The second half of the 20th century was overshadowed by the longstanding tensions of the Cold War, a conflict that not only played out in the halls of government, but also in the halls of government.

[Music] [MUSIC] Hi, my name is Ed Lowry, producer of Cottonwood Connections here with Don.

We're on our second episode of Kansas and the Cold War.

In our first episode, we talked about the bigger picture of the global conflict and how that brought very large forces to bear within Kansas and the Great Plains.

But in this episode, we want to get a little more personal.

How did this era and this time affect people in communities of Kansas and the plains?

For this continued discussion, we are once again hearing from professors at the Army General Staff and Command College at Fort Leavenworth and Dr. Andrew Orr at Kansas State University.

This was a new kind of conflict for the United States.

The U.S. had never really been in a struggle like this, where there are clear foreign enemies, as you need to prepare for a hot war against them, but you're also locked in a non-shooting struggle simultaneously.

And so the first thing federal officials did was to fall back on what they'd done in World War I and World War II.

They remembered that.

And so they did a lot of the kinds of things that they'd asked people to do before.

Make sacrifices for the war effort, but you can't really bring back rationing because there's no end to this struggle.

And so you do things to try and engage public morale.

One of the tensions in the early part of the 1950s, you have a change in the scale of destruction when you go from fission weapons to thermonuclear weapons, fusion weapons.

One of the difficulties in talking about what is civil defense, when you have the ability to destroy a city like New York City with a bomb, how much does a bomb shelter help out?

And it's not the case that they're completely useless.

It's also the case that maybe they're not as effective as people want them to be.

But there is a sense that the government has to give something for people to do.

You don't want this fatalistic view of, "Well, I guess if we're going to get irradiated or we're going to get destroyed, there's nothing I can do."

And so you have some efforts.

Turn your tornado shelter into a bomb shelter.

They'll mark public buildings with sufficiently reinforced basements as fallout shelters.

And so you know where to go.

And then of course there's the duck and cover educational videos that we all see.

You might be eating your lunch when the flash comes.

Duck and cover under the table.

Then if the explosion makes anything in the room fall down, it can't fall on you.

Nuclear weapons are obviously on the minds of a whole lot of people.

And the fear that there might be a Soviet attack on our hometown.

And so to your point, one of the ways that you engage the civil population is through civil defense, particularly early warning.

There were no radars that covered the entire northern part of or northern region of the United States.

And so there could very well be a sneak attack of Soviet bombers flying over the North Pole in Canada and dropping bombs on the United States.

And so the Air Force sets up this civil defense organization called the Ground Observer Corps.

And so Kansas does become one of those states that has an active Ground Observer Corps commitment.

And the way that works is every small town is charged and challenged to establish a post, staff it, and then report any aircraft that they see to the Air Force.

And any aircraft that they can't identify, the Air Force is going to scramble a jet and go up and take a look at it.

One of the things that sparked my interest in the topic was actually a photograph posted by our local historical society in Sheridan County of a lookout tower on top of a building in downtown Hoxie.

And I mentioned to you as maybe a reason for doing an episode about this, and you mentioned you had personal experience with that tower.

I went with my dad up there quite a bit because it was an adventure to me and we got to look through, watch the sky through binoculars.

As I remember now, of course, everything looked bigger when I was smaller, but it was only about six feet by eight feet on this.

But around the walls were silhouettes of enemy planes.

A refreshing light that we could see overhead, okay, which weighs it going and is coming out of our way because the lights on the different planes were different and significant, so you had this chart to go by.

And it wasn't just the big bombers and stuff.

It was for the small planes too because spy planes.

No, sure, yeah.

So there.

You know, the other interesting part about the Ground Observer Corps is by far the vast majority of commanders of every post were women, women who didn't necessarily have a lot of opportunities to join the military or other endeavors to show their patriotism.

But they could head up this volunteer organization and make sure that it's staffed 24 hours a day and everybody does their job.

So that's kind of a cool aspect, I think.

