The decades-long Cold War, which would embroil the world in conflict that would threaten humanity's very existence, also impacted plain states like Kansas in ways both very large and very personal.

[Music] [Music] [Music] So the Cold War hit all of America, and some of us remember it and a lot of us don't.

I must have been seven, maybe eight.

Where at a United Nations meeting, Nikita Khrushchev, who is the premier of Soviet Union, say, "America, we're going to bury you."

[Speaking in Russian] And so a kid, six or seven, and hearing about it in school, but seeing it on TV on the takes, it was very scary.

And so it made a lot of people very paranoid, and I was one included.

Ed Lowry, who has been a producer of Cottonwood Connections, did his own research on the Cold War, and there's so much information that we don't want that information to die on what people went through.

We can look at something like World War I, World War II.

There were huge events within the 20th century, but also fairly confined.

There was a definable enemy and a definable ending to the war, but the Cold War lasted decades.

So we're going to do two episodes on this, because as we got into working on it, it became obvious that this was a little too big for just one 25-minute episode.

The Cold War spanned a lot of time.

And so our first episode, we're really going to be looking at more kind of the bigger picture, some of the more, I guess, governmental-level things that were going on in Kansas and the Great Plains during the time of the Cold War.

And then in the second episode, we'll get a little more personal.

How did it affect people, and how did it come home?

Digging into this has been a really interesting opportunity.

We had the chance to go and speak with professors at the Staff and Command College at Leavenworth, Fort Leavenworth, but also spoke again with Dr. Andrew Orr at Kansas State, who was a significant part of our episodes about the World War era.

I'm Dr. Sean Kalic.

I'm the director and a professor in the Department of Military History here at the Command General Staff College.

And I have my colleagues, Dr. Dave Mills and Dr. Gates Brown, who are also Cold War historians.

The opinions expressed here today are our own opinions, and not those of the government and or the Army or Department of Defense in any way.

The birth of the Cold War already starts in 1917 with the Bolshevik Revolution and the idea that Russia is now becoming the Soviet Union and embracing these tenets that are anti-thetical to those of the United States in democracy and capitalism.

And from early on, you get folks in the State Department like Robert Lansing who are saying that you can't have good relations with this state simply because their ideas are to really subvert those of capitalism and democracy.

So early on, I think there's a palpable sense that these two systems are incompatible.

That gets a little suppressed during the FDR years, who's going to recognize the Soviet Union in 1933 and try to bring Stalin into the community of nations.

And then of course we were allies during the Second World War to fight Nazism.

But then after that, that deep suspicion never goes away.

In fact, it gets heightened.

And when we look at the post-World War situation, World War II, it's just the expansion of communism, not only in Eastern Europe, but 49 with the fall of China.

But that's construed in the U.S. as us losing China.

And so it seems like communism is just growing leaps and bounds and by extension the zero-sum game of nations, the free world is losing.

At the end of World War II, American political leaders and most Americans expected that the world was entering a period of relative peace and stability.

The Axis powers were beaten, the Grand Alliance that won the war was so powerful it was hard to imagine anyone challenging it.

But fairly quickly, the United States and Britain found themselves at cross-purposes with the Soviet Union.

And that conflict began in Eastern Europe.

Instead of restoring democratic governments, Stalin installed what he called democratic governments, which to him meant communist governments under the control of the Soviet Union.

And that poisoned Soviet-American relations fairly quickly.

As you see in 47-48, Czechoslovakia and Hungary go red based upon deals supposedly that FDR cut.

But the reality is the Soviets are manipulating the system to ensure elections come out the communist way.

So all of a sudden you start to see that red curtain descend.

There were conflicts over how to govern post-war Germany, how to organize post-war Berlin, which was itself divided into Western and Soviet spheres, just as the rest of Germany was divided.

The Truman Doctrine was also the Marshall Plan.

It's kind of part of this.

We're going to try to help rebuild Europe.

And they're rebuilding Europe with a capitalist framework with US dollars.

And we offer that to the Soviet Union.

There are some occupied states that want that.

But that would be corrosive to what Stalin is trying to create.

By the late 1940s, the US was spending the equivalent today of billions of dollars every year to rebuild Western European economies in the Marshall Plan.

The purpose of which was to restore economic activity, restore hope for average people in Western Europe.

