Cold War Archives

I fell in love with a Soviet robot and all I got was hacked

You get a message from an unknown number that doesn’t say much more than “hello,” and after a brief response, those dreaded words: “your device has been compromised.” You splutter and demand answers. The person on the other line is unhelpful; weaves some grand tale of identity theft and infinitely valuable lost codes lingering in hyperspace—then, without further ado, he connects you to another system. The music becomes more ominous; the faux-iPhone messenger turns into a green retro display, and the mysterious and threatening K.O.M.R.A.D. greets you. But you’d be kinda shaken up too if you’d been left alone to…

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In Calm Down Stalin, great vodka comes with great responsibility

The Cold War was as much a war of personality as it was a war between nations. For more than 60 years, everyday tensions for U.S. and Soviet leaders risked boiling over into nuclear war. It took hordes of advisors on both sides to talk down leaders like Reagan and Gorbachev when faulty intel or empty threats threatened to wipe humanity off the map. In hindsight, it was as much coddling as it was diplomacy. Calm Down, Stalin is a darkly humorous look at just how close humanity can get to offing itself. Quite literally, your only job is to…

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All Walls Must Fall to explore the cultural division of Cold War-era Berlin

In All Walls Must Fall, an upcoming isometric action game from newish studio inbetweengames, the Cold War never ended. It’s 2089 and Berlin is still caught in the midst of political powerhouses threatening to push the button. But in inbetweengames’s alternate timeline, the factions of the Cold War have the ability to manipulate time, and are using it to draw out the stalemate. All Walls Must Fall is a “tech-noir” game, a term coined by James Cameron for his 1984 film The Terminator, “merging classic noir themes with sci-fi, often featuring time travel elements,” inbetweengames co-founder David Hassal told me. He, along…

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Unless your name’s James Bond, the Cold War is still the topic of the day

In the interest of accuracy, I must attribute “Christ, I miss the Cold War” to Judi Dench’s M in Casino Royale, because she actually uttered those words. But M never had a monopoly on this sentiment. Here, for instance, is international relations bigwig John J. Mearsheimer’s “Why We Will Soon Miss The Cold War.” Would you prefer your Cold War nostalgia in listicle form? Good news! Here’s historian Jon Wiener’s “Eight Things I Miss About the Cold War.” Clearly the academe edges M when it comes to clickbait titles. This is the point in an “if only the Cold War…