Gareth ‘Gadge’ Harvey takes a look into
the phenomenon of Cold War airsoft
M
ost people are a little
confused by the idea of
Cold War airsoft. “Surely
there weren’t any Cold
War battles?” is the
usual response – and that’s partly true, and
part of what makes Cold War airsoft such
damn good fun.
So with no big battles to recreate, what
on earth is there to get excited about? For
a start you’ve got to look at the whole Cold
War thing from two points: first the very
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real shooting wars fought by the
USSR and the USA by proxy in
other peoples’ backyards (such
as Vietnam), and second
the European ‘Mexican
Standoff’ on the German
plains that, in the mid1980s, was just a stone’s
throw away from kicking
off into nuclear war.
It’s within this
‘two minutes to
midnight’ setting
of central Europe
circa-1985 that the
new genre of Cold War
games are being set.
Imagine an alternative
timeline, a universe
where diplomacy fails.
The balloon has gone up
and, engines revving, the
3rd Soviet Shock Army is on
the edge of the Iron Curtain,
sights firmly on Europe!
But I’m getting ahead of
myself. For many older airsofters
the Cold War (and it’s multitude
of associated global small wars)
was a worrying fact of life; to those