Now this becomes rather obsolete by the late 1950s when they do get radar coverage of the United States.

But is there any better, for lack of a better word, propaganda effort than getting the entire American citizenry engaged in civil defense?

I actually found something, Don, I wanted to share with you.

So as we were starting to think about doing these episodes on the Cold War, my wife and I were visiting a town here in western Kansas, happened into an antique store, and this book was sitting on top of the pile of books.

And it's a book that was sent out by the Department of Defense.

And what was interesting to me was actually the book still has the mailing label on the back, and just like a sales circular from the grocery store or insulated windows or something, it has just family residing at, and then it tells the address.

Which tells me these were being sent out to everybody.

This was not just about what big governments were doing, they were involving everyday people.

Yeah, and you talked about it in the schools at this time.

I see the date on this is 1966.

They talked about it and they were working things in, in your science classes they'd talk about radioactivity.

They worked that into the education.

Shoulder planning, there was a chapter of survival on the farm which would be very interesting to me.

Yeah, the fallout shelters, the occupancy of them and stuff, because they had those on there and what you're prepared for.

But being in the plains, in a way it was a modification of your tornado shelters.

That if you went to the, the hidey hole or the cellar, you had food in there and you would take water with you and things like that until the danger was over.

But you'd have, be checking there for radioactivity and all this sort of thing with the nuclear bombs.

But people, if they were building a new house, a lot of people incorporated a bomb shelter in their house.

And also in the, the towns themselves there were civil defense shelters.

In the case of the bomb, they were open to the public.

And in those there were things stored and what I remember, even in the 1980s, people were finally closing those down.

There were big sealed tin cans of crackers, great juice, lemon drops.

They brought back a lot of memories from somebody's, you'd go to a place that had a bomb shelter like the suddenly elevator.

You'd say, "How about a lemon drop?"

You know, "Take as many as you want."

"Well, where'd you get these?"

You know, from under the elevator, because there was a big basement under there.

The superstructure above ground, other grain elevators, were supposed to be enough to ward off an attack so you're safe in the basement.

Some of the folks we've interviewed for this, were talking about, there was patriotism coming out of World War II, but there was almost an increase as this Cold War started developing in trying to, I guess, amp that up a little bit more.

So you ramp up patriotic displays.

You do things like have Army, Air Force, National Guard units send troops to sporting events and show up in parades all over Kansas in greater numbers.

A sense that if you're showing men in uniform and the flag, you're ramping up national patriotism.

There's some efforts to re-educate the American people about the founding ideals.

Dr. Mills, the Freedom Train?

That's right.

So the Freedom Train was the brainchild of the Attorney General of the United States in 1947.

He said, "You know what?

When we were at war in World War II, this country worked well together.

Everybody sacrificed, everybody pitched in.

And now that the war is over, everybody's kind of going their own way."

And so the Freedom Train was an effort to bring American history and patriotism to the average citizen.

It visited, I think, 330 different cities in the United States, traveled 33,000 miles, carried, I believe, 106 different artifacts of American history.

It had the U.S. Constitution.

It had the Declaration of Independence.

Had that flag that the Marines raised over Iwo Jima.

I knew about the trains and the educational thing that was going through.

I was more interested in the history.

I remember the things about the Indian Wars of the late 19th century, the stuff I saw on that.

It was several years long as a project.

It was wildly successful.

And it had U.S. Marines guarding all of those priceless artifacts.

And so people got to meet Marines and got to see the founding documents and the founding artifacts of American history, which also was absolutely an anti-communist propaganda effort to bring patriotism to the average person.

Most of the Cold War was just that cold, a long standoff.

But the U.S. fought two major wars during the Cold War, Korea and Vietnam, and Kansans were called to fight them.

For the Vietnam War, the 1st Infantry Division had been based in Kansas from 1955 to 1965, when Lyndon Johnson sends the 1st Division to fight in Vietnam.

Kansans fight in the war as draftees.

The Kansas National Guard fought in Vietnam.

