Editing Cold War (section)

== The thaumaturgical cold war ==

The Department is concerned with the conflict that ran underneath it.

The '''secret thaumaturgical cold war''' opens in 1969 with the [[Arctic Silence Accord]], under which both superpowers agreed to seal [[Ark Chasm]] permanently and erase the event from all records. It is conducted entirely through deniable proxies, principally the [[Special Projects Staff]] and later [[Department of Esoteric and Thaumaturgical Research|DETR]] against [[GRU Division P]], and both parties maintain publicly that the site does not exist while privately building the institutions required to take it.

Two features distinguish it from the conflict above.

It did not begin in 1947. First contact with the subglacial structure was 1958, and both services were formalised in the same year, 1965.

It did not end in 1991. Nothing in the Departmental record marks the dissolution of the Soviet Union as a terminal event. Division P was reconstituted rather than disbanded, and engagements at [[wikipedia:Pripyat|Pripyat]] in 1987, in Kazakhstan in 1993 and at [[Site AZAZEL]] in 2020 are treated in this archive as a single continuous operation.

[[Category:Operations]]