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On 6 September 1976, an aircraft appears out of the clouds near the Japanese city of Hakodate, on the northern island of Hokkaido. It’s a twin-engined jet, but not the kind of short-haul airliner Hakodate is used to seeing. This huge, grey hulk sports the red stars of the Soviet Union. No-one in the West has ever seen one before. The jet lands on Hakodate’s concrete-and-asphalt runway. The runway, it turns out, is not long enough. The jet ploughs through hundreds of feet of earth before it finally comes to rest at the far end of the airport. The pilot...

An Indian Navy Sea Hawk taking off from INS Vikrant | Photo: The personal collection of Commander G.V.K. Unnithan (retired), Indian Navy If this were fiction, it could hardly be a more remarkable story. But a decorated ex-Nazi-turned arms dealer actually sold fighter aircraft to both India and Pakistan, which were facing an arms embargo after the ’65 war. The episode is recorded in the authoritative books, The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade, written by former South African MP Andrew Feinstein, and earlier, Private Warriors, written by Ken Silverstein and Daniel Burton-Rose. It is also narrated in detail...

Tom Cooper August 28, 2016 TweetShareShare Printer-friendly version It’s been 50 years since one of biggest — and most hyped — operational achievements by Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service. On Aug. 16, 1966, Operation Diamond resulted in what is usually described as the “defection” to Israel of an Iraqi air force MiG-21-pilot, Capt. Munir Redfa. Redfa took his MiG with him. There’s been no end to the rumors surrounding this affair, and especially regarding Redfa’s reasons for defection. According to official Israeli version of the story, Redfa was an Assyrian Christian who suffered from religious and ethnic discrimination, had been passed over for...

Way back in the early 70s, my mother's youngest brother (who was a seasonal worker for the US Army Corps of Engineers), as was his habit, brought his car over to our house while he was away on "the boat" (as we all called it). But this time he left something else . . . an very plain-looking, ordinary radio. Back in those days FM was still fairly exotic. AM was still king, and that's where most of the music and regular radio programming was. This little radio happened to have both AM and FM. But it had a third...

<p>WASHINGTON — Radioactive fallout from Cold War nuclear weapons tests across the globe probably caused at least 15,000 cancer deaths in U.S. residents born after 1951, according to data from an unreleased federal study. The study, coupled with findings from previous government investigations, suggests that 20,000 non-fatal cancers — and possibly many more — also can be tied to fallout from aboveground weapons tests. The study shows that far more fallout than previously known reached the USA from nuclear tests in the former Soviet Union and on several Pacific islands used for U.S. and British exercises. It also finds that fallout from scores of U.S. trials at the Nevada Test Site spread substantial amounts of radioactivity across broad swaths of the country. When fallout from all tests, domestic and foreign, is taken together, no U.S. resident born after 1951 escaped exposure, the study says.</p>

Stroilov, a historian now living in London, fled Russia in 2003 after stealing 50,000 top-secret Kremlin documents from the Gorbachev Foundation archives, where he was working as a researcher. He was given access to the archive in 1999, but Gorbachev refused him permission to copy its most significant documents. Having observed the network administrator entering the password into the system, Stroilov reproduced the archive and sent it to secure locations around the world.

Just 1% of Russians approved of U.S. leadership in 2015 -- the worst rating in the world last year and the lowest approval Gallup has measured for the U.S. in the past decade. Remarkably, this is even worse than their previous record-low 4% approval in 2014.

The U.S. intelligence community was responsible for usurping Europeans' right to self-government, in an effort to impose what Obama recently called “one of the greatest political and economic achievements of modern times.” As British voters prepare to vote on secession from the European Union super-state, the Obama administration's bizarre intervention to support the pro-EU side has sparked a fresh examination of the shadowy origins of the controversial European regime. Under scrutiny is the critical backing the EU and its predecessor outfits received at every step of the way from top globalists within the U.S. government, and in particular from the...

"Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it." On May 3, 2016, Elizabeth Edwards Spalding, an author and associate professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College, repeated this quote while discussing her newly published book "A Brief History of the Cold War." Spalding wrote the book in hopes of educating people on the tyrannical nature of communism, a lesson she claims more educators neglect. Most people see the Cold War as a power struggle between the East and the West who simply "misunderstood each other." Spalding emphasizes, however, that the cause of the Cold War was more than...

