Els Slots
Cold War
This week it has been reported that Ukraine plans to fast track Chernobyl for WH status. For someone my age it brings back memories from the Cold War, with news about the nuclear disaster seeping slowly through the Iron Curtain in 1986. In the WH nomination pipeline also are Gdansk Shipyard (in the TWHS description referred to as symbolizing “the end of the Cold War”) and the Korean DMZ (“the DMZ is a symbolic space of the inter-Korean cold war” ( source )). Post-War era and Cold War sites were considered underrepresented in the ICOMOS Filling the gaps analysis from 2004, so we can expect more of them to come.
The Cold War “was a period of geopolitical tension between the Soviet Union and the United States and their respective allies, the Eastern Bloc and the Western Bloc, after World War II. … the period is generally considered to span the 1947 Truman Doctrine to the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union” ( wiki ). Related WHS which we grouped into a connection include venues where summits between the parties were organized, nuclear testing sites and strategic military locations. These links are mostly by coincidence, so far there is only one site where the Cold War is part of the OUV.
Politics
It may all have started at what later became the Potsdam WHS: the Cecilienhof Palace was the venue for the Potsdam Conference of 1945 , where the USSR, the USA and the UK had gathered on how to administer Germany. Expansion of communism and nuclear power were important topics too.
In 1961 the Vienna Summit, where they mainly discussed the Berlin Crisis , was held between Kennedy and Chrushchov. Both leaders stayed at Hotel Imperial at the Ring in Vienna . The opening dinner was held at Schönbrunn Palace .
Throughout the whole period, the Kremlin was the seat of the communist Russian government and the Red Square saw many Soviet Union parades “for May Day (until 1969), Victory Day, and October Revolution Day, which consisted of propaganda, flags, labor demonstration, marching troops, and showing off of tanks and missiles”. The Kremlin was also the venue for the Moscow Summits of 1972 and 1974 (Nixon – Brezhnev) and 1988 (Reagan – Gorbachev).
Implications on a global scale
The Cold War had a lot of impact outside of the USA & USSR: the unfortunate inhabitants of the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific were removed from their ancestral lands to allow for nuclear testing in the area. This is the only WHS so far with Cold War in its OUV: “birth of the Cold War … race to develop increasingly powerful nuclear weapons …. escalation of military power which characterized the Cold War”.
Cuba’s Desembarco del Granma park “includes the nationally important site of Fidel Castro’s “desembarco” in 1956 where he and a group of 82 revolutionaries landed after sailing from Mexico” - this was highlighted in the IUCN evaluation. During the Cold War, Castro aligned with the Soviet Union and allowed the Soviets to place nuclear weapons in Cuba, resulting in the Cuban Missile Crisis – a defining incident of the Cold War – in 1962.
Paranoia
Fortress Stevnsfort at Stevns Klint was part of the Baltic Sea defense of Denmark and NATO. It contains 1.8 kilometres of underground passageways carved out of Stevns Klint. Because it was hidden away behind solid layers of chalk, Stevnsfort could withstand a direct attack by a nuclear bomb.
The weirdest connection between WHS and the Cold War must be Fujian Tulou . I’ve tried to find the origins of this apocryphal story – which certainly does not feature in the Chinese nomination dossier. I found this in the Beijing review (2011) : “One day, a U.S. satellite suddenly discovered several buildings which looked like nuclear missile silos in the mountains of Fujian Province. American military officers at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing were reportedly immediately dispatched to Yongding County in Fujian, where they discovered that the "silos" were nothing more than Tulou. As a result, Fujian Tulou was unveiled to the world.”
Comments
9 comments