So all of the ways America fought, Kansas fought.

Regular soldiers being sent abroad with their families still here in Kansas for the most part.

Draftees spending a year fighting in Vietnam, and although the National Guard was often assumed to be a safe way to avoid service, Kansas Guardmen fought in the Vietnam War, on the ground in South Vietnam.

The Cold War was still actively going on for the first couple of decades of my life.

So all through my school years, I remember hiding under my desk and hearing sonic booms of military aircraft going overhead and conversations about how close we were to Wichita and would we be safe with a nuclear attack because of the airfields there and those kinds of things.

So it was a big part of society.

So much of pop culture was about the Cold War.

It started earlier on, I'm sure, with spy shows and James Bond and all those kinds of things.

But then by the 80s, you've got movies like Red Dawn and movies like Rocky IV where he's fighting the Russian and there's songs on the radio about the potential of nuclear devastation.

And there's pop songs about this.

By the 1980s, you have a widespread fear of nuclear war, even as you still have a broad hostility to communism and the Soviet Union.

In American public opinion, these two things sat side by side.

In a lot of ways, that sums up Ronald Reagan in the mid-1980s.

He had a belief that the Soviet Union was threatening to overwhelm the West.

During the past decade and a half, the Soviets have built up a massive arsenal of new strategic nuclear weapons, weapons that can strike directly at the United States.

And so he launched a major military buildup designed to deter a Soviet attack.

But he also had a deep personal unease with nuclear weapons.

There's a story about Reagan, the candidate, when he's visiting a missile crew and he's talking to them about the missiles and everything, the ICBMs, right?

And he makes a comment about, OK, if you have to launch these, how do you call them back?

Or how do you, if it was my mistake, what happens?

And as a matter of fact, the answer is, well, once they're launched, they're on their way to the targets.

He viewed them as inherently dangerous, as in a lot of American public opinion had similar views.

You can see it in culture.

Two big things from the mid-1980s, a movie and a TV movie.

On the big screen, you had war games with Matthew Broderick.

This fear that the automated high-tech nuclear age would leave us vulnerable to being obliterated by people who acted without thinking.

There was one movie in particular, as a school kid in Kansas in the 80s, that was just particularly significant to us because it had been, we understood, produced, made in Kansas.

And it was a made-for-television movie called The Day After.

It's hard to understand how influential a TV movie could be looking back now.

Today, broadcast television has a fairly small audience.

But in 1983, most people had access to three to six TV stations.

But here you had a network TV movie about nuclear war.

We know war starts in the movie because people in Kansas can see the ICBMs launching.

And I just remember going to school the day after that showed.

My family hadn't watched it.

I don't know.

They hadn't let me watch it.

I don't know if they thought I was too young or what.

It really follows what happens afterwards.

People recovering from destroyed cities, dealing with death.

There are those who say that it actually influenced Ronald Reagan's mentality about nuclear escalation as far as, is that a good idea or not?

Reagan saw it.

It had an emotional impact on him.

We shouldn't exaggerate, though, how big an impact one thing can have.

It built support for an anti-nuclear weapons movement.

But that movement had deep roots.

This movie came out in the fall of 1983.

But in the spring of 1983, you have another event, Reagan's Star Wars speech, the Strategic Defense Initiative.

If the Soviet Union will join with us in our effort to achieve major arms reduction, we will have succeeded in stabilizing the nuclear balance.

Nevertheless, it will still be necessary to rely on the specter of retaliation, on mutual threat.

And that's a sad commentary on the human condition.

Wouldn't it be better to save lives than to avenge them?

He announced at the time a wildly unrealistic plan to supercharge research so the U.S. would be able to create a space-based system to shoot down Soviet ICBMs.

Let me share with you a vision of the future which offers hope.

It is that we embark on a program to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive.

Let us turn to the very strengths in technology that spawned our great industrial base and that have given us the quality of life we enjoy today.

It's unrealistic.

It terrified the Soviets who weren't entirely sure the U.S. couldn't do it.

