Episode 1.5: Cold War Facts to Fall Asleep To

A long, quiet night of Cold War history: seventy short stories from 1946 to 1991, told slowly over hand-printed illustrations. Telegrams and kitchens, shelters and school drills, jazz on the radio, spies and satellites, the wall through Berlin, and the quiet people who made careful decisions on the nights that mattered most.

Chapters:

Chapter 1: A Divided World

• 1.1 The long telegram
• 1.2 Fulton
• 1.3 A name for it
• 1.4 The Marshall Plan
• 1.5 The airlift
• 1.6 Uncle Wiggly Wings
• 1.7 Two alliances, two Germanys

Chapter 2: Life in the Soviet Union

• 2.1 The shared apartment
• 2.2 The rota on the wall
• 2.3 A door of their own
• 2.4 The line
• 2.5 The radio on the wall
• 2.6 Six hundred square meters
• 2.7 The underground palace

Chapter 3: Shelters, Drills, and Suburbs

• 3.1 Bert the turtle
• 3.2 Two marks on the dial
• 3.3 The shelter sign
• 3.4 A house in Levittown
• 3.5 The loaf
• 3.6 The last coupons
• 3.7 A shelter under every home

Chapter 4: Voices Across the Curtain

• 4.1 The voice of the jazz hour
• 4.2 Radio Free Europe
• 4.3 Dizzy abroad
• 4.4 A pianist from Texas
• 4.5 An American exhibition in Moscow
• 4.6 The kitchen debate
• 4.7 Benny in Russia

Chapter 5: Spies and Secrets

• 5.1 Venona
• 5.2 The Cambridge friends
• 5.3 The wooden eagle
• 5.4 The tunnel
• 5.5 The bridge
• 5.6 A man with a voice
• 5.7 Aldrich Ames

Chapter 6: Looking Up

• 6.1 A year for the planet
• 6.2 Sputnik
• 6.3 Explorer
• 6.4 One orbit
• 6.5 Almost three days
• 6.6 The handshake
• 6.7 Falling blocks

Chapter 7: The Wall

• 7.1 The open door
• 7.2 No one intends
• 7.3 The street of the houses
• 7.4 Checkpoint Charlie
• 7.5 Ich bin ein Berliner
• 7.6 A car, eventually
• 7.7 What grew in the strip

Chapter 8: Thirteen Days and Other Near-Misses

• 8.1 The photographs
• 8.2 A careful word
• 8.3 Two letters
• 8.4 Submarine B-59
• 8.5 The hotline
• 8.6 A quiet night in 1983
• 8.7 Able Archer

Chapter 9: Talking

• 9.1 Nixon in Moscow
• 9.2 The Helsinki promise
• 9.3 A letter from Maine
• 9.4 Geneva
• 9.5 Reykjavik
• 9.6 The treaty that took missiles away
• 9.7 The inspectors

Chapter 10: The Ending

• 10.1 A new General Secretary
• 10.2 The round table
• 10.3 The picnic
• 10.4 The press conference
• 10.5 Keys in Prague
• 10.6 August 1991
• 10.7 The last evening