Left’s ad hominem attacks in the 1950s on Chambers — whose allegations of Communist conspiracies have been entirely vindicated with irrefragable documentation from the captured Soviet Venona cables — Congressman Peter King’s staid initial hearings of March 10, 2011, on American Muslim radicalization engendered similarly...

How To Fly A U-2 Spy Plane Got your eye on a sweet used '59 U-2 spy plane you saw on Craigslist? Would you go ahead and take the plunge if you just, you know, knew how to fly it? Then boy, are you in luck. That's because a couple days ago an entire flight manual for the U-2 from 1959 was declassified and released by the CIA. You can tell it's declassified because on each page where the word "secret" appears, someone has carefully drawn a line through it. We've got a copy here for you. The U-2 is,...

FBI Finally Releases "Communist" Marilyn Monroe's Unredacted Files Miller and Monroe at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, 1957. (via LIFE) The first systematic Hollywood blacklist—which barred screenwriters, actors, directors and anyone in the industry that was a member of or sympathizer of the Communist Party—was instituted on November 25, 1947. In the 1950s a Red Channels (Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television) pamphlet was published, which listed Arthur Miller as a communist. So when Miller started dating Marilyn Monroe in 1955, The Man started keeping an eye on her as well... and now an unredacted classified file has been...

The B-58 Hustler was the world's first supersonic jet bomber, a delta-winged marvel of Cold War design created in the 1950s solely to deliver nuclear weapons to the U.S.S.R. And the "pilot" used to test the capsule ejection system was a live bear.

East Germany's secret police sold citizens to western pharmaceutical companies to use as human guinea pigs in drug trials • Tens of thousands tested with experimental drugs not approved in the West • One study of a drug for heart conditions saw six out of 17 patients die • Sinister practice exposed in disturbing new Germany documentary Former Communist East Germany secretly sold its citizens to western pharmaceutical companies to use as human guinea pigs in drug trials. Tens of thousands of sick people in the former German Democratic Republic were treated with medicines not approved in the West to...

This summer, friends and I took a cruise in Alaska where the tourist shops often featured the Russian matryoshka dolls.  The dolls originated in Japan but were made popular in Russia around the time of the Russian Revolution, a century ago.  You've seen them -- you pop open an outer doll, and nested inside is another.  The magic of the art is that you keep opening layer after layer, only to find another even smaller doll, until at last the final incarnation is just a kernel in size.  The successive dolls vary from near exact duplicates with hard-to-identify slight...

Out of curiosity, I took a look at how film critics from other newspapers and publications reviewed the new “Red Dawn,” a remake of the 1984 cult classic about teenagers taking up guns and defending America from communist invaders. You’d think from the critics’ condescending sneers that the remake is utter garbage. “Preposterous,” said one critic of the remake’s premise that North Korea could invade the U.S. today. “Outdated,” said another, suggesting the plot line be relegated to the ancient Cold War and the once-upon-a-time Red Scare. The only thing that’s “preposterous,” however, is the speed at which these obviously...

Revealed: How the U.S. planned to blow up the MOON with a nuclear bomb to win Cold War bragging rights over Soviet Union - Scientists were hoping for giant flash on the moon that would intimidate the Soviet Union - Aim of mission was to launch the nuke by 1959 - Plan was later scrapped due to possible danger to people on Earth It may sound like a plot straight out of a science fiction novel, but a U.S. mission to blow up the moon with a nuke was very real in the 1950s. At the height of the space...

Those who treat the Cold War as a relic of the past ignore a salient fact: Communist regimes still exist, sometimes with nukes but always with human rights violations. To get an idea of why they linger, it is helpful to see how they came into being. They were mostly established by the mother of all communist dictatorships, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). In World War II, Franklin Delano Roosevelt sought to placate wartime ally Josef Stalin, dictator of the USSR in every manner possible, particularly at the wartime conferences attended by the Allied leaders in Teheran and...

A retired Soviet lieutenant colonel whose self-control prevented a nuclear war from being triggered by a long-classified accident in 1983 was named on Friday a recipient of a German anti-war prize. Stanislav Petrov, 73, won the fourth Dresden-Preis (Dresden Prize), which comes complete with a check for 25,000 euro ($32,000), prize organizers said on their website, Friendsofdresden-deutschland.com. The prize is to be bestowed at a ceremony in Dresden on Feb. 17, the anniversary of the Dresden bombing in 1945, the organizers said. Ironically for a military officer, Petrov shot to fame for ignoring his direct responsibilities. The officer served at...

