Declassified CIA Cartography Maps from the 1980s

BoxOfRain•about 20 hours ago

Map Men did a great video on the reverse of this, classified Soviet-made maps of Britain which were all labelled in Polish! They were in some cases more accurate than the British OS maps of the era which did not print some features around military bases, but they did make mistakes too.

I thought it was quite interesting, I'm too young to remember the Cold War but it's always described to me in terms of nuclear warfare and mutually assured destruction. The quality of the Soviet maps suggests the mentality of a conquering adversary rather than a destroying one though, as though they intended to occupy the territory they were mapping rather than nuke it.

GJim•about 20 hours ago

> They were in some cases more accurate than the British OS maps of the era which did not print some features around military bases,

Not so much more accurate ('classified' features aside), as more detailed: The soviet maps included such things as bridge weight limits...... After all, if trying to invade you need to know if the local bridges can support a T-62 tank.

toyg•about 19 hours ago

the Cold War started before MAD became a thing. Had the USSR and NATO started a conflict in 1949, nukes would still have to be delivered by (slow, fragile, at heavy risk of interception) plane. ICBMs arrived in the late '50s, and submarine launches in the '60s, at which point MAD became a thing; but even later, all sides largely continued to operate like a conflict would follow traditional engagement patterns, when it came to the basics of planning. Nobody stopped, say, spying activities just because "eh, we'll nuke them all anyway" - if anything, because this allowed for targeted activities that ensured MAD would not get triggered.

jordanb•about 19 hours ago

The Soviets had a "no first strike" doctrine because they perceived themselves to be the stronger force on the continent. They had a huge standing army and massive numbers of armored vehicles and expected to be able to roll through the fudla gap and across western Europe as they had done through Eastern Europe in the final stages of WWII.

NATO, on the other hand, expected to be overrun by the soviets and used the threat of nuclear counterattack to keep them from trying it. The Soviets built up their own nuclear deterrent to prevent NATO from responding with nukes (the MAD).

If the US/NATO nuclear threat wasn't credible and the NATO armies were no match for the soviet army, then western Europe became a pawn for the soviets, leading the western allies to also invest in conventional arms.

In short: the argument for the conventional forces was that the nuclear threat wasn't really credible because nobody would choose to end the world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg-UqIIvang

NooneAtAll3•about 19 hours ago

in absence of giant oceans that's the only way to make buffer

Aboutplants•about 20 hours ago

I would love to see other countries classified maps of US cities.

showerst•about 20 hours ago

Here's a fun collection of Soviet maps of DC - https://www.wired.com/2015/07/secret-cold-war-maps/

Someone on reddit got the actual maps but the link has bitrotted, wayback saved some - https://web.archive.org/web/20241207144716/http://architecto...

macintux•about 20 hours ago

Thank you, that Wired piece is fascinating. (I probably enjoyed it 10 years ago too.)

threeio•about 16 hours ago

I have two of these up in my office.. absolutely love them

xhkkffbf•about 20 hours ago

Do they have pointers to the bars with the best vodka?

sixtyj•about 20 hours ago

You could like The Red Atlas by John Davies and Alexander Kent. It is full of maps made by the Soviets of the Western world during the Cold War.

daveslash•about 18 hours ago

Came here to make the same comment. I have a copy of The Red Atlas. Fantastic. Here's a link to the comment thread about it here on HN

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15378422

mallory854•about 7 hours ago

I'll never get tired of maps! There's so much to learn.

ricksunny•about 20 hours ago

Wake me up when they offer an unredacted, unadulterated map of S4.

Declassified CIA Cartography Maps from the 1980s

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