Cold War

Bob Kahl slips in through a side door of the vast, abandoned hangar and looks at what's left of the assembly plant where he worked for nearly 40 years. He remembers the hum of power tools, the biting aroma of cutting oil, swarms of workers plugging away on a labyrinth of yellow scaffolding. All that's left is a few piles of broken concrete and a sea of colorless dust that coats a Palmdale factory floor the size of two football fields. "Welcome to the birthplace of America's space shuttle fleet," said Kahl, 60, smiling.

For sale: An exotic, once top-secret radar-evading ship, dubbed the Sea Shadow, that was built by one of the world's largest defense contractors during the height of the Cold War. Specifications: about 68 feet wide, 164 feet long and around 563 tons. Price: $139,200 or best offer. If interested, please contact the General Services Administration at its website: gsaauctions.gov. That's the sales pitch from theU.S. Navy, which - after five years of trying and failing to donate the stealthy Sea Shadow to a museum - is now selling the ship for scrap metal in an online auction.

Joe Sanderson left his Midwestern hometown in his 20s with a backpack, a notepad and a dream of being a writer. Starting in the mid-1960s, he crossed the Pacific on a freighter, climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, and kept going, for two decades in all, traipsing across more than 60 countries. Everywhere he went, he kept a diary and wrote to Mom and Dad back home in Urbana, Ill. Shortly after arriving in this Central American country in 1979, Sanderson pulled off his most audacious feat yet: He joined a guerrilla army.

NEW YORK - Who was Joseph Alsop? This question, this mystery drives "The Columnist," a new drama by David Auburn,Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Proof," about a star journalist who was as clear cut in his political views as he was opaque in his private life. The play, which opened Wednesday at Manhattan Theatre Club's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on Broadway in a production expertly directed by Daniel Sullivan, is more engrossing as creative biography than drama. (Factual events are fictionally processed and supplemented.)

Long gone are the soldiers who kept guard at this former Army facility, searching the skies for Soviet planes that might soar in from the Pacific to bomb the city. Their weather-battered guard shack off a gravelly road in the steep hills behind Encino now has rusted window frames and a hole in one wall. But the radar tower still stands tall, overlooking the San Fernando Valley to the north and the central city to the southeast.

Amid the family farms and rolling terrain of southern Ohio, one hill stands out for its precise geometry. The 65-foot high mound stretching more than a half-mile dominates a tract of northern hardwoods, prairie grasses and swampy ponds, known as the Fernald Preserve. Contrary to appearances, there is nothing natural here. The high ground is filled with radioactive debris, scooped from the soil around a former uranium foundry that produced critical parts for the nation's nuclear weapons program.

1 Russia Forget ballerinas, St. Petersburg's frothy architecture and the herbal aromas of bathhouses. There's another, harder edge to tourism in the former Soviet Union. For the Tom Clancy lovers, survivalists and others who like to play at war, a crop of tour companies offers Russian vacations with a dash of gun-toting machismo. You can fire small arms, Kalashnikov assault rifles or rocket-propelled grenades.

As we sort through the implications of Umar Farouk Abdulmultallab's alleged attempt to incinerate a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day, we're bound to hear a great deal about "the war on terror" and how it is or isn't being waged. We're also going to have to assimilate the confounding facts that Abdulmultallab converted to Salafism -- Islam's fundamentalist and puritanical variant -- not in his native Nigeria but in London. He was apparently drawn to Yemen, where his suicide mission was conceived, by sermons and texts posted on the Internet, and it was there, on Monday, that Al Qaeda's Arabian peninsula organization hailed him as a hero.

Did you ever think you might actually miss the Cold War? Feel a twinge of nostalgia for a time when we knew exactly who our enemies were? Yearn for those glory days when we didn't question whether we were the good guys, even if we should have? I never expected to and yet as we mark the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall's fall, I've been hit by a wistful wave, especially for the heroes and villains of cinema past who roamed the Eastern Bloc with wits sharp and weapons at the ready.

The hottest video rental in this beachside resort town isn't some action-packed Hollywood blockbuster, but "Brigada," a Russian miniseries about a bunch of army buddies who form an organized crime syndicate before they're rubbed out by a group of younger, more unscrupulous rivals. The Russian influence here is also visible in shop signs using the Cyrillic alphabet and Russian flags hanging outside stores just down the street from Starbucks. "We've had good relations with the Russians for a long time," said Nikos Andreo, a 57-year-old wine grower in Limassol.