The Weirdest Monuments Of The Communist Era That Are Still Standing After the fall of the Soviet Union, many Communist statues and sculptures were destroyed, while others were moved to statue parks or museums. But many of them remained in the same place for the last 20 years, while the former Soviet areas were transformed into modern countries. Here are thirteen of the most incredible ones. Click to enlarge images below. 1. Lenin's giant head, Ulan-Ude, Republic of Buryatia, Russia The 42 ton, 25 foot tall head of former Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin is standing in Ulan-Ude. Built in 1970,...

President Barack Obama once promised, as a U.S. Senator, to honor veterans of the Cold War, who have never received official recognition and are therefore prevented from full participation in many Veterans Day celebrations. But he never fulfilled that promise--neither in the Senate nor the White House--leaving Cold War veterans in the cold. This weekend, the Wall Street Journal documented the promise, made in 2006 to Frank Almquist, an Illinois constituent who had served in the Army in the 1980s. A medal for Cold War veterans seemed "appropriate," Obama wrote, and wrote that he hoped "this impasse can be broken...

'Contrary to popular belief, the Cuban missile crisis did not end with the agreement between the US and Soviet Union in October, 1962. Unknown to the US at the time, there were 100 other nuclear weapons also in the hands of Cuba, sparking a frantic - and ingenious - Russian mission to recover them.'

HMS Conqueror is famous, some would say notorious, for sinking the Argentinian cruiser General Belgrano. The nuclear-powered attack submarine, a type also known menacingly as a hunter-killer, that year became the first of her kind to fire in anger..... But the ship now in the crosswires was not the Belgrano. This was August, almost two months after the liberation of the Falklands, and on the other side of the world, in the Barents Sea, backyard of the mighty Soviet Northern Fleet..... This one was special: [the trawler] was pulling a device long coveted by the British and Americans, a two-mile...

In 1979, Adolph Dubs, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, was kidnapped in Kabul by Muslim extremists and killed in a shootout between his abductors and police. Lieutenant Commander Adolph Dubs ,United States Navy Foreign Service Officer(1920-1979) of Maryland. Born in Chicago, Illinois, August 4, 1920. Served in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II; U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, 1978-79. Assassinated in Afghanistan, February 14, 1979. Interment at Arlington National Cemetery.

Washington: The US National Security Archive has fully declassified the most controversial nuclear policy document of the Cold War, the Presidential Directive 59 (PD-59) http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/Presidential-Directive-59 , which focused on a possible nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The full text of the document, available on the US National Security Archive page at George Washington University's website, provides insights about the thinking of key US officials about the state of nuclear planning and the possible progression of events should war break out. In a surprising reverse from previous policies, PD-59 called for pre-planned nuclear strike options and capabilities for rapid development...

The American POWs sent secret coded messages to Washington with news of a Soviet atrocity: In 1943 they saw rows of corpses in an advanced state of decay in the Katyn forest, on the western edge of Russia, proof that the killers could not have been the Nazis who had only recently occupied the area.

Massoud's Letter To The People Of America Date: 1998 A Message to the People of the United States of America I send this message to you today on behalf of the freedom and peace-loving people of Afghanistan, the Mujahedeen freedom fighters who resisted and defeated Soviet communism, the men and women who are still resisting oppression and foreign hegemony and, in the name of more than one and a half million Afghan martyrs who sacrificed their lives to uphold some of the same values and ideals shared by most Americans and Afghans alike. This is a crucial and unique moment...

Romney thanks Poles for their courage to fight for freedom   Peter Gentle 31.07.2012  Republican candidate in the US presidential elections, Mitt Romney has thanked Poles for their “courage” in joining the “fight for freedom” in Afghanistan and Iraq, on the second day of his trip to Poland.   Mitt Romney at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw, Tuesday: photo - PAP Radek Pietruszka “I would like to express my gratitude to the Polish government and Polish people for the courage of your men and women in supporting the fight for freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Romney said...

A Los Alamos Story Worthy of Stephen King Ever heard of The Demon Core? It was named by Los Alamos scientists — who are generally not a superstitious lot — after it claimed multiple lives, in a series of strange and horrible accidents. Discover a legend of science... that's worthy of a horror movie. When I was reading Stephen King stories, I was constantly amazed at the things he made scary. It was like reading the legend of the monkey's paw over and over again, with increasingly weird objects. His most famous evil objects are the hotel in The Shining...

