Cold War playground equipment was intended to foster children's curiosity and excitement about the Space Race. It was installed during the Cold War in both communist and capitalist countries.
Cold War playground equipment was intended to foster children's curiosity and excitement about the Space Race. It was installed during the Cold War in both communist and capitalist countries.
In 1959, Popular Mechanics wrote that a Kiwanis Club in Ontario, California was "in tune with the times" when it erected a three-story rocketship in a local playground. [1]
Around 1962, a 26-foot (7.9 m) high Moon rocket was installed in a playground in Calwa, California. The "Calwa Rocket", described as "an affectionate symbol of an earlier time", was designated a heritage property in 2013. [2]
The "space-age shift" in playground design was described in a 1963 issue of Life magazine, which featured Fidel Castro on the cover. A row of tree trunks installed in a Kansas City, Missouri park could elicit "any game an imaginative child might think up," including "an array of ICBMs on a launch pad." [3]
By 1963, Philadelphia had installed 160 space-aged playgrounds, which featured satellites, rockets, and submarines. [3]
Richardson, Texas installed a space-themed playground in 1965, with a radar tower, Saturn climber, submarine, radar dish, planet climber, and three-story high rocket ship. When the city tried to replace the playground equipment in 2008, it was met with local opposition. A task force established to investigate the removal found the rocket ship had "very limited play value," and had "hazardous conditions that present a great danger to young children." [4] The playground equipment was dismantled despite the objections. [5]
Two companies were noted for their military and space-themed playground equipment: Miracle Equipment Company of Grinnell, Iowa, and Jamison Fantasy Equipment of Los Angeles, California, which manufactured a moon rocket, nautilus submarine, and space slide. [2]
Author Fraser MacDonald wrote "nuclear weapons were made intelligible in, and transposable to, a domestic context" through children's toys and playground equipment featuring Cold War symbols. [6]
Playgrounds in the Soviet Union were also designed to stimulate children's excitement about space, as this was an ideology supported across Communist states. Eastern Europe "followed the Soviet playgrounds movement and was under the influence of the Cold War fashion." [7]
The success of the Soviet space program was celebrated through monuments, parks and museums. In Baikonur, Kazakhstan, where Yuri Gagarin was launched into orbit in 1961, rocket-shaped playground equipment and other mementos of Soviet space exploration were installed around the village. [8] [9]
Playground equipment—including rockets—was usually mass-produced at large manufacturing plants which tended to follow repetitive designs and patterns. As a result, playgrounds across the Soviet sphere of influence often featured identical equipment, with "brutal construction" and "generous use of old tires." [8]
A missile is an airborne ranged weapon capable of self-propelled flight aided usually by a propellant, jet engine or rocket motor.
K-77 was a "Project 651" diesel–electric submarine built for the Soviet Navy during the 1960s. Commissioned in 1965, the boat was armed with long-range cruise missiles to carry out its mission of destroying American aircraft carriers and bases. The missiles could be fitted with either conventional or nuclear warheads.
USS Triton (SSRN/SSN-586), the only member of her class, was a nuclear powered radar picket submarine in the United States Navy. She had the distinction of being the only Western submarine powered by two nuclear reactors. Triton was the second submarine and the fourth vessel of the United States Navy to be named for the Greek god Triton. At the time of her commissioning in 1959, Triton was the largest, most powerful, and most expensive submarine ever built at $109 million excluding the cost of nuclear fuel and reactors.
The GIUK gap is an area in the northern Atlantic Ocean that forms a naval choke point. Its name is an acronym for Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom, the gap being the two stretches of open ocean among these three landmasses. It separates the Norwegian Sea and the North Sea from the open Atlantic Ocean. The term is typically used in relation to military topics. The area has for some nations been considered strategically important since the beginning of the 20th century.
Texas Towers were a set of three radar facilities off the eastern seaboard of the United States which were used for surveillance by the United States Air Force during the Cold War. Modeled on the offshore oil drilling platforms first employed off the Texas coast, they were in operation from 1958 to 1963. After the collapse of one of the towers in 1961, the remaining towers were closed due to changes in threat perception and out of a concern for the safety of the crews.
The Bedford Incident is a 1965 British-American Cold War film directed by James B. Harris, starring Richard Widmark and Sidney Poitier, and produced by Harris and Widmark. The cast also features Eric Portman, James MacArthur, Martin Balsam, and Wally Cox, as well as early appearances by Donald Sutherland and Ed Bishop. James Poe adapted Mark Rascovich's 1963 novel of the same name, which borrowed from the plot of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick; at one point in the film, the captain is advised he is "not chasing whales now".
An anti-submarine weapon (ASW) is any one of a number of devices that are intended to act against a submarine and its crew, to destroy (sink) the vessel or reduce its capability as a weapon of war. In its simplest sense, an anti-submarine weapon is usually a projectile, missile or bomb that is optimized to destroy submarines.
Operation Ivy Bells was a joint United States Navy, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and National Security Agency (NSA) mission whose objective was to place wire taps on Soviet underwater communication lines during the Cold War.
The P-120 Malakhit is a Russian medium range anti-ship missile used by corvettes and submarines. Introduced in 1972, it remains in service but has been superseded by the P-270 Moskit.
