Cold War | War History

Keeping The Promise – Air Force Veteran Finishes Career While Commander of 24th NORAD Region

War History online proudly presents this Guest Piece from Jeremy P. Ämick, who is a military historian and writes on behalf of the Silver Star Families…

BRDM – The Specialist Soviet Armored Fighting Recon Vehicles

Greg Jackson

Arriving in 1957 The first BRDM vehicle, the BRDM-1, entered service in the Soviet army in 1957. It had been accepted for use by the…

How A Small Group Of Canadian Paratroopers Saved Denmark From Soviet Occupation

By May 1945 the war in Europe had finally started to wind down. Yet for the men of the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion, there was…

BRDM – The Specialist Soviet Armored Fighting Recon Vehicles

Arriving in 1957 The first BRDM vehicle, the BRDM-1, entered service in the Soviet army in 1957. It had been accepted for use by the…

Raining Fire – Soviet Multiple Rocket Launcher Vehicles of the Cold War

Rocketry was an important part of the Warsaw Pact to armies during the Cold War. Having discovered in WWII that multiple rocket launchers (MRLs) were…

Nukes on the Moon: The A119 Cold War Project

Lincoln Riddle

In the late 1950s, in the midst of the Cold War, the United States developed a super-secret plan referred to as Project A119, involving the…

Things Nearly Went Nuclear When the Chinese Stole a Soviet Tank

In 1900, Russia signed the Treaty of Beijing which gave them Outer Manchuria and other Chinese lands. When both countries became communist, their nagging border…

The Tsar Bomba, The Biggest Bomb The World Has Ever Seen

Lincoln Riddle

Every aspect of the phrase, ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ applies to the Tsar Bomba. The weapon was the Soviet Union’s rebuttal to the United States…

Saddam’s Secret Super Gun – Project Babylon

Project Babylon was an Iraqi code name for the construction of a supergun, commissioned by Sadam Hussein in 1988. The engineer in charge of the…

When The Nuclear Submarine USS San Francisco Crashed Into An Undersea Mountain

Launched in 1979, the USS San Francisco is the third American ship, boat or submarine to carry a title featuring San Francisco in the name.  In…

Operation Urgent Fury: The 1983 US Invasion of Grenada

In 1983, the Cold War was rather hot: Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States and the relations between East and West deteriorated.…

After 39 Soviet Commandos Took Hill 3234 In Afghanistan, Not Even Hundreds Of Mujahedeen Could Dislodge Them

Greg Jackson

The Soviet-Afghan War, or the “Soviet Vietnam” as some political analysts called it, was one of the key points in which the decaying superpower came…