When asked two weeks ago in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee whether the Army was “outranged” by any adversary, U.S. Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley said: “Yes … the ones in Europe, really Russia. We don’t like it, we don’t want it, but yes, technically [we are] outranged, outgunned on the ground.” Given Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, this is sobering testimony. But is it accurate? Unfortunately, yes: Nearly two years of extensive wargaming and analysis shows that if Russia were to conduct a short-warning attack against the Baltic States, Moscow’s forces could roll to the outskirts...

Ronald Reagan's legacy, long after his passing, continues to be distorted by the leftist academic community, one professor noted at a panel discussion held at the Heritage Foundation. Francis Marlo, an associate professor of International Relations at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College, said that the Left does not like giving Ronald Reagan credit for ending the Cold War. The panel discussion centered around the recently published book, "The Grand Strategy that Won the Cold War," and Marlo's remarks centered around correcting the record on Ronald Reagan's Cold War exploits. Marlo stated, "The intent of this book is to...

Sitting next to Cuban President Raul Castro (R), US President Barack Obama (L) gestures during the state dinner at the Revolution Palace in Havana on March 21, 2016. Adalberto Roque | AFP | Getty Images Sitting next to Cuban President Raul Castro (R), US President Barack Obama (L) gestures during the state dinner at the Revolution Palace in Havana on March 21, 2016. U.S. President Barack Obama declared on Tuesday that he had come to Havana to "bury the last remnant" of the Cold War in the Americas as he spoke directly to the Cuban people in a historic speech...

PARIS — Cuban leader Fidel Castro asked the Soviet Union in 1962 to launch a nuclear attack on the United States if it invaded Cuba, according to letters published today by a French newspaper. The respected daily Le Monde said the letters were exchanged between Castro and Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis. In an acrimonious reply, Khrushchev suggested that Castro was irresponsible, since such a war would have killed millions of people in both East and West and destroyed Cuba. Le Monde said Castro gave copies of three of his letters and two of Khrushchev's...

Friends of both Nancy and Ronald Reagan would often remark about how deeply and passionately they loved each other, even after decades of marriage, a rare thing indeed in a world where half of all marriages end in divorce. The love story of the greatest president of the 20th Century and the actress and dancer whom he met in the early 1950s would make a great subject for a movie if Hollywood cared to make it. But the romance of Nancy and Ronald Reagan also changed the world. Without her, there might not have been him.

The technical museum named After K. G. Sakharov is probably one of the main places of interest in Togliatti. It was founded in 1998, today it has many unique exhibits and is surely worth visiting. The museum allows to trace the historical development of the automobile, engineering, armoured, aviation, railway, missile, artillery and naval weapons. The B-307 was retired and moved to the museum! The Russian Tango-class submarines (Project 641B Som [Catfish]) were the successors to the Foxtrot-class submarine based in the Black Sea and Northern Fleet areas. The first of the class was completed in 1972 at Gorky. A...

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow. ~ Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965) (speech, Fulton Missouri, 5 March...

Editor's note: This column was co-authored by Elizabeth Edwards Spalding. It is just as true today as it was more than a century ago when the philosopher George Santayana wrote: "Those who cannot learn from history are condemned to repeat it." That is why the history of the Cold War--the most protracted conflict of the 20th century--is critical to today's war on terrorism. Here are ten things to understand about the Cold War: 1. It was a war. The Cold War is sometimes referred to as World War III, which is apt. At its quietest moments, the Cold War was...

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said Saturday that strains between Russia and the West have plunged the world into a "new Cold War". With tensions high over the lingering Ukraine conflict and Russia's backing of the Syrian regime, Medvedev said: "All that's left is an unfriendly policy of NATO against Russia". "We can say it even more clearly: We have slid into a new period of Cold War," he said, speaking at the Munich Security Conference. "Almost every day we are accused of making new horrible threats either against NATO as a whole, against Europe or against the US or...

Defense ministers from NATO countries agreed on Wednesday to a plan that would see the military alliance strengthened in Eastern European countries feeling at risk of aggression from Russia. The "enhanced forward presence in the eastern part of our Alliance," as NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg put it, is designed to "make clear that an attack against one ally is an attack against all allies, and that the alliance as a whole will respond." ...

Deploying Lena didn't work. Neither did shout-outs from Beyoncé, Kim, Ilana and Abbi, Ariana, Katy, Demi or either of the Amys. (snip) Why are so many young'uns feeling the Bern? I see two main reasons. The first is that, to millennials, Sanders's socialism is a feature, not a bug. Much of the current conversation about Sanders's "democratic socialism" is predicated on whether Americans can look past this supposedly toxic label. But millennials love Sanders not despite his socialism, but because of it. "Socialism" has never been a dirty word for the current cohort of youth, who either didn't live through...