Cold War
The Cold War is the period of geopolitical confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union conventionally dated from 1947 to 1991. See Cold War for the public record.
The thaumaturgical cold war[edit]
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 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 Pripyat in 1987, in Kazakhstan in 1993 and at Site AZAZEL in 2020 are treated in this archive as a single continuous operation.