Long after cold war, artists' paintings of Soviet weapons remain
Back when superpower summits were the most important dates on a president鈥檚 calendar and arms control was debated as fiercely as health-care reform is today, one of the US military鈥檚 best cold-war weapons might have been painting.
That鈥檚 right 鈥� brushes, palettes, easels, the whole Picasso thing. But the artists in question weren鈥檛 producing 鈥淟es Demoiselles d鈥橝vignon.鈥� They were depicting missiles.
From 1981 to 1991, the Pentagon published a glossy booklet titled 鈥淪oviet Military Power.鈥� This yearly assessment of the USSR鈥檚 might had its critics, who thought it exaggerated the size of Kremlin arsenals and the effectiveness of Soviet forces.
But the pamphlet was supposed to rally US support for defense spending 鈥� and that it did. (Nobody ever talks about a Reagan-era military funding squeeze, do they?) It wasn鈥檛 just the scary red covers and the comparison charts that helped keep appropriations flowing. The most impressive part was the lush illustrations depicting Soviet weapons in their operational habitat.
The paintings produced by Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) artists included such classics as 鈥淪oviet SS-20s in Firing Position,鈥� which depicted intermediate-range nuclear missiles awaiting launch orders in a pine forest, and 鈥淪oviet MI-24 Hind Delivering Chemical Spray,鈥� which showed swooping helicopters misting some sort of gas over a defenseless (and apparently unpopulated) mountain field.
Why paintings? Because the artists were working from classified photos and other intelligence that couldn鈥檛 be reproduced. They could leave out stuff they didn鈥檛 want the Soviets to know that we knew.
The collapse of the Soviet Union made this exercise superfluous. 鈥淪oviet Military Power鈥� was canceled in 1991. The DIA painting era ended at the same time. Today the Pentagon uses computer generation if it wants fancy illustrations.
But art is eternal 鈥� and you can still see many of these paintings on the public part of the , or in person at the Smithsonian鈥檚 Air and Space Museum.