And the process keeps them from turning to communism as a desperation measure to rebuild their lives.

We see what's happening in Italy and France.

A large proportion of the elected officials in Italy and France are communists.

So there's a very distinct fear that the communists are going to take over governments without firing a shot.

They're just going to be elected.

The initial period really is the beginning of that dissolution of the allied relationship into this new kind of geopolitical era that is trying to figure out how to get out of the war and maintain.

There's some good reason not to trust the Soviets.

There are Soviet agents in the Manhattan Project.

There are Soviet agents in the United States government.

US government officials knew, though they couldn't always say publicly, that the Manhattan Project that led to the atomic bomb had been penetrated by Soviet intelligence agencies.

They had detailed information of what had gone on, which dramatically sped up the building of the Soviet's atomic bomb.

And the idea that, OK, if you have this Manhattan Project, which was the most classified project and the second most expensive DOD program during the war, and that was able to be penetrated by Soviet agents and spies, they must be everywhere.

So US officials knew that Soviet espionage was widespread.

They weren't always able to say everything they knew, which left the space open for demagogues, for people who were willing to lie about what was happening for their own political purposes.

The most prominent, but certainly not the only one, was Joseph McCarthy, a congressman and then senator from Minnesota, who used fear of Soviet espionage to build a political brand.

And people like McCarthy got a huge boost in 1948 and 1949, when the Kuomintang, the Nationalist Party in China, lost the Civil War.

And the question of who lost China became front and center in early Cold War politics.

And now the US faced Mao Zedong, a close ally of Stalin.

And that seemed to suggest that the Soviets were winning.

But there's also an escalating atomic component of it.

And in 1949, the Soviets are going to get the bomb.

So instead of the United States being the only power with the atomic bomb, and we can be trusted with that, now this expansionary, aggressive regime has it.

What are they going to do with it?

The initial Air Policy Commission reports, the projected intelligence that we have on the Soviet Union, is that they're not going to get the bomb until like 1955.

And when it happens in 1949, it kind of throws everybody off their timeline.

Because if you assume you have nuclear monopoly for 10 years, and all of a sudden that's cut to four, it has a profound impact.

And some of those reports kind of get leaked to the public, and that helps fuel this idea that all of a sudden there are spies everywhere in the US government, right?

That we don't know about.

McCarthy, and now the Soviets have the bomb, China's gone red, and all of a sudden it feels to the average American that this thing is real, and we must do something about it.

The US government does a number of things to re-engage the US in military preparations.

There's a big program of arms purchases.

We had a lot of stuff from World War II, but especially in air power, technology was moving so fast that most of our World War II Air Force, which had been the best in the world in 1945, was obsolete.

Kansas is front and center in that effort.

Boeing had shut down its wartime production plants in Wichita.

But when the B-47 Stratojet gets ordered, Boeing needs to reopen factories, and they build them in Wichita, which was great for the Kansas economy, and also great from the perspective of Kansas congressmen and senators who could prove that they were bringing federal dollars back to Kansas.

You needed places to base them.

If you're going to train people on the Stratojet, why not base the Stratojets outside of Wichita?

Which they do.

That's how we get McConnell Air Force Base.

Yeah, I mean Strategic Air Command, which what you see there is really going back to kind of, Wichita is really one of the air centers of America, by the way, right?

So you see kind of a birth of aviation in the 20s and 30s.

World War II helps with that because a lot of the airfields are actually training airfields in Kansas, and there's an idea they're going to go away at the end of the war, but places like Salina, right?

You can maintain those now as Strategic Air Command bases.

So I think Kansas becomes a critical component of that with McConnell Air Force Base, Shilling Air Force Base in Salina.

Then you have Forbes Field in Topeka, and then just across the state line you have Whiteman Air Force Base as well.

So you see a strong SAC presence.

If you're a Kansan, right, you start to kind of see these things on a daily basis.

It's kind of hard to hide B-36s and B-52s and B-47s.

In a Great Plains state, I've looked at North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana.

There is a very real advocacy for bringing bases to these Great Plains states, the federal dollars, the building dollars, the payrolls, the dollar that bounces around an economy.

Yeah, and I think the conscription.

So after World War II, you don't have conscription until the Korean War, and then you ramp back up with conscription.

