soviet union

Chris Knight's avatar
SDI, Strategic Defense Initiative, Star Wars, missiles, nuclear weapons, antiballistic

It was thirty years ago this week that President Ronald Reagan gave a historic speech proposing, for the first time, a space-based anti-ballistic missile system for the United States.  The plan, once developed, would utilize ground and space-based weaponry to blast apart incoming nuclear missiles.  The basic premise was an array of missile-launching satellites around the Earth.  A far more radical design called for the deployment of platforms in orbit: either carrying anti-missile lasers or particle beams, or as part of an adaptive-optics system which would focus a surface-generated laser onto a moving target anywhere around the world (see illustration).

The official name for the concept was Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI.  But for reasons apparent to everyone it was quickly labeled “Star Wars” by the mainstream press and the name stuck.

SDI gained notoriety overnight, as much from many people in the United States as from the government ...

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Chris Knight's avatar
Mysterious bar code on the ground, United States, Cold War, surveillance aircraft, spy satellites
The “bar code” at Walker Field, Maryland

Adjacent to the runway of a Navy airfield in Maryland is a paved rectangle.  And within that area are a series of quadrilaterals painted bright white, in pairs and ascending in size.

By itself its existence would be a mystery, or at least a curiosity.  Except that it is one of dozens to be known throughout the United States, with most of those found near military bases and other restricted facilities.  Some remote locations have entire arrays of the “bar codes” stretching for miles toward the horizon.

So what are these test pattern-ish arrangements?  Based on available evidence, they seem to have been put in place by the government during the first few decades of the Cold War.  With tensions high between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the advent of high-altitude aircraft reconnaissance – and then “spy” satellites – became an important ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Working on a few things behind the scenes, but felt like posting something tonight. And that’s when I discovered that YouTube is hosting Threads.

Sure, why not.

I first saw this movie in July of 1986 but it wasn’t until I was in college a long time later that I found out the title. We were visiting family in Florida and playing a game of Monopoly in our motel room with my cousins and we thought we’d put some TV on. It was a PBS station showing… some very dark and gritty film about nuclear war in England.

I was 12 years old. I soon lost all interest in Monopoly and became transfixed to this film. The image of the young woman chewing through her newborn baby’s umbilical cord is something that has haunted me to this day.

Threads originally aired on BBC Two in Great Britain in September ...

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Sixty-six years after he disappeared into the prisons of the Soviet Union, new information has been discovered about the fate of Raoul Wallenberg.

Raoul Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat who became one of the most revered heroes of World War II. At the height of the Holocaust, Wallenberg was able to rescue and shelter tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews who would have otherwise been dispatched to the concentration camps. When the Soviets liberated Budapest early in 1945, Wallenberg was taken into custody by the Russians on suspicion of being a spy for the United States. His fate remains unknown to this day. The Soviets reported two years later that Wallenberg had died in his cell… but there are reports that he was seen alive as late as 1987.

Now two researchers who have studied the case for decades have announced that they have discovered old Soviet files pertaining ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

For two days now this has been wigging me out. Think y’all will understand why as you read on…

Saturday afternoon my girlfriend arrived at my house. It’s about a hundred miles or so between where we live (only an hour and a half of drive time, and less if the Virginia state troopers aren’t looking :-P). She came at 2 and we were hanging out here when a short while later in the afternoon we noticed something on the front bumper of her car.

At first we thought it might be part of some animal that she had hit (though she couldn’t remember ever hitting one, which is better than can be said about Yours Truly, but anyhoo…) But when we went out to look at it, it wasn’t long before we had wished that it was a piece of roadkill, ‘cuz we can not figure out how this ...

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It was twenty-five years ago today, on the morning of April 26th 1986, that the Chernobyl disaster – the very worst nuclear accident in history – happened.

The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, located at Pripyat in Ukraine, suffered a severe meltdown in Reactor No. 4 following an attempted experiment. The town of Pripyat was evacuated and thousands of firefighters and other workers died either during the immediate crisis or in the following weeks from radiation poisoning. The reactor ended up entombed within a “sarcophagus” and the entire area rendered a wasteland. It’ll take several thousands of more years yet before human resettlement within what has come to be known as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone will be possible again. The years since have seen some very tragic results, such as birth defects and an increase in cancer rates of those who were most in the path of the radioactive cloud (which ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Longtime readers of this blog know that one bit of history that I’m particularly fond of is Russian space exploration. Say what one might about the policies of the Soviet government during those early years, I can’t help but have huge appreciation for the engineers and pilots who took part in that endeavor. It wasn’t politics that drove those men and women: just good ol’ human adventure and tenacity.

So that said, The Knight Shift salutes the memory of Yuri Gagarin, who on this day in 1961 became the first human to journey into space… and not only that but became the first person to complete an orbit of the Earth! His flight aboard Vostok 1 would be his only spaceflight. And unfortunately a few years later Gagarin perished during a training flight in a MiG 15. He was only 34 at the time.

I don’t look at it ...

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On July 24th, 1959, one of the more unusual events of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union took place. At the opening of the American National Exhibition in Moscow, visiting U.S. Vice-President (and future President) Richard Nixon accompanied Russian Premier Nikia Krushchev on a tour of a model “typical” American house, complete with all the modern conveniences of the late Fifties. It was meant to be a goodwill gesture on the part of both countries… but soon devolved (or escalated) into a rambunctious argument between Nixon and Krushchev about the pros and cons of their respective countries’ systems of capitalism and communism. The impromptu discussion reached its climax in the kitchen of the model house, where Nixon enthusiastically pointed out American household appliances such as an automatic dishwasher.

And so it was that the “Kitchen Debate” received its more-or-less formal moniker.

Here’s a newsreel clip ...

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Robert Ballard has come forward with something very interesting: his successful 1985 search for the Titanic was only a cover story for a mission from the United States Government.

The deal was: Ballard would assist the U.S. Navy in examining the wreckage of two American nuclear submarines – the Thresher and the Scorpion – that were lost at sea in the Atlantic during the 1960s. At the time, there was concern that the Soviet Union might somehow find and exploit the sunken subs. The expedition was funded by the government and upon completion, Ballard would be free to continue his quest for the Titanic. All fine and dandy… except few people expected him to find the thing! Some in the Navy were alarmed that Ballard’s discovery might arouse suspicion, but because of all the publicity about the Titanic itself nobody dared question the purpose of Ballard’s mission.

Head ...

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