Cold war documents bear striking resemblance to today’s nuclear threat
The recently declassified National Intelligence Estimate from 1951 outlines a frightening world where soviet agents could have been everywhere, smuggling bomb parts into the U.S. to construct and detonate with the aid of their American sympathizers. It’s startlingly similar to the security problems of today, where specters of sleeper cells and terrorists with bombs built from weapons tossed out during the cold war haunt the American consciousness. The biggest difference between then—when clandestine submarine landings and a permeable Mexican border were thought to be viable options for Ruskies to get WMDs into the country—and now is that while the U.S. used to know its enemies had weapons and feared whether they’d use them, it now knows that terrorists are willing to detonate a bomb, and has to fear one falling into their hands.