The Cold War was a period of time when all of the countries of the world waited with baited breath to see what the outcome of the decades-long hard staring contest between the United States and the Soviet Union would be. As the nuclear arms race ramped up, some of these countries (either voluntarily or otherwise) picked sides; some began developing nuclear programs of their own, and most just kept their heads down and quietly hoped for another day without complete annihilation.
Most are aware of some of the truly shady things done by intelligence agencies and military organizations during this period, but the sheer scope of programs designed to figure out the capabilities of and/or screw with the other guy—and the ridiculous amounts of money and effort involved—is staggering. Here are some Cold War-era programs that should never have been—from the laughably ineffective to the jaw-droppingly criminal.
[amazon asin=B007KTEBO0&template=*lrc ad (left)]10 Real Flying Saucer
Before the development of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile and the real threat of total nuclear destruction, people projected their Atomic fears onto all kinds of weird things. In the 1950s, flying saucers were all the rage. Little green men were the go-to villains of movies and television, and sightings of flying saucers exploded to such a degree that the US Air Force were essentially forced to take them seriously.
At some point, someone undoubtedly suggested that perhaps the saucers had a more sinister origin… a Russian origin. And by God, if there was any chance that the Russkies had a flying saucer, the US was damn well going to have one, too.
US Air Force project 1794, as described in an official document from 1956, was an effort to create a Vertical Takeoff and Landing honest-to-Pete flying saucer that would just beat the crap out of anything else in the sky, including the USAF’s own fighter jets. This machine, built by Canadian aerospace firm Avro at the behest of the United States government, was projected to be capable of reaching altitudes of 100,000 feet while traveling at [amazon asin=B00BC5I6Q2&template=*lrc ad (right)]Mach 4 and also, did we mention, being a flying saucer.
Its performance fell somewhat short of expectations. That is to say, it began to wobble uncontrollably any higher than three feet off the ground, never got beyond blistering speeds of 35 MPH, and proved completely aerodynamically unsound in wind tunnel tests. We’re not sure if “Aerospace” means something else in Canada, but then it should have been obvious to everyone involved from the beginning that the very idea of a flying saucer is just wildly unscientific.
9 Green Run
The Hanford Site, a decades-old government complex in Washington State, is the site of the first working plutonium producing nuclear reactor. Plutonium manufactured there was used in the very first atomic bomb test, and [amazon asin=B009Z59ZNE&template=*lrc ad (left)]also in Fat Man—the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki and ended World War II.
Residents of the nearby town of Hanford were subjected to many small releases of radioactive iodine between 1944 and ’47, as batches of spent fuel that were allowed to decay for a shorter time than normal were released as clouds into the atmosphere. While there is little documentation or detail about these exposures, the “Green Run” of 1949 is slightly more well-documented—and terrifying.
A batch of fuel of the type that was usually allowed to cool for up to 101 days underwent only a 16-day cooling period, making the exhaust from the plant much, much more radioactive than normal. The resulting cloud was released over a populated area, its movement tracked by the Air Force.
The likely purpose of the experiment was to get an idea of the pattern with which such a cloud could spread, so that similar patterns could be detected via reconnaissance in the USSR, and their plutonium production facilities [amazon asin=1629144894&template=*lrc ad (right)]could be located and kept track of. But that’s kind of the scary thing—even that is only an educated guess on the part of one of the scientists who helped run the experiment. Even they weren’t told for sure.
8 PROFUNC
And in the Refusing To Learn From History department, we have this decades-long Canadian program designed to keep tabs on Communists and Communist sympathizers throughout America’s neighbor to the north. The 1946 Gouzenko Affair, in which Canadian spies were accused of passing secrets the the Soviets in one of the first North American trials of its kind, helped to jump-start the Cold War and was the beginning of a (not so) healthy Red Paranoia that was soon to sweep the continent.
[amazon asin=162914603X&template=*lrc ad (left)]Part of the project—the part that was implemented—involved collecting names, and lots of them; 16,000 suspected Communists and 50,000 potential “sympathizers” had made PROFUNC’s list by the time all was said and done. The really insane part of this plan was its provision for “M-Day”, which would have been implemented in the event of a “national security crisis”; which, if you think about it, could cover a lot of things.
Short for “mobilization day”, this would have involved literally rounding up everyone on the list and sticking them into internment camps—you know, like the ones the American government had employed to detain Japanese Americans during World War II, and eventually had to apologize profusely and pay reparations for. These camps were in place all across Canada, ready to house thousands of suspected Commies should a “crisis” arise.
The very detailed plan helpfully provided for a course of action should anyone try to escape one of these hypothetical camps in this purely “what if” scenario: they would be shot dead. Hypothetically.