So there was a lot of fear in Moscow.

Gorbachev was worried about it.

And that drove him in his negotiations to some extent.

But we can see Reagan pushing it because he wants to make nuclear weapons obsolete.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of mythology with Reagan's strategic defense initiative.

Some call it Star Wars.

It's designed to bankrupt the Soviets, which it's not.

It's actually designed as Reagan is deeply concerned about this mutual assured destruction thing and that the Soviets really have a superiority in ICBMs.

And we build this layered shield to help right the balance.

What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?

I know this is a formidable technical task, one that may not be accomplished before the end of this century.

The unintended consequences of the Soviet economic system can't compete and they have a significant brain drain and lack of computing power and laser and all this research and developments in hard science, which is, I would argue, an unintended consequence of pushing SDI.

And I think the tie-in to the day after reinforces that point.

So he has to be a hawk.

But yet at the same time, as the relationship with Gorbachev grows in the late 80s, it becomes much more of a, yeah, this is good for anybody.

And from the Gorbachev perspective, I think you get Gorbachev realizes Reagan isn't this kind of mad, power-hungry cowboy.

He kind of has some ideas and he doesn't want nuclear exchange.

So I think that helps feed into the movie, that the movie is, you know, this won't be good for most folks, by the way, no matter if you have shelters or not.

It's going to be bad.

Yeah, that's right.

Apparently those school desks were something.

I guess, right?

I saw a cartoon one time, it's instead of SDI or Star Wars, just build an enormous school desk over top of the United States.

Yes.

If it's good enough for children, it's good enough for everyone else.

It's real American steel.

Yeah.

Right.

American ingenuity.

That's right.

There is one sign that the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace.

General Secretary Gorbachev, come here to this gate.

Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate.

There are a number of competing theories about how and why the Cold War ended as it did.

But there are some pieces that are common to almost every scholarly understanding of how the war ended.

And that is that fundamentally the Cold War ends because the Soviet Union begins to fall apart under the stress of competition.

And most scholars think the inherent weaknesses inside the Soviet system.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

You see evidence in the 1960s.

Already this is a system that can't last.

But even in 1988, there aren't national security professionals in the United States saying, hey, this thing's on its last legs.

But yet by 1992, it's gone.

Much of American military history before the Cold War had been built on relatively short, sharp conflicts.

The Cold War had to be fought literally over generations.

The Cold War lasted 45, 46 years or so.

It's been over almost that long.

But it impacts so much of what we're dealing with today, the alignment of nations and the grudges among nations.

It is still very relevant to trying to figure out why we are where we are today.

And it's not just a historical artifact.

Kansas looks different than it would have without the Cold War.

Before the Cold War, the military establishment in Kansas was pulling back.

McConnell Air Force Base was shut down after World War II.

It's reopened for the Stratojets, strategic bombers, and survives to this day as part of America's strategic air power posture.

The First Division didn't have to come back to Kansas.

But the experience of sending those men to fight, bringing them back, veterans staying in Kansas transforms Kansas, shapes its politics and its culture down to today.

I would encourage folks to explore the Cold War.

And today I think we are a victim of it too, right?

We tend to say it's a Soviet Union versus the United States.

The reality is it's a much more dynamic global Cold War.

We can know so much more about what's behind those decisions, not only from the US perspective, but also from the Soviet perspective.

So definitely read about the Cold War because it helps you understand the chaotic character of the international scene.

But also it helps us better understand policy formation, better understand why things worked out the way that they did.

Some of that's because of good decisions and some of that's because the brakes went our way.

Yeah, it ended in a whimper.

Which is probably the best way it could have ended versus the alternative, right?

Which I'll take luck as part of that too.

But I think some vigilant planning and decision making feeds into that luck.

So just read about it because there's so much more literature out about it now than there was in say 89, 90 that you get a much greater appreciation for its impact.

Not just for the local Kansans, but also what it means for folks in Africa, Latin America, you know, China, Asia, you name it.

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