Cold War Maps: Propaganda, Strategy and Occupation Zones

Explore maps that chart the division, anxieties and strategic imagination of the Cold War. The collection opens with Allied occupation maps of Germany, Austria and Vienna—including the scarce Atlanta map of the four zones and official 1946 plans of Austria and Vienna—then follows Europe’s hardening split into East and West. Satirical and persuasive maps reveal the era’s psychology: David Low’s 1952 serio-comic Europe, the Two Worlds Atlas, Life’s dramatic Global Pattern of the Red Offensive, and Richard Edes Harrison’s Fortune maps The Communist Fastness and Asia’s Southern Bastion. Maps of NATO, SEATO, the Baghdad Pact, COMECON and rival European trade blocs show containment taking institutional form. Atomic-bomb damage maps, the Nevada Test Site, Korean War campaigns and restricted silk escape-and-evasion charts extend the story from propaganda to military planning. Together these maps show how cartography made a divided world legible—turning occupation sectors, alliances, resources, flight routes and imagined threats into a compelling visual history of the era.