By Steve Brawner, © 2025 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.
For Americans over age 45, our childhoods were defined in part by the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. We grew up knowing the next war could destroy the world, and it could happen with the press of a button.
Now Blytheville is becoming the central place to remember that era as the home of the National Cold War Center.
The center still has a long way to go from being constructed, but it’s making progress. Dr. Christian Ostermann, the new executive director, said it has raised $7 million of the initial goal of $75 million. It soon will start a major fundraising campaign.
Why Blytheville? From 1955 to 1992, it was home to what eventually became known as Eaker Air Force Base. In 1955, its pilots flew through mushroom clouds minutes after bombs were detonated at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean to test the radiation’s effects on planes and pilots. Starting in 1960, it became part of the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command (SAC), which was responsible for American nuclear forces. Personnel at the base’s Ready Alert facility were prepared 24-7 to scramble to their B-52 bombers at the klaxon’s alarm.
Blytheville was the only SAC base where the Ready Alert facility was accessible to the public. When the National Park Service became interested in preserving it about a decade ago, local leaders, including former That Bookstore in Blytheville owner Mary Gay Shipley, decided to go further and make Blytheville the National Cold War Center’s home. Congress declared it a federal Cold War museum in December 2023.
“It’s really a story of community engagement, community action, community leadership, and one that allows me to apply three decades of research on the Cold War to a new museum,” Ostermann said. “But it’s also a story about a community rising to the challenge.”
In addition to restoring the Ready Alert facility, organizers plan to build a state-of-the-art museum along with an outdoor area. They hope to display large segments of the Berlin Wall, a B-52 bomber, and other planes. The center already has a Soviet MiG fighter.
Ostermann was born in Ohio to German parents who were living there at the time. His family returned home, and he grew up in Bonn in what was then West Germany.
He comes to the center from directing the History and Public Policy Program at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. The Trump administration recently reduced the center’s funding to the statutory minimum. As a result, its Cold War digital archive is moving to Blytheville.
Ostermann said the museum will tell the Cold War story as a global confrontation between the democratic West and the communist Soviet Union. It will describe how the war personally affected Americans, allies and adversaries. It will tell the story based on American values, but it also will acknowledge what Soviet citizens were experiencing and what Soviet leaders might have been thinking. The center will explain that much of the conflict was not actually “cold” because many people in the Third World died in proxy conflicts between the two superpowers. It will cover not only the military angle but also describe how “soft power,” such as American culture and business, influenced the outcome.
The museum will acknowledge the Cold War’s gray areas. It was an ideological conflict as much as a military one, so victory was difficult to define and acknowledge. There was no surrender, and there were no triumphant troops returning home to a ticker tape parade, as occurred after World War 2. Instead, the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet empire dissolved, the United States emerged as the world’s dominant superpower, and the relationship between the United States and Russia thawed – only to be periodically and partially re-cooled, as is the case now.
“It’s not an easy story about good versus evil,” Ostermann said. “There is that, too, for sure. But it’s more complicated. It’s more complex. And so we want to get the visitor to understand some of the complexity.”
Finally, the museum will let the visitor decide how the conflict applies to today’s geopolitical climate. Sometimes the United States’ relationships with Russia and China are described as new “Cold Wars.”
Those are complex, too. China is the United States’ third largest trading partner after Mexico and Canada. While the United States is arming Ukraine in response to the Russian invasion, American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts live together on the International Space Station.
Hopefully, the National Cold War Center will help us make sense of it all. To learn more, go to nationalcoldwarcenter.com.
Steve Brawner’s column is syndicated to 21 outlets in Arkansas. Email him at brawnersteve@mac.com.