Today is Guy Fawkes Day, a day where the U.K. celebrates the foiling of a plot to kill King James I in 1605. The country celebrates this by lighting fireworks and, in a morbid twist, burning an effigy of poor Guy.

It's easy to forget that this celebration has rather grim roots. Guy Fawkes was part of a Catholic plot to kill a Protestant King and his English Lords — and, unfortunately for him, it failed. He was almost certainly tortured severely, before being executed in a brutal manner.

Fawkes was the one guy in the plot unlucky enough to have been discovered late on November 5 with dozens of barrels of gunpowder hidden under wood, after a tip-off to a Catholic politician led to an inspection of the cellars under parliament. He was swiftly taken into custody at the Tower of London and interrogated until he eventually gave up his co-conspirators.

While we'll never know precisely what happened to Fawkes in those eight days, it seems pretty likely it was bad: There is speculation that Fawkes was tortured using a rack during his stay in the Tower of London.

For a visual on the effects of torture, look at the document below. You can see Fawkes' signature, before the interrogation (he signs as Guido Fawkes, a name he had taken on later in life):

Now, contrast that with his signature on a later confession, made after eight days of interrogation. As you can see, Fawkes' signature is a barely legible scrawl:

As the BBC puts it, "his signature on his confession was that of a shattered and broken man, the ill-formed letters telling the story of a someone who was barely able to hold a quill. "

Even once the torture was over, Fawkes still had to meet a grisly end. After his confession, he was hanged, drawn, and quartered, with his remains sent to the four corners of the kingdom — as a warning to future plotters.

This post was originally written by Adam Taylor.

SEE ALSO: How Guy Fawkes Inadvertently Created The Word 'Guy'

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A true milestone in the progress of naval aviation, the Vought F-8 has been one of the few carrier-based fighters that could outperform its land-based counterparts.

Being the first genuinely supersonic naval aircraft, the Crusader was a single seat, single engine swept fighter that introduced an unusual feature, the variable incidence wing.

Armed with four Colt Mk 12 cannons,  the F-8 was called “The last gunfighter."

This firepower, combined with its high thrust-to-weight ratio and with its good maneuverability, made the Crusader a good dogfighter.

The Crusader showed its ability in close combat during the Vietnam war, especially on Dec. 14, 1967. As explained by Barrett Tilman and Henk van der Lugt in their book VF-11/111 Sundowners, on that day, Lt. Cdr. Richard “Brown Bear” Schaffert, the VF-111 Sundowners operation officer during the 1967 deployment onboard the CV-34 USS Oriskany, were involved in an aerial combat which became a classic dogfight of the jet age, even if it did not result in any MiG kill.

Schaffert was escorting an A-4E Skyhawk, piloted by Lt Charles Nelson, tasked to an Iron Hand anti-SAM (Surface to Air Missile) mission in the area between Hanoi and Haiphong, when “Brown Bear” saw two MiG-17s (“Fresco” based on their NATO designation).

Schaffert immediately started a descent from 18,000 ft. When he recovered at 3,000 ft, he looked for Nelson but found two more MiGs.

Having lost the sight of the A-4E, Brown Bear understood that he had to rely on his 3500 hours of flight experience to face four bandits alone. He started the dogfight with an 8-Gs break forcing the first Fresco to overshoot. But Schaffert knew very well that he had to fight working in the vertical, since the F-8 couldn’t turn as fast as a MiG-17.

As it became obvious that the four bandits had split into two sections, Schaffert started a series of yo-yo maneuvers using the afterburner, trying to reach an advantage position against the MiGs and leaving Brown Bear the chance to conduct the dogfight as a 1 vs 2 engagement.

Schaffert got a “good tone” from one of its Sidewinders but the second pair of MiG-17s shot at him with their cannons and he had to perform three more yo-yos before launching a Sidewinder — which didn’t explode. Now he had only two missiles left since one of the four AIM-9s carried by the F-8 had already experienced a failure before takeoff.

Executing reversal maneuvers and pulling high Gs to defeat the superior turning radius of the MiG-17, Schaffert shot another missile which failed to explode.

