On his visit to Hiroshima last May, Obama did not, as some had vainly hoped he might, apologize for the August 6, 1945 atomic bombing of the city. Instead he gave a high-sounding speech... By Diana Johnstone.

Tim Kaine isn’t shy about trading on his year in Honduras as a Catholic missionary. Accepting the V.P. nomination, he said, “My faith  is my North Star for orienting my life...” By Daniel Hopsicker.

In the 1970s and 80s, crews sat at constant readiness in nuclear missile silos buried in the Arizona desert. What would have happened if they had got the order to launch? By Richard Hollingham.

The U.S. Air Force has asked defense firms to bid to supply new ICBMs and controversial nuclear cruise missiles. By Marcus Weisgerber.

I speak with Joshua Itzkowitz Shifrinson, an assistant professor at Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government and Public Service and author of “Deal or No Deal? The End of the Cold War and the U.S. Offer to Limit NATO Expansion,” published in the current edition of International Security. By Micah Zenko.

An exhibition examining the landscape and abandoned spaces of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries opens in London.

Ozersk, codenamed City 40, was the birthplace of the Soviet nuclear weapons programme. Now it is one of the most contaminated places on the planet – so why do so many residents still view it as a fenced-in paradise? By Samira Goetschel.

On a cold February night in 1986, Berlin’s Glienicke Bridge became the scene of the cold war’s last ever prisoner exchange – a dramatic hand-over involving a Soviet dissident and Karel Koecher, the only foreign agent ever known to have infiltrated the CIA. Koecher was a Czech citizen who had been living undercover in the US for 21 years. Alternately codenamed Rino, Turian or Pedro, he had moved to America in 1965 to establish himself as a mole within the CIA. Koecher’s KGB case officer, Colonel Alexander Sokolov, would later call him a super-spy.

The 1966 World Festival of Negro Arts was the first state-sponsored showcase of the work of black artists, musicians and poets. By David Murphy.

The pope has been there, Obama is there this week and the Rolling Stones are arriving soon. Everyone wants a chance to see Socialism one last time before it dies. But what is it like to visit Cuba for a former citizen of East Germany? By Jochen-Martin Gutsch.

How U.S. intelligence services solved the mystery of a cold war killer. By John Sotham. (Sept. ’14)

Critic Agata Pyzik’s 2014 book, Poor But Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West, situates Bowie at the heart of Cold War pop culture. Here, she explores Bowie's role in uniting disaffected young people on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Newly released documents describe the U.S. Air Force’s secret cold war project known as the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL). By Leonard David.

More than two years after the Berlin Wall was constructed by East Germany to prevent its citizens from fleeing its communist regime, nearly 4,000 West Berliners are allowed to cross into East Berlin to visit relatives. Under an agreement reached between East and West Berlin, over 170,000 passes were eventually issued to West Berlin citizens, each pass allowing a one-day visit to communist East Berlin.

How the Soviet Union Spied on the US Embassy for 7 Years. By Adam Fabio.

During the Cold War, they guarded America’s nuclear weapons facilities. Now they are dying of cancer, as the U.S. government looks the other way. By Jim Morris and Jamie Smith Hopkins.

In 1961, Candid Camera ruled American television. The proto-reality show, in which everyday people were faced with ridiculous situations under the gaze of a hidden camera, was a massive hit, reaching millions across the country every week. Allen Funt, the show's creator and punchy host, had criss-crossed thousands of miles... By Cara Giaimo.

Early one morning, in September 1982, hundreds of young Russians were waiting in a Moscow TV studio for an image of Southern California to appear on a giant screen. All of a sudden, there it was, live via satellite: a crowd of hundreds of thousands of sweltering Americans, blanketing the desert in front of a rock star-worthy stage and even bigger screens, backed by a ripple of mountains... By Sarah Laskow.

East German officials opened the Berlin Wall, allowing travel from East to West Berlin. The following day, celebrating Germans began to tear the wall down. One of the ugliest and most infamous symbols of the Cold War was soon reduced to rubble that was quickly snatched up by souvenir hunters.

Two members of the Cambridge spy ring were so drunken and unstable that US officials were stunned they had been employed by the Foreign Office, newly-released papers show.