10 Strange Cold War Tales
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 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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