Then, two MiGs fired a couple of IR-guided K-13 missiles (AA-2 Atoll as reported by NATO designation) which failed to land on target because they were launched outside of the missile operative envelope.

Brown Bear found himself once again in a good firing position. But this time the guidance system of the last Sidewinder failed, leaving Schaffert with only the rounds of his plane’s four Colt cannons.

After another 5 Gs turn, he had a good tracking solution on a MiG. But when he pulled the trigger, all the four 20 mm cannons choked.

The problem was caused by a common defect of Crusader cannons: the pneumatic ammunition feed system disconnected after high-Gs maneuvers.

Two MiG-21s joined the air combat firing two more Atolls missiles, which Brown Bear was able to avoid.

Facing six adversaries, Schaffert started another series of high-altitude yo-yos and engaged the enemy leader in a vertical rolling scissors. Once he had reached the bottom of the maneuver, he accelerated towards the coast, leaving the enemy behind. He returned safely to the USS Oriskany with almost no fuel left.

Despite the fact that Brown Bear didn’t shoot down any enemy fighter, he left an important lesson to Topgun instructors: how to survive in a dogfight alone against six MiGs, a good lecture to give to the Fighter Weapons School students in the following years.

SEE ALSO: Thanks to espionage, Chinese fights may be able to match the F-35

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As the director of this country’s oldest museum of political repression, Vasiliy Khanevich spends his days inside a musty Siberian basement some 2,000 miles east of Moscow, surrounded by photographs of the dead.

His salary is modest and the state-owned museum he runs, located in the cramped detention center of a former state security building, makes no money.

But none of that bothers him.

What upsets stocky, mustachioed Khanevich is that the rest of Russia is caught in a patriotic frenzy glorifying the Soviet Union’s heroic achievements.

“People forget a lot of details about the ‘bright Soviet past,’” Khanevich says, “about the shortages, the poverty and many, many other things.”

With Russia locked in a geopolitical standoff with the West over Ukraine, the Kremlin is selectively deploying historical memory in a bid to bolster support for President Vladimir Putin and his policies.

That often means glossing over its most painful moments, such as the terror that flourished under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

Instead it’s resurrecting a Soviet-style narrative with the help of state-run media, casting Russia as a righteous bulwark against Western influence. The overarching theme is always “victory.”

Officials and other government supporters here have drawn increasingly absurd parallels between the seizure of eastern Ukraine by Russian-backed gunmen and the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany — by far the most pivotal moment in that country’s history.

Critical examination of the Soviet past is rarely an option, and Putin himself typically sets the tone.

In a meeting with historians on Wednesday, he dismissed Western criticism of the 1939 non-aggression agreement between the Soviets and Nazi Germany, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that paved the way for Soviet Union’s forcible occupation of the Baltic states and half of Poland.

“They say: ‘Oh, how bad,’” Putin told the audience. “But what’s so wrong here if the Soviet Union did not want to fight?”

Arseny Roginsky, chairman of the venerated rights group Memorial, says such official messages justifying Soviet policy have left Russians confused about the past, especially because de-communization never occurred here.

He points to Stalin’s Great Terror of 1937-38, when more than a million were killed or imprisoned, saying many are reluctant to pin blame on the Soviet system at large.

“On one hand, they understand the Terror happened, and that it was bad,” Roginsky says. “But on the other, they say, ‘Our government was always decent.’”

“So who is to blame?” he adds. “A crime took place, but there’s no perpetrator.”

The absence explains why Stalin remains one of the most popular historical figures for Russians, credited for defeating the Nazis and industrializing the Soviet Union.

A recent poll by the official Public Opinion Foundation found that 89 percent of Russians discuss their country’s history of repression only rarely or not at all. Meanwhile, a third of the population believes the media discuss the topic “too much.”

Even more ominously, the same poll also found that 48 percent expect a return of Soviet-style repression.

And it’s not just public opinion: Veteran dissidents see signs of what they say are familiar Soviet tactics making a comeback.

Critics have accused the authorities of staging politically charged show trials against protesters and even ordering alleged perpetrators to mental hospitals.

Sergei Grigoryants, an activist who spent nearly a decade in Soviet prisons, says the Kremlin’s current critics are met with a wave of “total intimidation” that may only worsen.

