Kyle Kellams: Work continues toward opening the National Cold War Center in Blytheville, Arkansas, on the eastern side of the state. A major capital campaign is underway, with a goal of opening a full-fledged museum around the end of the decade.
Christian Ostermann, executive director of the National Cold War Center, says the center was designated by the United States Congress in late 2023 as the Federal Museum of the Cold War.
Christian Ostermann: The only museum that will tell the story of the Cold War in its full complexity and comprehensiveness that it deserves, given the currency of the term Cold War and all that historical baggage behind us in today's world. So the idea is to engage future generations on the history of the Cold War, to educate, to tell the story of the Cold War, to engage veterans, to help us inform this narrative, must tell this story and to honor their service.
If you think about it, Cold War service is not necessarily one, um, that was was, um, done in the battlefield. The Cold War was a twilight struggle. It was an ideological struggle. It was a cultural struggle. It was, yes, also a military conflict in those areas where it grew hot. Korea, Vietnam, but also in those areas where it didn't, fortunately. That is in lots of, um, hotspots around the world, but a lot of veterans of the Cold War, military and otherwise, don't really feel recognized for their service during this so hard to grasp conflict between the late 1940s and the late 1980s.
And so one of the things we really want to do is to honor that service and to talk about this history that is so profoundly important to understanding this country and the world today.
Kellams: As you mentioned in Blytheville, which is on the eastern edge of Arkansas, for people who might not be familiar, why in Blytheville?
Ostermann: A question I think that's on a lot of people's minds. It wasn't actually initially our idea. The inspiration we have to give credit where credit is due came from the National Park Service, which called, uh, my colleagues in Blytheville back in 2017 and shared with them that in Blytheville, at the former Blytheville Air Force Base, the Eaker Air Force base that was decommissioned in the early nineties, we have the only intact and publicly accessible in some way, Strategic Air Command alert center in the country.
And the Strategic Air Command was key to the U.S. military position posture during the Cold War to the deterrence policy that the United States pursued. The National Park Service says, you have this facility there. I think they were wondering whether I should turn it into a National Historic Landmark or something, but it didn't. It was the seed of this idea to create a museum, initially just a museum about the former Air Force base and centered around the restored alert facility.
But since then, this idea has grown into a vision to really provide the nation with a museum, a state-of-the-art, world-class museum that will tell the story of the Cold War as a global, national and local conflict. We have with the alert center a the ready alert facility, an authentic site that, once restored and we're on our way, I think will allow visitors to get a sense of the daily threat, the daily feel that people had during the Cold War of this constant threat out there of nuclear war, and the perception of a threat that the Soviets would attack at any point. And it was, of course, the crews at the ready alert facility that were at the ready within 15 minutes to get on the B-52s and head towards the Soviet bloc as part of a response to a Soviet attack.
Kellams: Where are we on the timeline? What is the progression now for the museum in the center?
Ostermann: It's where we're in, I would say, phase number two of a three-phase stage for this, for this program. The first phase that really ended earlier this year was to get an initial base Bass Museum open, what we call our BAFB exhibition. It's a small museum that shows, tells the story of the Blytheville Air Force Base, but also is starting to host temporary exhibits on other subjects related to the Cold War. We had to get that museum open to even function and be registered as a museum.
We've begun with the initial restoration to secure the structural integrity of the radio alert facility. We've begun a process of getting certified to host military aircraft on static display at the base. So that's base number one from 2019, 2020 through earlier this year.
Right now we're in phase number two, probably projected over three years through 2027, 2028, when we've launched a major national capital campaign. We are hoping next year to bring some major artifacts to Blytheville and open up an outdoor campus, at least one that will be a sort of initially accessible. I won't go into, can't go into the details there just yet. That'll be, hopefully, a big announcement sometime next year.
We're continuing to do work on the cleanup and restoration of both the facility and the base around it. Um, and as I said, we're in the middle of this certification process. But most importantly, we're in the middle of a major fundraising campaign. It's a $75 million campaign. That's our goal at the moment. And so phase three, groundbreaking. We plan to do that in 2028 with a projected opening of the museum in 2030.
Kellams: You know, it's so interesting. I was in high school and college in the waning days of the Cold War in the mid to late eighties, and I'm in my early sixties, so there are many people who are walking around employed with families who don't remember the Cold War and know it as a term only. So it's going to be interesting to see the patrons, the clientele that will come in.
Ostermann: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm, I'm hoping it will be a cross-section of America that will be interested in all of this. There will be the the veterans who will, I hope, will want to show their kids and grandkids what they were engaged in and why they were engaged in this conflict in whatever fashion they were part of it, whether that was within the military, within the intelligence service, within the diplomatic corps, within, frankly, the business community, or as part of a member of an NGO. We've come in recent years as historians of the Cold War to appreciate the important role that non-governmental actors and individuals have played in the Cold War, as opposed to governments and international organizations.
So we're hoping, you know, that will be one part of the audience. Clearly, our most important audience is the next generation. Those generations by now that are post-Cold War, that have no personal experience, like you and I, of the Cold War, what it felt like to live at that time and to engage them in the history of the Cold War, but also in the way that a lot of things in their daily lives, from the cell phone to GPS to the internet, are legacies of the Cold War and the things we take for granted actually have a history that often enough is rooted in the Cold War.
Kellams: Christian Ostermann is executive director of the National Cold War Center in Blytheville, Arkansas. You can find out more at nationalcoldwarcenter.com
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