Cold war - stories

Agreed To End The Cold War.....If Aliens Attacked

During the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union competed in everything from space to missiles to boxing but considering that LBJ was involved, it probably wasn't limited to mere comparison.

There was one arena in which the two powers had no desire to compete, however: alien invasion. If little green lads came down from the UFO, they would've torn off their partisan shorts, linked arms, and started throwing joint haymakers up at the sky.

This is absolutely not a joke.

In a 2009 interview, Mikhail Gorbachev revealed that during the 1985 Geneva Peace Summit, he and Ronald Reagan were taking a walk around the gardens when Reagan threw out something that'd been bothering him for some time: "'What would you do if someone from outer space suddenly attacked The United States? Would you help us?' I said, 'No doubt about it.' He said, 'We too.'"

If the peace summit the two were attending didn't work out, their next-best hope was a full-scale alien attack. We should point out that this wasn't some crazy fever dream of Reagan's, just a case of him taking his hobby way too far. Reagan was a huge sci-fi nerd, a love that stemmed from a childhood spent reading books like the John Carter series. This eventually resulted not only in him staffing a space policy think tank with astronauts, engineers, and sci-fi writers such as Robert Heinlein, but also in the creation of a missile defense program named after the most popular sci-fi franchise of the day.

Two Scientists Died Messing With The Same Nuclear Core

On August 21, 1945, Harry K. Daghlian Jr., an assistant physicist at Los Alamos, was undertaking an experiment with a spherical core of plutonium (code-named "Rufus") and a set of tungsten carbide bricks -- the object being to build a house of bricks around the core to generate a controlled nuclear reaction. As he was building, however, the core started to, as official physicist lingo puts it, go nutso. In his rush to compensate, Daghlian dropped a brick directly onto the exposed core and was quickly enveloped in a beautiful hot blue light. Not usually a good sign when you're working with nuclear materials.

Daghlian received a radiation dosage nearing 40,000 rem -- and considering that a dosage of 5,000 rem is fatal, he was as super-dead as it's physically possible for a person to be.

Only nine months later, Louis Slotin, another nuclear physicist, accidentally caused the same plutonium core to go nutso on his internal organs. Henceforth it was no longer Rufus, but THE DEMON CORE (seriously). After getting hit with 21,000 rem of radiation, Slotin suffered for nine days before he died, after which hopefully somebody handed these guys some goddamn tongs or something.

Chickens?

The 1950s were a strange time to be alive. Rationing was still in effect following the end of the Second World War and the world was gripped in the early days by a continued threat of nuclear war, prompting governments to devise new plans to counter this. The British were no exception.

In 1957, the British government started Operation Blue Peacock, which despite sounding like a strip bar was actually a plan involving nuclear landmines! Picture the scene: the Russian army has deployed on one side, the US army has deployed on the other side and you’re stuck in the middle. (Got to do something, right?) So, they decided to plant TEN nuclear mines as a deterrent against Russia invading West Germany. Surprisingly, we aren’t even at the crazy part yet! The biggest problem they faced was the unpredictability of the components in cold weather and given that the winters in Germany can be harsh, something needed to be done.

What they came up with proves that this was a time when no idea was dissuaded: surrounding the bombs with chickens. Yes, actual chickens. It was believed that their body heat would keep the parts at the right temperature long enough to retreat to a safe distance to detonate. Could have been a real coop!