A spy ship or reconnaissance vessel is a dedicated ship intended to gather intelligence, usually by means of sophisticated electronic eavesdropping. In a wider sense, any ship intended to gather information could be considered a spy ship.
A radar picket is a radar-equipped station, ship, submarine, aircraft, or vehicle used to increase the radar detection range around a nation or military force to protect it from surprise attack, typically air attack, or from criminal activities such as smuggling. By definition a radar picket must be some distance removed from the anticipated targets to be capable of providing early warning. Often several detached radar units would be placed in a ring to encircle a target to provide increased cover in all directions; another approach is to position units to form a barrier line.
The National Museum of the United States Navy, or U.S. Navy Museum for short, is the flagship museum of the United States Navy and is located in the former Breech Mechanism Shop of the old Naval Gun Factory on the grounds of the Washington Navy Yard in Washington, D.C., United States.
The Norwegian rocket incident, also known as the Black Brant scare, occurred on January 25, 1995 when a team of Norwegian and American scientists launched a Black Brant XII four-stage sounding rocket from the Andøya Rocket Range off the northwestern coast of Norway. The rocket carried scientific equipment to study the aurora borealis over Svalbard, and flew on a high northbound trajectory, which included an air corridor that stretches from Minuteman III nuclear missile silos in North Dakota all the way to Moscow, the capital city of Russia. The rocket eventually reached an altitude of 1,453 kilometers (903 mi), resembling a US Navy submarine-launched Trident missile. Fearing a high-altitude nuclear attack that could blind Russian radar, Russian nuclear forces went on high alert, and the "nuclear briefcase" was taken to Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who then had to decide whether to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike against the United States. Russian observers determined that there was no nuclear attack and no retaliation was ordered.
The Avco AN/FPS-26 Radar was an Air Defense Command height finder radar developed in the Frequency Diversity Program with a tunable 3-cavity power klystron for electronic counter-countermeasures (e.g. to counter jamming). Accepted by the Rome Air Development Center on 20 January 1960 for use at SAGE radar stations, the AN/FPS-26 processed height-finder requests (e.g., from Air Defense Direction Centers) by positioning to the azimuth of a target aircraft using a high-pressure hydraulic drive, then "nodding" in either a default automatic mode or by operator command. The inflatable radome required a minimum pressure to prevent contact with the antenna which would result in damage to both (technicians accessed the antenna deck via an air lock.) To maintain high dielectric strength, the waveguide was pressurized with sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), which technicians were warned would produce deadly fluorine if waveguide arcing occurred.
Project Hula was a program during World War II in which the United States transferred naval vessels to the Soviet Union in anticipation of the Soviets eventually joining the war against Japan, specifically in preparation for planned Soviet invasions of southern Sakhalin and the Kuril islands. Based at Cold Bay in the Territory of Alaska, the project was active during the spring and summer of 1945. It was the largest and most ambitious transfer program of World War II.
A playground, playpark, or play area is a place designed to provide an environment for children that facilitates play, typically outdoors. While a playground is usually designed for children, some are designed for other age groups, or people with disabilities. A playground might exclude children below a certain age.
Vitse-Admiral Drozd was the third ship of the Project 1134 Berkut Large Anti-submarine Ships built for the Soviet Navy, also known as the 'Kresta I'-class or Admiral Zozulya-class guided missile cruisers. The vessel was commissioned in 1968 and served with the Baltic and Northern Fleets through the 1970s and 1980s. As well as taking part in naval exercises in the Atlantic, the ship assisted in the rescue of the crew of the stricken submarine K-19 in 1972. As a consequence, the ship was named in the Northern Fleet's book of honour. The vessel was reclassified a Large Rocket Ship in 1977 to reflect its multi-purpose capability. After an upgrade in 1981, Vitse-Admiral Drozd continued to operate in the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean. The vessel observed the 1986 United States bombing of Libya and undertook good will visits to Annaba, Algeria, and Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, as well as Tripoli and Tobruk. After being decommissioned in 1990, the ship was sent to India to be broken up in 1992 but sank en route.
Marshal Voroshilov was a Project 1134A Berkut A class cruiser of the Soviet Navy, which briefly became part of the Russian Navy after being renamed Khabarovsk in 1991. The fifth ship of her class, the ship served mostly during the Cold War, from 1973 to 1992.
Vladivostok was the second Soviet Navy Project 1134 Berkut Large Anti-submarine Ship also known as a Admiral Zozulya-class guided missile cruiser or by the NATO reporting name Kresta I. Launched in August 1966, the ship was reclassified a Large Rocket Ship in August 1978 to reflect the wide-ranging capability of the vessel. Serving primarily in the Pacific Fleet during the Cold War, Vladivostok took part in exercises and tours that demonstrated Soviet naval power in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The ship played a part at a number of points of potential escalation in the Cold War, including the Indo-Pakistani War of December 1971, the Mozambican Civil War in 1980 and the collision between the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk and the submarine K-314 in March 1984. Vladivostok was taken out of service to be modernised and updated in September 1988 but there were insufficient funds to complete the work. Instead the ship was decommissioned in April 1990 and, the following January, sold to an Australian company to be broken up.
The Saugatuck Gap Filler Annex is a decommissioned air defense radar installation previously of the United States Air Force. It served in the vast Cold War era Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) air defense system. Of the hundreds of SAGE radars, Saugatuck's is one of, perhaps, two that remain nearly completely intact.