^^ Video is at the link

All, please join me at the Cincinnati Freedom Center, 7:00 Thursday night for a screening of our new film "Rockin' the Wall." The movie, which features rockers from the 60s and 70s such as the Doors, Quiet Riot, Vanilla Fudge, Mother's Finest, and Toto, looks at music's influence in the Cold War. I'll be there to do a Q&A and autograph books if you bring them. We'll also show the trailer for our newest movie, "Other Walls 2 Fall" with Clint Black, Yanni, and Busta Rhymes (!!)

GDANSK, Poland (AP) — Polish officials unveiled a statue of former President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II on Saturday, honoring two men widely credited in this Eastern European country with helping to topple communism 23 years ago. The statue was unveiled in Gdansk, the birthplace of Lech Walesa's Solidarity movement, in the presence of about 120 former Solidarity activists, many of whom were imprisoned in the 1980s for their roles in organizing or taking part in strikes against the communist regime...

Yes, we won the Cold War, but unlike other wars the Cold War did not end with an act of surrender and with the defeated enemy throwing down his weapons. But no, we are not fighting Marxism in our country, because the American people have not yet been warned that their country is being contaminated by Marxism. ...

The owner of a home in Queens has not given much thought about the origin of the concrete and steel room buried beneath his basement. “When I bought this house, nobody came to see this,” said Francisco Lago, who purchased his two-story home about 30 years ago. “It was in ruins.” It looks better today, but not by much: cluttered with tools and echoing with the rumble of a dehumidifier working overtime to keep the 300-square-foot room from devolving into the mold-infested, subterranean cave it was before. Yet this unimpressive cramped space hidden away on a quiet block is a...

President Reagan's remarks on East-West relations at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin, Germany on June 12, 1987.

(CNN) -- An American pilot whose U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union will be posthumously awarded the Silver Star next week, 50 years after he was released from prison and returned to the United States. The award for valor is being bestowed on Francis Gary Powers for exhibiting "exceptional loyalty" during harsh interrogation while in captivity by the Soviet Union for nearly two years, the Air Force said. The Silver Star is the third-highest combat military decoration awarded to members of any U.S. military branch for valor in the face of the enemy, the Air Force...

Famed Southwest Virginia spy-plane pilot Francis Gary Powers will posthumously receive the Silver Star next week in honor of his captivity in the Soviet Union more than 50 years ago.

An SR-71 Blackbird Tail Fin Is For Sale On eBay For $1 Million A tail rudder from the fastest airplane in the world could be yours — for a cool $1 million. The seller didn't say if it was a spare part, or if it was once part of a functioning SR-71 Blackbird, which is an important distinction given the cost. When it debuted in 1964, the SR-71 Blackbird — the mean looking surveillance aircraft that cruised high above the Soviet Union at speeds of up to mach 3.5 — cost the U.S. Air Force $34 million per air frame....

The Murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer by Jacob G. Hornberger, April 11, 2012 In early 1976 the National Enquirer published a story that shocked the elite political class in Washington, D.C. The story disclosed that a woman named Mary Pinchot Meyer, who was a divorced spouse of a high CIA official named Cord Meyer, had been engaged in a two-year sexual affair with President John F. Kennedy. By the time the article was published, JFK had been assassinated, and Mary Pinchot Meyer herself was dead, a victim of a murder that took place in Washington on October 12, 1964. The...

In 1958, America accidentally dropped a nuclear weapon on two little girls’ playhouse For certain rural residents of the Carolinas during the Cold War, apocalyptic anxiety hit disturbingly close to home. In 1958 and 1961, the American Air Force lost nuclear weapons over the skies of South and North Carolina, respectively, raining potential apocalypse on the folks below. In both incidents, complete catastrophe was avoided thanks to that ever-potent combination of foresight and unmitigated dumb luck. And in the former incident, the bomb fell square on some unsuspecting children's playhouse. The first accident occurred over Florence, South Carolina on March...

How Lockheed’s Skunk Works Got into the Stealth Fighter Business How Lockheed’s Skunk Works Got into the Stealth Fighter Business How do you hide an airplane behind a bird? Very skillfully. Lt. Col. William B. O'Connor (ret.) flew the F-117 Nighthawk during the Bosnia Conflict, and in Stealth Fighter, he explains the history, operation, and soul America's most advanced stealth jet. While the United States had never embraced a defensive mindset and had only fielded one strategic SAM system to that point, the Nike-Hercules dating from the 1950s, and one real medium-range tactical system, the HAWK (homing all the way...

