The cold war and its secret maps

bornkiller

Roogle maps came first then in good old stereotypical google style google stole the idea. Nah, but seriously, the detail on these maps were so pedantic. they were crazy incredible.

Inside the Secret World of Russia’s Cold War Mapmakers

A military helicopter was on the ground when Russell Guy arrived at the helipad near Tallinn, Estonia, with a briefcase filled with $250,000 in cash. The place made him uncomfortable. It didn’t look like a military base, not exactly, but there were men who looked like soldiers standing around. With guns.

The year was 1989. The Soviet Union was falling apart, and some of its military officers were busy selling off the pieces. By the time Guy arrived at the helipad, most of the goods had already been off-loaded from the chopper and spirited away. The crates he’d come for were all that was left. As he pried the lid off one to inspect the goods, he got a powerful whiff of pine. It was a box inside a box, and the space in between was packed with juniper needles. Guy figured the guys who packed it were used to handling cargo that had to get past drug-sniffing dogs, but it wasn’t drugs he was there for.

Inside the crates were maps, thousands of them. In the top right corner of each one, printed in red, was the Russian word секрет. Secret.

The maps were part of one of the most ambitious cartographic enterprises ever undertaken. During the Cold War, the Soviet military mapped the entire world, parts of it down to the level of individual buildings. The Soviet maps of US and European cities have details that aren’t on domestic maps made around the same time, things like the precise width of roads, the load-bearing capacity of bridges, and the types of factories. They’re the kinds of things that would come in handy if you’re planning a tank invasion. Or an occupation. Things that would be virtually impossible to find out without eyes on the ground.

Given the technology of the time, the Soviet maps are incredibly accurate. Even today, the US State Department uses them (among other sources) to place international boundary lines on official government maps.

Here: Read the rest > http://www.wired.com/2015/07/secret-cold-war-maps/

bornkiller

Oh Yah!
Here another one. "San Diego"

http://www.wired.com/2015/07/soviet-militarys-eerily-detailed-guide-san-diego/

Slartibartfast

Holy shit what an effort. The Soviet's advantage and disadvantage was that it was a centrally planned autocracy.

It allowed them commit to mammoth tasks like this without too much internal friction. 

It also disadvantages them because it's impossible to control human labour without stifling innovation. You'll notice that in the 70s unregulated markets were producing digital systems and integrated components while the Soviet was still using analogue devices. I personally think this was the real reason for their collapse.

That image looks exactly _like_ an island in the game "Raid on Bungeling Bay"

 

 

bornkiller

Russia was paranoid about tech advanced electronics (advanced at the time) because of the affects radiation had on electronic components. Around about then they theorized during the course of a nuclear attack modern electronic equipment would fail from radiation fallout which is quite plausible.. I believe the computer system they used for nuke deployment at the time was discovered in a myan temple in 1931. (the last part is not true of course but it would be the makings of a sweet movie) :-D

Radiation comes in different forms and its ability to affect electronic devices depends on its ability to penetrate the electronic equipment and then to penetrate the packages with semiconductor devices in them. Usually it will be beta and gamma radiation that will have this ability; alpha particles will usually be stopped by outer packaging very easily. The common quality that is measured in Radiation is its ability to ionise materials. In semiconductors this ionising radiation can have two major effects: one is to produce electron-hole pairs which can create "soft" errors (errors in operation but not permanent damage) and, if the radiation is sufficient, permanent damage by creating large numbers of charges with sufficient energy to be injected into Silicon dioxide regions (where they stick) and change a transistors characteristics. Such high levels of radiation can also disrupt the crystal lattice and damage the transistors in that way. Normal semiconductor devices such as those in a typical computer would have sufficient soft errors at relatively low levels of radiation to render the computer unusable though not necessarily cause permanent damage. These levels are not generally sufficiently low that you would want to stand around in for long in it either! I suspect this is the sort of levels that we may be getting close to at the site in Japan at present. At the next level up where humans would be seriously harmed is similar to the point where normal semiconductors also get permanent damaged.