And that's going to continue until 1973.

So it's not going to be at the same scale as World War II or Korea.

You're going to see it go down.

But still, your average male high school student knows, well, when I hit 18, my number could come up.

You go back to a draft, which begins hitting young men in Kansas, because the people could at least evade the draft with young men who were not going to college.

So you have urban poor and rural men.

And the Army is even going to change a little bit about how it's meeting a public need.

Instead of just focusing on readiness, as they did in World War II or the Korean War, they're going to start to make an argument that the Army is a great place to make citizens.

Today, we're more familiar with college ROTC, Reserve Officer Training Corps programs, that train college students to be officers in the U.S. military in exchange for paying their tuition.

But you had high school versions of this.

You still do, I think, in some places.

So it was for everybody.

Whether or not you wanted to go to college, it was preparing you for a military career track, because for the first time, the United States needed a large-standing military in peacetime.

You needed draftees, but you needed enough volunteers to have a big, non-commissioned officer corps, and a big officer corps.

And you had to recruit that.

And you couldn't start when kids turned 18.

You started in high school getting them ready to want to enlist, to want to volunteer to become an officer, to want to make a career of military service.

On a scale we had never had before in American history.

And the other thing most people don't consider is the interstate system.

The interstate was President Eisenhower's idea after World War II, when he was president.

So it was the interstate systems.

Because prior to that, most of the military transportation had been by rail.

So if they bombed the railroads, we still had through highways that were great.

So one of the things that Eisenhower does as a junior officer, he's given this task in the 1920s to drive a convoy from the East Coast all the way to the West Coast, to get a sense of what the U.S. road infrastructure is.

And it's horrible.

His trucks get bogged down.

It takes him much longer than he thought, because there's no U.S. highway system.

The paved roads are hit or miss.

The quality is hit or miss.

So that's in the back of his mind.

When he goes to Europe in World War II and he sees the German Autobahn, he says, "Wow, this is a way that you can move forces from A to B, but you can also move commerce very efficiently."

And so the interstate system is an attempt to meld national security priorities as far as within the United States ease of movement, but it's also about creating more efficient commercial traffic.

To piggyback off of that, I don't disagree that that was the main focus.

But one of the ways that you sell this to Congress is to couch it in civil defense terms.

Up until the highway system, the duck and cover was the preferred method of surviving a nuclear blast.

Duck and cover means you just stop and wherever you are, you get under a school desk or something along those lines, and hope for the best, right?

But if you've got this interstate highway system, now you can start thinking about providing early warning to your citizens and evacuating from the big cities that are going to be targets.

And so I'm not saying that that was one of the more realistic approaches, but that's one of the ways that you sell it.

But then also another aspect of the whole thing here in Kansas and Nebraska, the Dakotas, was missile silos.

In the early 1960s, Kansas becomes home to intercontinental ballistic missiles, missiles permanently based in missile silos dug into the Kansas earth, not just Kansas.

Nebraska has them, Missouri has them as well.

They still exist.

There's no missiles in them anymore, but they actually had the chance to go visit one that this gentleman has turned into an Airbnb.

So you can stay in the missile silo and get a tour of the whole thing.

And he's really dived into the research of what these things were and how they functioned.

My name is Matthew.

I grew up just outside of Topeka.

And when I was 10 years old, I found my first missile base.

I was hiking through the Flint Hills and all of a sudden I came across this paved road in the middle of nowhere, high security chain link fence barbed wire on top.

I'm all like, what is this?

The place looked abandoned.

The gate was open.

And so I followed the road in and it went underground into a bunker.

This I didn't realize was Atlas E missile base.

The Atlas was our first intercontinental ballistic missile that we developed.

Ended up meeting the owner.

He was a retired school teacher who had bought this abandoned Atlas E missile base and was converting it into his own home.

Now, this was all one level underground.

The missile would have been stored horizontally.

You had a 400 ton blast door that move to the side.

The crane would erect it and then it would launch off.

This was kind of a slow system.

They switched over to the Atlas F series, which is what I'm standing on top of right now.

Atlas F is a silo that goes down 176 feet beneath us in what was known as a crib.

You had nine floors that held the missile in place.

And these floors, they were floating.

They were attached to large springs on the wall.

