Free Republic

As we look back tomorrow at the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union, an important question should be raised: could the USSR actually have won the Cold War? Or maybe a better question: at least survived? That was something we asked Professor Tom Nichols of the U.S. Naval War College and Harvard University back in 2014.

The second -- 21 century version -- Cold War has officially started, courtesy of China: IMAGE CNN explains: The images, released by the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, show anti-aircraft guns plus other weapons systems that would guard against cruise missiles sitting in hexagonal structures on the islands. China has already built military-length airstrips on three of these artificial islands, previous analysis by the AMTI, part of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), has shown. According to China, the weapons are purely meant for self-defense. Sadly for the red Chinese, nobody's willing to accept that explanation. China can...

Author of a masterful study on the CIA and the cultural Cold War, British historian Frances Stonor Saunders provided a detailed account for The Independent of the CIA’s covert role in sponsoring Abstract Expressionist painting in the United States. The CIA exploited this artistic movement as a showcase of freedom and free enterprise, and to counteract the influence that communist ideology still had for many intellectuals and artists in the West. For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art...

This is a good example of Liberal Psychosis. It bemoans the making poorer an America which out-spent the Russians on Cold War systems and equipment. Somehow, to the author, having defeated the USSR in the Cold War, has made America poorer, worse-off. Clearly, he wishes Russia had won the Cold War, to make America richer, more successful. I have not seen a more stupid article in a long time. Thank you, Washington Post, for reassuring us that Liberals know absolutely nothing about the real world. merit.

Sweden has built some fascinating aircraft over the years, but the SAAB 37 Viggen has to be one of the most interesting. The jet was unique—its delta-canard configuration was cutting-edge, and its ability to operate in austere conditions made it quite independent compared to most other western fighters of the era. The Saab's unique engine choice not only resulted in its stout appearance, and also gave it unique performance characteristics—especially when it came to short field operations. In the early 1960s while turbojets still filled the sky SAAB designers pursued a turbofan engine for their new multi-role fighter-attack-reconnaissance-interceptor. The type...

It seems we have something more to be thankful for the day after Thanksgiving! On November 25th, 2016 after ruling over the poor people of Cuba for 57 years, Fidel Castro, AKA El Jaffe, El Commandant and the butcher died and entered eternity Godless and Christless as he lived and reigned. Born in the hamlet of Biran in 1926 to a hardworking Spanish farmer Angel Castro y Argiz, Castro was the illegitimate offspring by Angel and a cook, Lina Ruz Gonzales. Angel served as a soldier in the Spanish American war in Cuba and at wars end returned where he...

Important note: this terror plot to murder thousands of American holiday shoppers was planned  by essentially the same Stalinist terror-sponsors who rule Cuba today and who receive an estimated $4 billion annually from the U.S.-- thanks mostly to Obama’s executive orders that loopholed the “Cuban embargo” half to death. For his transition team, President-elect Trump has just appointed a former Treasury Dept. official who probably ranks as the most knowledgeable American on how horribly the letter of U.S. law [the Cuban embargo] has been violated by Obama in his “opening” to the terror-sponsoring Castro regime. Consequently, nobody is better...

I have been studying, working and going to Russia for 34 years. From the beginning I was lucky enough to meet and get to know a wide variety of Russians. During these many years whenever I went, it was always apparent that what I saw and heard was often diametrically different from both the official and the journalistic perception in the United States. I came to call it my worm’s eye view. The more I studied Russian history and culture the more I saw that the picture was always far more nuanced and complex than the judgments often characteristic of...

Those who have been toying with outright war against Russia, and an escalation of the conflict in Syria, are putting the lives of all Americans at risk. Of course, the threat of nuclear annihilation has been with us since the earliest days of the Cold War, but Russia has now positioned itself with the largest and most destructive nuclear arsenal of any country in the world.

Mark Twain probably didn’t make the famous quip, “History doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes,” but the phrase’s sentiment often feels right. In discussing British independence, U.S. nuclear policy, strategic-weapons upgrades and a fraying “special relationship,” we could be discussing current events—or those of a half-century ago. In the late 1950s, Britain’s defense establishment faced some grim realities. The empire and its wealth were no more, and nuclear weapons were very costly. Although UK scientists played major roles in the Manhattan Project, postwar espionage and U.S. mistrust of the British led to a chill in collaboration and to the UK’s...

Our nature as Americans, in focusing on the present, is to quickly forget the past. Today the omnipresent news and social media cycles remind us 24/7 that we are in a war with an enemy our leadership fails to fully acknowledge. And we are in an ongoing culture war battling political correctness, with PC forces aggressively on the offensive. For many these first nine months of 2016 seem to be without historical precedent, the world about to spin off its axis. We fail to remember that there was an existence before the Internet, before PC became the cause celebre for...

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...