Cold War Reads

Forty-nine years ago today, on October 14, 1962, a spy plane photographed Soviet missiles stationed in Cuba, 90 miles off the U.S. coastline, which sparked the Cuban Missile Crisis. Only two years and two days later, China executed a successful nuclear test, making it the fifth nation with nuclear capability.

Today, nuclear conflicts have all but vanished from our minds. Take a dive through the history of Cold War technology, from the Cuban Missile Crisis to today, with these MIT Press reads:

 

Contemporary Nuclear Debates: Missile Defenses, Arms Control, and Arms Races in the Twenty-First Century Edited by Alexander T.J. Lennon

The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, in the hands of both states and terrorist networks, is considered by many to be the greatest threat to global security today. Contemporary Nuclear Debates discusses the key issues surrounding that threat.

 

 

 

Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance By Donald MacKenzie

Donald MacKenzie follows one line of technology - strategic ballistic missile guidance through a succession of weapons systems to reveal the workings of a world that is neither awesome nor unstoppable.

 

 

 

 

Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces Edited by Pavel Podvig

Discusses the structure of the political and military leadership in the Soviet Union and Russia, the structure of the Russian military and military industry, nuclear planning procedures, and the structure of the command and control system.

All the information is presented chronologically, arranged by individual systems and facilities, and is not available elsewhere in a single volume.

 

 

 

Domesticity at War By Beatriz Colomina

Just as manufacturers were turning wartime industry to peacetime productivity—going from missiles to washing machines—American architects and cultural institutions were, in Buckminster Fuller’s words, turning “weaponry into livingry.”

Colomina examines, with interlocking case studies and an army of images, the embattled and obsessive domesticity of postwar America. She reports on, among other things…a corrugated steel house suitable for use as a bomb shelter, and the American lawn as patriotic site and inalienable right.

 

 

 

From Whirlwind to MITRE: The R&D Story of The SAGE Air Defense Computer By Kent C. Redmond and Thomas M. Smith

The book shows how the wartime alliance of engineers, scientists, and the military exemplified by MIT's Radiation Lab helped to transform research and development practice in the United States through the end of the Cold War period.

Presents an organizational and social history of…SAGE, [which] monitored North American skies for possible attack by manned aircraft and missiles for twenty-five years.

 

 

 

Revolutionary Struggle 1947-1958: Volume 1 of the Selected Works of Fidel Castro By Rolando Bonachea and Nelson P. Valdes

A collection of Castro's chief statements—letters, articles, interviews, press releases, proclamations, and decrees—from the late 1940s to the fall of the Batista regime in 1959.