“Unfortunately, I’m afraid that the forms [of intimidation] used today will be deemed insufficient by the authorities pretty soon,” he told Radio Liberty late last month.

Some of that pressure is being exerted on those encouraging Russians to dig deeper into their history.

The most prominent example is an official campaign against Roginsky’s Memorial, the country’s oldest civil rights group and the lone symbol of Russia’s flagging effort to deal with its past.

Founded during the Soviet Union’s twilight years to shed light on the regime’s crimes, it’s also played a crucial role in uncovering human rights abuses in post-Soviet Russia.

The group is has gotten used to official harassment.

In recent years, it’s been hit with allegations of treachery and collusion with foreign powers seeking to foment unrest here — familiar accusations for Putin’s critics.

But now Memorial faces a Supreme Court hearing next week that could strip the organization of its legal status. It comes after Russia’s Justice Ministry asked the court last month to “liquidate” Memorial.

Roginsky says the move would unleash a bureaucratic nightmare on his organization, which maintains a vast network of regional groups, but that it would not stop their activity.

“The [regional] organizations will reregister, and we’ll keep thinking about how to reunite again,” he says.

The campaign is especially painful for veteran activists like Khanevich, who runs the Tomsk chapter of Memorial and has spent more than two decades uncovering Soviet crimes.

For him and other locals here in Siberia, the issue of historical memory hits home particularly hard: virtually everyone was affected in one way or another by the regime’s penchant for mass executions, arbitrary detentions, and forced exile.

In the Tomsk region alone, at least half a million people fell victim to Soviet repression. That number includes only those who were officially rehabilitated, Khanevich says.

From the four-chamber prison that now houses his museum, around 11,000 people were sent to their deaths in front of firing squads on Stalin’s orders.

That’s partly why he believes politics shouldn’t be involved in addressing historical memory.

“The time has come to drop the political insinuations regarding this question and simply think about the millions of people who were lost,” he says.

“No matter what you think of this part of history,” he adds, “it’s impossible to hush it up.”

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On Monday, I posted my nominees for ten Cold War histories worth reading.

But many people don’t have the time or patience to plow through comprehensive histories.

So for The Water's Edge readers looking to save time, here is a short course on the history of the Cold War using forty of the most memorable quotations from that era.

“I can deal with Stalin. He is honest, but smart as hell.” — President Harry Truman, diary entry, July 17, 1945.

“In summary, we have here [in the Soviet Union] a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with US there can be no permanent modus vivendi that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure. This political force has complete power of disposition over energies of one of world’s greatest peoples and resources of world’s richest national territory, and is borne along by deep and powerful currents of Russian nationalism.” — George Kennan, chargé d’affaires at the US embassy in Moscow in an official cable to the US State Department (“The Long Telegram”), February 22, 1946.

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”— Winston Churchill, address at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946.

“I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way. I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes. ”— President Harry Truman, speech to a joint session of Congress, announcing what becomes known as the Truman Doctrine, March 12, 1947.

“The United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace.” — Secretary of State George C. Marshall, commencement address at Harvard University that unveils the Marshall Plan, June 5, 1947.

“The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” — “X” (George Kennan), Foreign Affairs, July 1, 1947.

“The defensive perimeter [of the United States in East Asia] runs along the Aleutians to Japan and then goes to the Ryukyus.” — Dean Acheson, speech to the National Press Club that leaves South Korea outside the U.S. defense perimeter, January 12, 1950.

“While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205.” — Sen. Joseph McCarthy, speech at the Women’s Republican Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, February 9, 1950.

“The whole success of the proposed program hangs ultimately on recognition by this Government, the American people, and all free peoples, that the cold war is in fact a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake.” — NSC-68, April 7 (or 14), 1950.

“If we let Korea down, the Soviet[s] will keep right on going and swallow up one [place] after another.” — President Harry Truman, remarks at his first meeting with his advisors after learning that North Korea had invaded South Korea, June 25, 1950.

“Mr. Stevenson has a degree alright – a PhD from the Acheson College of Cowardly Communist Containment.” — Vice President Richard Nixon, attacking the Democratic presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson, during the 1952 election.

