The award-winning podcast preserving the stories of the Cold War before they are lost…subscribe for free. Produced by Ian Sanders FRHistS
The Jodrell Bank observatory in Cheshire in the UK played a significant secret role during the Cold War. It was established in 1945 by Bernard Lovell, a radio astronomer at the university, to investigate cosmic rays after his work on radar in the Second World War. Listen on Apple PodcastsListen on SpotifyListen on Google PodcastsBecome … Read more
Richard Stachurski joined the US Air Force in 1962, on the cusp of the Cuban Missile Crisis as a security police officer guarding nuclear-armed B-58 Hustler bombers. Within two years he volunteered for the Minuteman nuclear missile program where he served as a Deputy Missile Combat Crew Commander with the 68th Strategic Missile Squadron … Read more
Fred Haise was one of the three astronauts on the ill-fated Moon mission when a design fault caused an oxygen tank to explode mid-mission putting the Apollo 13 crew in mortal danger on April 13th, 1970. This was the seventh crewed mission in the Apollo space program and the third meant to land on the … Read more
The phrase “history is human” was coined by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian David McCullough. He says “History is about life. It isn’t just about dates and quotations from obscure treaties and the like; it’s about people”, which is exactly what Cold War Conversations is about. I discovered this phrase listening to the History … Read more
On 17 July 1975 the first manned international space mission, carried out jointly by the United States and the Soviet Union. Millions of people around the world watched on television as a United States Apollo module docked with a Soviet Union Soyuz capsule. The project, and its memorable handshake in the heavens, was a symbol … Read more
This week it’s the 60th anniversary of the flight of Gherman Titov on Vostok 2. The forgotten 2nd cosmonaut overshadowed by the exploits of his friend Yuri Gagarin. Titov’s 25.3 hours and 17 orbits flight was much more ambitious than Gagarin’s and more dangerous. It was also a very political flight, intending to distract the … Read more
9.07 a.m., April 12, 1961. A top-secret rocket site in the USSR. A young Russian sits inside a tiny capsule on top of the Soviet Union’s most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile – originally designed to carry a nuclear warhead – and blasts into the skies. His name is Yuri Gagarin. And he is about to … Read more
Richard Easton is the co-author of GPS Declassified which examines the development of GPS or Sat Nav as some of us call it now, from its secret, Cold War military roots. Roger Easton, Richard’s father, assisted in laying the foundations for the GPS system. However, Roger Easton also worked on the early US space program and … Read more
In a world divided by the ideological struggles of the Cold War, the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, more than one-fifth of the people on the planet paused to watch the live transmission of the Apollo 11 mission. To watch as humanity took a giant leap forward exactly 50 years ago. Now … Read more
We talk with Vince Houghton – Curator of the International Spy Museum who has just written a new book called “Nuking the Moon & Other Intelligence Schemes & Military Plots left on the Drawing Board”. Vince proves that abandoned plans can be just as illuminating–and every bit as entertaining–as the ones that made it. … Read more