Cold War

Back to the Drawing Board: the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter

It was a futuristic-looking aircraft, which Lockheed publicised as ‘a missile with a man in it’.

REVIEW – The Elite: the story of special forces – from Ancient Sparta to the War on Terror

Fiennes had picked his moment well. Ever since the dramatic Iranian Embassy Siege of 1980, the press, and to some degree the public, have been obsessed by the idea of special forces.

Back to the Drawing Board: the T-64 Tank

Although its ‘high-tech’ features, such as an auto-loader for the main armament and its ultra-compact multi-fuel engine, were superficially impressive, they proved to be complex to maintain and highly unreliable.

BEHIND THE IMAGE: B-52 storage area, Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Arizona

The boneyard here at Davis-Monthan was established in 1946 to store WWII bombers and transports.

Back to the Drawing Board: the Davy Crockett ‘Tactical’ Nuke

In the 1950s, the Cold War was at its height. To many, it seemed to be a question of when, rather than if, Soviet forces would exploit their overwhelming numerical superiority with a ‘steamroller’ offensive against Western Europe.

The Cuban Revolution

The Cuban Revolution of January 1959, the Bay of Pigs Invasion of April 1961, and the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 were events of worldwide significance. All three of these events were, in very different ways, remarkable military collisions. Marking the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, we take a detailed look at this epic struggle against the odds.

RAF Museum London: into the future

Seema Syeda reviews the newly remodelled RAF Museum. Museums, I thought in a rather prosaic way as I sat underneath the bomb bay of an Avro Vulcan B2 in the RAF Museum’s Hangar 5, usually chronicle the events of the past. Meandering through the corridors of the British Museum, for instance, gazing at the ossified warriors […]