“It will begin with its President taking a simple, firm resolution. The resolution will be: To forego the diversions of politics and to concentrate on the job of ending the Korean war – until that job is honorably done. That job requires a personal trip to Korea. I shall make that trip. Only in that way could I learn how best to serve the American people in the cause of peace. I shall go to Korea.” — Republican presidential nominee Dwight D. Eisenhower laying out his plan for ending the Korean War, October 25, 1952.

“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness …. Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?” — Lawyer Joseph Welch defending one of his colleagues against an attack from Sen. Joseph McCarthy at the Army-McCarthy hearings, June 9, 1954.

“Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the ‘falling domino’ principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly.” — President Dwight D. Eisenhower, press conference, April 7, 1954.

“If you don’t like us, don’t accept our invitations and don’t invite us to come to see you. Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you.” — Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, November 18, 1956.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.” —President Dwight D. Eisenhower, farewell address, January 17, 1961.

“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” — President John F. Kennedy, inaugural address, January 20, 1961.

“Nobody intends to put up a wall!” — East German Premier Walter Ubricht, June 15, 1961, less than two months before construction of the Berlin Wall begins.

“This Government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet Military buildup on the island of Cuba. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.” — President John F. Kennedy, address to the nation on the Cuban Missile Crisis, October 22, 1962.

“We’re eyeball to eyeball … and I think the other fellow just blinked.” — Secretary of State Dean Rusk to National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy upon learning that Soviet ships headed toward Cuba had stopped dead in the water, October 24, 1962.

“All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, Ich bin ein Berliner.” — President John F. Kennedy, speech to the people of West Berlin, June 26, 1963.

“I believe this resolution to be a historic mistake. I believe that within the next century, future generations will look with dismay and great disappointment upon a Congress which is now about to mistake such a historic mistake.” — Sen. Wayne Morse (D-OR) on the Senate’s impending vote to adopt the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, August 7, 1964.

“We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” — President Lyndon Johnson, speech at Akron University, October 21, 1964.

“We do this in order to slow down aggression. We do this to increase the confidence of the brave people of South Vietnam who have bravely born this brutal battle for so many years with so many casualties. And we do this to convince the leaders of North Vietnam — and all who seek to share their conquest — of a simple fact: We will not be defeated. We will not grow tired. We will not withdraw either openly or under the cloak of a meaningless agreement.” — President Lyndon Johnson, address to the nation on US war aims in Vietnam, April 7, 1965.

“Declare the United States the winner and begin de-escalation.” — Sen. George Aiken (R-VT) offering advice to President Lyndon Johnson on how to handle the politics of reducing the US commitment in Vietnam, October 19, 1966.

“But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” — Walter Cronkite, CBS Evening News, February 27, 1968.

“Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.” — President Lyndon Johnson, address to the nation, March 31, 1968.

“And so tonight — to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans — I ask for your support.” — President Richard Nixon, address to the nation asking for support for his Vietnam policy, November 3, 1969.

“It is in that spirit, the spirit of ’76, that I ask you to rise and join me in a toast to Chairman Mao, to Premier Chou, to the people of our two countries, and to the hope of our children that peace and harmony can be the legacy of our generation to theirs.” — President Richard Nixon, toast on his visit to China, February 25, 1972.

“From secrecy and deception in high places; come home, America. From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation; come home, America. From the entrenchment of special privileges in tax favoritism; from the waste of idle lands to the joy of useful labor; from the prejudice based on race and sex; from the loneliness of the aging poor and the despair of the neglected sick — come home, America.” — Sen. George McGovern (D-SD), speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president, July 14, 1972.

“During the day on Monday, Washington time, the airport at Saigon came under persistent rocket as well as artillery fire and was effectively closed. The military situation in the area deteriorated rapidly. I therefore ordered the evacuation of all American personnel remaining in South Vietnam.” — President Gerald Ford’s statement following evacuation of United States personnel from the Republic of Vietnam announcing the Fall of Saigon, April 29, 1975.

“Under Lenin, the Soviet Union was like a religious revival, under Stalin like a prison, under Khrushchev like a circus, and under Brezhnev like the US Post Office.” — National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski at a cabinet meeting, as recorded in President Jimmy Carter’s diary, November 7, 1977.

