We’ve previously talked about bizarre things that happened during the Cold War, and there are much more such stories. Four decades truly is more than enough time for all sorts of wackiness.

10 Nixon’s Pretend Attack On The Soviets

In October 1969, nuclear-armed bombers took off from the US and raced over the North Pole. The move looked very much like a preemptive strike against the communists. It wasn’t; it was just part of Richard Nixon’s crazy plan to make the Soviet Union think he was crazy. Nixon’s thinking was that if the Soviets thought he was crazy, they would tell the North Vietnamese to back off in Vietnam out of fear he would do something rash. Alternately, Nixon The Man Who Killed Ken... Roger Stone Best Price: $4.24 Buy New $5.41 (as of 07:15 UTC - Details) might have wanted to deter the Soviets from bombing China’s nuclear weapons facilities, as the Soviets and Chinese were rather unfriendly toward each other at this stage of the Cold War.

The operation was so secret that top US military officials were kept out of the loop, even the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. The operation also coincided with US nuclear forces secretly going on alert, again without telling top US generals. In the end, if its goal was to get the Soviets to respond in some way, the operation seems to have failed. The US detected no changes in Soviet activities.

9 The US Built A Top Secret Bunker For Congress Inside A Luxury Hotel

Nixonu2019s Secrets: T... Roger Stone Best Price: $4.00 Buy New $6.55 (as of 07:15 UTC - Details) West Virginia’s Greenbrier Resort is famous as a haunt of kings, prime ministers, and presidents. But for 30 years during the Cold War, it was also home to a gigantic fallout shelter the size of a Walmart, designed to house all of Congress during nuclear war. Construction of the fallout shelter started in 1958. The workers who dug the big hole in the ground and poured tens of thousands of tons of concrete into it were told that they were building a new conference facility. This was technically true, as part of the complex was occasionally used as such; thousands of people would walk in and out of the bunker without ever knowing they had been in a top secret fallout shelter for the US Congress.

For years, there were rumors about the area, and most of the people in the nearby town of White Sulphur Springs knew something was amiss. A 2,000-meter (7,000 ft) runway was built along with the bunker to secretly allow speedy transportation from Washington, which raised questions as to why it was needed in a town of just a few thousand people. There was also the mysterious group of workers who worked at the hotel but not for the hotel. They were there to secretly keep the bunker in tip-top shape.

Family of Secrets Russ Baker Best Price: $1.93 Buy New $8.85 (as of 05:45 UTC - Details) The bunker was ultimately exposed by The Washington Post in 1992. Its secrecy was blown, the facility was deactivated.

8 The Battle Of Palmdale

On August 20, 1956, the US Navy was testing an automated drone designed for use in tests of air-to-air missiles. The drone was supposed to crash into the Pacific Ocean but instead malfunctioned and started heading for Los Angeles. The Navy, understandably panicked about the drone heading toward a major city, sent two fighter aircraft to shoot it down. That should have been a simple mission, right?

As it turned out, the fighters were ill-equipped to shoot down the drone. Even after firing 208 unguided air-to-air rockets at the drone, the fighters failed to do anything but set fire to Los Angeles County below them, with rockets landing in people’s backyards and blazes burning very close to a munitions factory. The fires burned 1,000 acres. The drone finally crashed when it ran out of fuel, thankfully coming down in an empty stretch of desert.

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