Declassified CIA Cartography Maps from the 1980s(brilliantmaps.com) |
Declassified CIA Cartography Maps from the 1980s(brilliantmaps.com) |
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.
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.
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.
> By 1980, Moscow was under intense scrutiny from Western intelligence agencies.
> The city hosted the 1980 Summer Olympics during a period of heightened Cold War tension following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. CIA maps like this would have been useful for diplomatic security planning, intelligence analysis, and understanding the geography of Soviet government operations.
The clean graphic design is characteristic of late Cold War CIA cartography.
> Rather than artistic relief shading seen in earlier maps, this style focused on clarity, precision, and rapid interpretation. E (sic)
> very rail yard, roadway, and public site could hold intelligence value, especially in a closed society like the USSR where reliable geographic information was often difficult for outsiders to obtain.
I can’t find a human behind any of this on the website. I’m certain there is one, but I’m not certain the summary is anything other than AI generated. Content farms at a new level? To what end?
Ah, the company that owns the site “Brilliant British Ltd” is a content farm. Its managing director says this on his own LinkedIn profile (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ian-wright-2079531b?originalSubd...):
> I am currently the Managing Director of Brilliant British Ltd, which owns and operates several websites in the UK payment, energy and small business sectors.
> Previously I was the Senior SEO manager for the EMEA region at Hotels.com and the Head of B2B SEO at MVF (Winner of the Sunday Times Tech Track 2013). I have over 13 years experience in SEO and online marketing and have worked for large corporations, startups and independently over that time.
> In my spare time I continue to operate a few test websites to see what's working in the world of SEO and also run my blog RandomlyLondon.com which has been featured in the Londonist, TimeOut and The Guardian.
And in the ‘blurb’ in his current company, he says:
> I'm currently the Managing Director of Brilliant British Ltd which publishes websites in various sectors including, business finance, payments and home improvements.
Someone on reddit got the actual maps but the link has bitrotted, wayback saved some - https://web.archive.org/web/20241207144716/http://architecto...
A content farm having a disparate range of websites, for the sole purpose of SEO needs to be able to create engaging content quickly. AI generation allows for that; and by purposefully keeping a name that we can try to trace back to a real human as the author, the post itself lends credence to the theory that it’s AI generated.