ART Examining the phantom-like presence of the American military-industrial complex in Southern California, local artist Gabie Strong takes a trans-disciplinary approach in her exhibition, "My War. " Using photography, drawing and sound, Strong looks at the influence of the Cold War on the built environment and social culture of the Los Angeles area, focusing particularly on architectural forms in deterioration. Angels Gate Cultural Center, 3601 S. Gaffey St., San Pedro. Opening: 1-4 p.m. Sun. Closes April 20. (310)

The levels of radioactive plutonium around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant aren't much higher than the amount of plutonium remaining in the environment from Cold War-era nuclear weapons tests, and it probably poses little threat to humans, a new study indicates. The paper, published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, examines the area within a roughly 20-mile radius of the stricken plant and details the concentration of plutonium isotopes deposited there after explosions ripped open multiple reactors.

Four years ago, "Child 44," Tom Rob Smith's debut thriller set in Stalinist Russia, was a literary sensation. An edgy, intense portrait of Russia's secret police and the lengths they would go to to protect their country's image as a crime-free society, "Child 44" managed to straddle a fine line between well-researched, absorbing historical fiction and propulsive thriller that would earn the book universal praise, sales of more than 1.5 million copies...

Make a list of those who've had a hand in the entertainment world's vampire vogue and you'll probably put Tomas Alfredson near the top. The Swedish filmmaker directed "Let the Right One In," the 2008 hit about a relationship between a bullied boy and the young-looking vampire Eli that turned even skeptics into believers. Yet ask the 46-year-old about his influence on, or interest in, the bloodsucker bonanza and you'll get a shrug. "I haven't really seen any vampire movies, except maybe a few Bela Lugosi movies when I was a kid," Alfredson said.

The early, largely positive reviews for "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy," Tomas Alfredson's new big-screen version of the classic John le Carré novel, have come with an undercurrent of surprise. Le Carré's murky, tricky stories present obvious challenges to filmmakers, and "Tinker" — published in 1974 and considered one of his murkiest, trickiest books — was turned into a lauded 1979 BBC miniseries that the author himself once termed the most successful adaptation of his work. With a leisurely running time of nearly 51/2 hours over six episodes (Acorn Media has just reissued a three-disc DVD edition)

A movie producer who made low-level passes over the Santa Monica Pier in a Cold War-era military jet went to jail Wednesday for flying an aircraft in a manner that endangered lives and property. Having lost his appeal, David G. Riggs, 48, surrendered to authorities at Los Angeles County Superior Court and began serving a 60-day sentence imposed by Judge Harold I. Cherness in June 2010. Cherness further ordered Riggs to clean beaches for 60 days and pay more than $6,000 in penalties and court fees.

Besides being cynical, Michael Ledeen's argument (Commentary, March 30) that to have peace you have to make war is historically flawed. World War I was a smashing victory for the Allies. But the peace bought by victory spawned Nazism, fascism and the seeds of World War II. On the other hand, the Cold War brought about lasting peace, as Ledeen rightly writes, and it did so for the reason he chooses to ignore: It was not a real war, having been fought with words, not weapons. ALFREDO A. BONADEO Santa Barbara

In the-not-so-very-distant past, when newspapers had staffs large enough to include a variety of talents, there were journalists known mainly for their sure-handling of breaking or specialized news and others valued mainly as writers. Among the latter there were always a few who labored so long and intensely over their stories that some colleagues -- and frustrated editors -- derisively referred to them as "stone cutters." It was meant to be an epithet, of course, but the metaphorically inclined sometimes would point out that those who work in stone, though they proceed slowly, sometimes produce monuments.

She was born on the west side of the Berlin Wall. He was born on the east side. But artists Jasmin Siddiqui and Falk Lehmann worked side-by-side for days to paint a poignant 12-foot-tall reminder of the Cold War on a chunk of the Berlin Wall that stands next to Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. The artwork is spray-painted on the "East Berlin side" of the concrete wall that for 28 years split families, blocked workers from their jobs and prevented Germans from freely traveling inside their divided country.

The Apothecary A novel Maile Meloy G.P. Putnam's Sons: 353 pp., $16.99, ages 10 and older A quick Amazon search for books on World War II yields an astonishing 45,961 titles. There are far fewer stories about its Cold War aftermath, and even fewer that attempt to channel the early '50s from a teenager's point of view - but Maile Meloy's "The Apothecary" does just that. A gem of historical fiction for the middle-school set, Meloy's children's debut is a pitch-perfect melding of postwar intrigue and ancient medicinal arts told from the perspective of a 14-year-old girl.