“My opinion of the Russians has changed most drastically in the last week than even (sic) the two-and-a-half years before that. It’s only now dawning upon the world the magnitude of the action that the Soviets undertook in invading Afghanistan.” — President Jimmy Carter, interview with ABC News, December 31, 1979.

“Well, the task I’ve set forth will long outlive our own generation. But together, we too have come through the worst. Let us now begin a major effort to secure the best — a crusade for freedom that will engage the faith and fortitude of the next generation. For the sake of peace and justice, let us move toward a world in which all people are at last free to determine their own destiny.” — President Ronald Reagan, speech to the British Parliament at Westminster Hall, June 8, 1982.

“What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant US retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?” — President Ronald Reagan, address to the nation on defense and national security that launches the Strategic Defense Initiative, March 23, 1983.

“My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” — President Ronald Reagan during a microphone test before a radio address, August 11, 1984.

“I like Mr. Gorbachev. We can do business together.”— British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, BBC interview, December 17, 1984.

“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” — President Ronald Reagan, speech at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin, June 12, 1987.

“The threat of world war is no more.” — Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev on the ending of the Cold War December, 1991.

“But the biggest thing that has happened in the world in my life, in our lives, is this: By the grace of God, America won the Cold War.” — President George H.W. Bush, State of the Union address, January 28, 1992.

SEE ALSO: The biggest human-made explosion in history happened 53 years ago

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 In this excerpt from The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, Frederick Taylor, a German historian, describes the moments leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall by weaving together history, archival materials, and personal accounts.

At around 11:30 p.m, a group of East Berliners pushed aside the screen fence in front of the border crossing and everyone swarmed into the checkpoint area en masse.

Checkpoint commander Lieutenant-Colonel Harald Jäger decided that he was not prepared to risk the lives of himself and his soldiers. He ordered his men to stop checking passports, open up fully, and just let the crowd do what it wanted.

And the crowd knew what it wanted.

Within moments, thousands began to pour through the checkpoint. They simply walked or, in most cases, ran into West Berlin. The sensation of running freely over the bridge, of crossing a border where such an action, just days or even hours before, would have courted near-certain death, brought a surge of exhilaration that, if we are to believe those who were there, all but changed the chemical composition of the air and turned it into champagne.

Large crowds had already gathered on the Western side. They greeted the Easterners with cries of joy and open arms. Many improvised toasts were drunk.

By midnight, all the border checkpoints had been forced to open. At the Invalidenstrasse, masses 'invaded' from the West and met the approaching Easterners in the middle.

It was now twenty past midnight, and the entire East German army had been placed on a state of heightened alert. However, in the absence of orders from the leadership, the 12,000 men of the Berlin border regiments remained confined to barracks. The night passed, and the orders never arrived.

Between one and two a.m., human swarms form East and West push their way through the Wall at the Brandenburg Gate. Some are still in their sleepwear, ignoring the November cold.

Thousands luxuriate in the sensation of walking around the nearby Pariser Platz — embassy row — an elegant city landmark closed for thirty years by barbed wire, concrete blocks and tank traps, turned by state decree into a deadly no man's land. People are clambering on top of the Wall to caper and dance and yell their hearts out in liberation and release and delight.

A mix of hype and hope has defeated bureaucratic obfuscation. A little over six hours after a fumbled press conference and a Western press campaign that took the fumbled ball of the temporary exit-visa regualtion and ran with it, a revolution occured.

One of the swiftest and least bloody in history. 

The fall of the Berlin Wall, like its construction, took place in a single night. Just as on 13 August 1961, a city and a people awoke to find themselves divided, so on the morning of 10 November 1989 that division was no more.

Although, how many people actually woke up to this relevation is debatable, since during that night in Berlin many had not slept a wink.

Excerpted from The Berlin Wall: A World Divided by Frederick Taylor, (HarperCollins Publishers, 2006). Excerpted with permission by Frederick Taylor.

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RFE/RL archival photos of the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. All of the photographs in this slide show were all culled from the RFE/RL archives at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

East German troops were prominently deployed following the division of East and West Berlin on August 13, 1961.