So if an explosion happened up above, the entire floor system could move on the shock absorbers and keep everything safe inside.

Now, the rocket was already fueled with kerosene.

Then they would put in that last fuel mixture, which was liquid oxygen.

Once it was fueled, an elevator would lift the rocket to the surface, then it would launch off.

It had a deflector shield to shoot the flames to the side so they want to go back in underground.

Now, that whole process took about 15 to 20 minutes to fuel it, open the doors, raise it to the surface and launch.

And we figured here in Kansas, we had about a 30 minute window.

If the Soviets were launching on us, we need to get our birds up in the sky.

We're now on the lower level of the Launch Control Center.

It's known as the Launch Control Room.

This is where the missileers used to work.

So as you can tell, this is all still a construction zone.

I'm developing this out.

But here is the original Launch Control desk.

Unfortunately, they gutted it when they left.

What I'm doing is I'm cleaning it all up.

I'm going to replace this with a touchscreen monitor and digitally recreate what it would have looked like.

So you can do a simulation of launching the missile.

In the back, there is a box that would have held your launch codes.

It took two missileers to open that up.

Each had their own combination lock.

That way, one guy couldn't go rogue and take over the place.

It also took two missileers to launch the missile.

One was sitting at the desk, another one upstairs.

Altogether, you had five officers on duty known as missileers.

They would be on shift for 24 hours on, 48 hours off, and be shuttled back and forth to the main Air Force Base in Selina.

Originally, there was an office behind this desk.

Then there was a backup battery room.

And the whole other side of the room was full of cabinets with computers and communications equipment.

It took an entire room full of computers in the 50s and 60s to have less processing power than the phone in your pocket.

On this door, there's a sign that says "Warning!

150-foot open silo shaft exists at end of tunnel beyond this door."

So follow me this way.

This silo, it goes down 176 feet deep.

When they started construction, they had a concrete plant on the property.

So when they started pouring this silo, they didn't stop until they finished.

This is one continuous pour with no seams in the entire structure.

Now, from where we're standing right here, all the way down, it's about three foot thick.

From here all the way up, it's about nine feet thick.

And the concrete ceiling as well is nine feet thick.

So this was engineered to withstand a nearby nuclear explosion.

We are now in the launch control center where the missileers used to live and work.

So now I book this entire top floor as an Airbnb where guests can stay.

And I've been getting five-star ratings from guests from all over the world.

This was operational from 1961 until 65, just four years and then it was already obsolete.

We had developed our next generation of rocket called the Titan.

So the Titan series, you just had a door that slid to the side and the rocket could be hot launched from inside of the silo.

Kansas was really kind of missile-base central right here in the center of the United States.

There were nine Atlas E's around Topeka, Kansas built in a ring around Forbes Field.

You had 12 Atlas F's around Salina, Kansas where Shilling Air Force Base was.

And then you had 18 Titan 2's outside of Wichita.

This rocket, it could travel over 5,000 miles, pretty much hit any target in the northern hemisphere.

It carried a thermal nuclear warhead that had more explosive force, about 300 times more explosive force than what we dropped on Japan in World War II.

Now this whole program was designed to be a deterrent to nuclear war.

The concept was if you launch on us, we launch on you, nobody wins.

Mutually assured destruction, MAD.

It's a path we knew we didn't want to go down.

In fact, one of our Air Force generals said if we ever had to launch these, they didn't do their job.

Like I said, fortunately this was never used as a weapon of mass destruction.

Instead, in the mid-60s when this was decommissioned, there was a technology transfer between the Air Force and NASA for our great space race with the Russians.

I did some research.

I found the tail number to the rocket stored right here.

It was taken down to Florida.

They removed the warhead and put on a satellite for NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to monitor the weather.

So in a lot of ways, I feel like this rocket technology has actually helped bring us together as a human race more than tear us apart.

You have to look for that silver lining, right?

So throughout Kansas, in the time of that, there were a lot of large governmental projects, the interstate system, the Air Force bases, the missile silos.

But in many ways, the Cold War, because it was as much a psychological war as it was anything else, it became very personal.

Personal to people even in small rural communities, thinking about how does this conflict impact us.

No matter where we live, in the city or the country, we must be ready all the time for the atomic bomb.

Duck and cover.

That's the first thing to do.

Duck and cover.