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Checkpoint Charlie: The Sixteen-Hour Nuclear Standoff
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
In October 1961, Soviet and American tanks faced each other barrel-to-barrel at Checkpoint Charlie — the only direct superpower confrontation of the Cold War, triggered by a dispute over an ID card. This episode traces how a single crossing point on Friedrichstraße became the pressure valve for everything wrong with the Cold War settlement.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The tank standoff at Checkpoint Charlie in October nineteen sixty-one lasted sixteen hours. That fact alone doesn't sound remarkable until you place it in context.
To understand Checkpoint Charlie, you have to go back to the night the wall began. August thirteenth, nineteen sixty-one.
Here's the framework that made Checkpoint Charlie possible, and also made it dangerous. After the Second World War, Berlin was divided among four occupying powers.
October twenty-second, nineteen sixty-one. An American diplomat named Allan Lightner wanted to cross into East Berlin to attend the opera.
The tank standoff didn't end the confrontations at Checkpoint Charlie. It set the pattern for them.
August seventeenth, nineteen sixty-two. One year and four days after the wall went up.
June twenty-sixth, nineteen sixty-three. President Kennedy came to West Berlin.
For most of the nineteen seventies and the early nineteen eighties, the wall was simply a fact of life. It was documented, it was protested, it was memorialized.
Günter Schabowski was an East German politburo spokesman. On the evening of November ninth, nineteen eighty-nine, he held a televised press conference in East Berlin.
Here's what the tank standoff of October nineteen sixty-one settled, and what it didn't. It settled, temporarily, the question of Allied access rights.
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