A list of unused titles for Dr. Strangelove, lifted from Stanley Kubrick’s notebooks From the notebooks of Stanley Kubrick comes this most excellent list of movie titles that never saw the light of day, but were evidently considered for the film that Kubrick would eventually name Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. There are plenty of mentions of Dr. Strangelove, bombs, and even implications that one should love and cherish said "wonderful bomb," but you won't find the final title in this list. Still, it gives one pause to think how this movie...

Along with the ICBM, it was one of the defining pieces of military technology during the Cold War: the B-52 bomber. Those who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s knew the B-52 Stratofortress as a central figure in the anxiety that flowed from the protracted staring match between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. On the one hand, it was reassuring to know that the Strategic Air Command was ready at a moment's notice to scramble its B-52s to counter any potential nuclear attack. On the other hand, if the bombers were flying that mission, well, things might well...

An Extremely Creepy Tour of an Abandoned Soviet Monument in Bulgaria Remember those derelict Bulgarian war memorials that resemble space fortresses? Well, it turns out they're just as otherworldly inside. Here's one intrepid urban explorer's journey into the shadowy corridors of the shuttered Bulgarian-Soviet Friendship memorial in Varna, Bulgaria. It's also a case study on why you never tour old Soviet monuments alone. In its Communist heyday, the "Park-Monument of the Bulgarian-Soviet Friendship" contained an eternal flame, a bomb shelter, and a tourism center. Loudspeakers would also blast Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 on constant loop. The center opened in...

Gallery: Familiar-yet-alien Soviet arcade games While playing Centipede (don't judge) at my local mall in the '80s, it never occurred to me that somewhere behind the soon-to-fall Iron Curtain there would be some punk playing the Soviet version of arcade games as well. Hell yeah they were! Now, thanks to two nostalgic Muscovites who remembered their days of playing "Sea Battle," there is an entire museum full of these Soviet-era games. The story of the Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines is so cool we couldn't make this up if we tried. Let's talk about the games first. Soviet classics Sea...

The government repeated assurances that it would continue military cooperation with Syria. Several hundred Russian personnel are building facilities for the Russian Navy at the Syrian port of Tartus and Russia continues to deliver weapons and military equipment to Syria. State controlled media blames outsiders for the violence in Syria. This programming is similar to the kind of stuff the old Soviet Union constantly used during the Cold War, blaming the West, and especially the United States, for all the world's ills. But most of the world blames the decades old Assad dictatorship for the problems in Syria and condemns...

March 1981, and inside 10 Downing Street, Margaret Thatcher is confronting the most terrible dilemma any British Prime Minister has ever faced. The news could hardly be worse. Across Britain, tens of thousands of terrified people are streaming out of the major cities. Looting is widespread, while every day brings bomb attacks at railway stations and RAF bases. Abroad, the Red Army has sliced through the West’s defences, using chemical weapons to punch through Nato’s front lines. Yugoslavia has fallen, and West Germany and Norway are on the verge of succumbing. After four days of Russian air raids, killing hundreds...

In the 1970s, the Air Force launched a Minuteman ICBM launched from a C-5 Galaxy. Hold on, what!?!? That was my reaction upon learning that the above sentence is true. In 1974, the Air Force decided that it could turn C-5 Galaxy airlifters into flying SSBNs. Yup, Air Force planners thought the missile would be tougher for the Soviets to take out with a preemptive strike if it was already aboard a moving target like a C-5 versus sitting in a stationary missile silo. So, they loaded a Minuteman into a C-5 that parachute-dropped the 60-foot tall missile out of...

Vladimir Putin praised Cold War-era scientists on Thursday for stealing U.S. nuclear secrets so that United States would not be the world's sole atomic power, in comments reflecting his vision of Russia as a counterweight to U.S. power. Spies with suitcases full of data helped the Soviet Union build its atomic bomb, he told military commanders. "You know, when the States already had nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union was only building them, we got a significant amount of information through Soviet foreign intelligence channels," Putin said, according to state-run Itar-Tass. "The were carrying the information away not on microfilm...

Russia needs to launch a major military buildup to prepare for life in a dangerous world where international law is breaking down, the West feels free to intervene in sovereign countries, and rivals could invade Russia to seize its rich trove of natural resources, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has warned. In his fifth programmatic article detailing what he will do if he wins a new six-year presidential term in elections that are now less than two weeks off, Mr. Putin pledged, among other things, the biggest rearmament program in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Over the next...