The award-winning #podcast preserving the stories of the #ColdWar before they are lost…subscribe for free. Produced by Ian Sanders FRHistS
On 29 August 1949 at 7:00 a.m. the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb. Listen on Apple PodcastsListen on SpotifyListen on Google PodcastsBecome a Patron! The test stunned the Western powers. American intelligence had estimated that the Soviets would not produce an atomic weapon until 1953, while the British did not expect it … Read more
In November of 1982, at the height of the Cold War, Samantha Smith, a 10-year-old girl from Manchester, Maine, wrote to the Soviet leader Yuri Andropov and asked him if he was going to wage a nuclear war against the U.S. When an unprecedented response from Andropov arrived, and Samantha received an invitation to visit … Read more
Listen on Apple PodcastsListen on SpotifyListen on Google PodcastsBecome a Patron! The second part of Svetlana’s story starts shortly after her arrival in West Germany with her husband Oleg who is the Chief Editor of the Russian Service of Radio Liberty a CIA-financed station beaming Western propaganda into the Soviet Union. To Svetlana’s horror, Oleg … Read more
Listen on Apple PodcastsListen on SpotifyListen on Google PodcastsBecome a Patron! Svetlana came from a dissident Jewish family opposed to Soviet rule in Latvia. Her parents survived World War 2, but during the Stalin era two members of her family were held in the Gulags. The family never resigned themselves to Latvia’s occupation by … Read more
wwListen on Apple PodcastsListen on SpotifyListen on Google Podcasts Richard was 6 years old when he was uprooted from a school in the United States to a Soviet school 700 miles East of Moscow. In 1988 the Soviet Union was opening up following Michael Gorbachev’s policy of Perestroika and American firms began looking at … Read more
Tim Lyon was an officer assigned to the 400th Strategic Missile Squadron located in Cheyenne Wyoming. The Squadron was maintaining 50 Peacekeeper ICBM missiles based in underground silos in farmers’ fields in remote areas of Wyoming. Listen on Apple PodcastsListen on SpotifyListen on Google PodcastsBecome a Patron! Tim was one of two launch officers who … Read more
Warning: This episode does cover the subject of suicide. If you need help please use these links: UK https://www.samaritans.org/how-we-can-help/contact-samaritan/ Rest of the World https://findahelpline.com/i/iasp Listen on Apple PodcastsListen on SpotifyListen on Google Podcasts Dean Reed was an American actor, singer and songwriter, director, and Socialist who became a huge star in Latin America and the Eastern Bloc. … Read more
On 10 February 1962, Gary Powers, the American pilot whose U2 spy plane was shot down in Soviet airspace, was released on “The Bridge in Spies” in Berlin by his captors in exchange for one Colonel Rudolf Abel, aka Vilyam Fisher – one of the most extraordinary characters in the history of the Cold … Read more
In 1986 Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev said “Never perhaps, in the post-war decades has the situation in the world been explosive and hence more difficult and unfavourable as in the first half of the 1980s.” Listen on Apple PodcastsListen on SpotifyListen on Google Podcasts He was referring to a period of immense tension between the … Read more
Dave Phillips is a Yeoman Warder at the Tower of London. The Yeoman Warders have been guarding the Tower since Tudor times. Dave joined the British Army aged 16 into the Royal Irish Rangers. We hear of his early years in the Army in Northern Ireland and his posting to West Berlin. In West Berlin … Read more