East German police patrol a temporary, prefabricated section of the Berlin Wall. After midnight on August 13, East German troops began erecting what Communist East German leader Walter Ulbricht called an "anti-fascist protection barrier."

Two months earlier, on June 15, he had declared: "Nobody intends to build a wall."

A section of the temporary wall snaking through Berlin. In the first week of the division of Berlin, East German authorities erected a barbed-wire fence, laid concertina wire, and mounted heavily armed patrols. The construction of the real wall would begin in the next week or so.

An East German armored car patrols the zonal border between East and West Berlin in mid-August 1961.

William Marsh, Berlin bureau chief of Radio Free Europe, interviews a police official at Potsdamer Platz. In the background, East German workers are erecting the permanent wall that bisected Potsdamer Platz and rendered the square a desolate wasteland.

View of the newly constructed Berlin Wall, looking from West to East. On August 19, 1961, the wall claimed its first life as a man fell to his death trying to climb down from his top-floor apartment in East Berlin's Bernauerstrasse to the pavement below in West Berlin.

View of the newly constructed Berlin Wall, looking from West to East. On August 24, 1961, 24-year-old Guenter Litfin was shot dead as he swam across the River Spree. The incident is generally accepted as the date of the first killing of a would-be escapee by border guards after the wall went up.

A section of the wall. On August 17, 1962, 18-year-old Peter Fechter bled to death in the no-man's land between East and West Berlin after being shot trying to escape. Western cameramen recorded the scene for nearly an hour before guards took away his body.

The wall with the Brandenburg Gate in the background. On June 12, 1987, near this site, U.S. President Ronald Reagan famously demanded of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."

Looking through the Brandenburg Gate from West to East Berlin in 1961.

SEE ALSO: How Putin is reversing the progress what was made in Berlin 25 years ago

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The beginning of November saw Sana's airport, government buildings, universities, and even major city intersections firmly under the control of the anti-government Houthi movement.

Since the 1990s, the Houthi clan has gained the support of many northern Zadyi tribes, adherents of Yemen's branch of Shia Islam, which comprises around 30 percent of the country's population of 25 million. The attack on Sana caps a decade of armed political struggle between the tribesmen of the Houthi movement and the Yemeni government. 

For its part, the foreign media has portrayed the Houthi rebellion in global terms of religious sectarianism, Iranian foreign policy, and al-Qaeda, while largely ignoring local Yemeni factors.

Behind the Houthi rebellion, however, lies a long history of Zaydi minority religious rule over the Sunni majority in Yemen and decades of opposition to the modern Yemeni government.

Reflecting back on the 1968 siege of Sana provides historic insight into the current assault on the city.

The Siege: Buildup and Aftermath

On September 26, 1962, the Yemeni imam Muhammad al-Badr, from the Zaydi clan of Hamid al-Din, was overthrown by a group of military officers who founded what is now recognized as the modern Yemeni republic, marking the end to more than a thousand years of Zaydi religious rule in Yemen. The deposed imam fled northward and gathered a coalition of Zaydi tribes to form an armed opposition to the republic.

Over the next six years, a dozen different countries and organizations intervened in the Yemeni civil war in an attempt to influence the outcome in one direction or another. The seventy-day siege of Sana in 1968 by the imam's northern tribes marked the war's culmination.

Prior to the siege, most of the political elite had fled Sana, leaving behind a weakened central government with only a few thousand soldiers to defend the capital. Despite overwhelming odds against the republic's survival, the city was saved by a combination of timely Soviet airlifts and a series of battlefield miscalculations by the imam's generals.

The defense of Sana became the defining moment in the Yemeni republic's modern history.

A generation of Yemeni politicians, including former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, claim to have been among the defenders of the capital city in 1968, counting themselves as national heroes.

After six years of fighting, tens of thousands of total casualties, and untold sums of money, the Yemeni republic emerged from the civil war as a weak state reliant on foreign support for its continued existence.

The Soviet Union had invested the most money and political capital in supporting the new republic during the 1960s by financing the construction of new naval and airports, underwriting an Egyptian army of occupation that numbered 70,000, and carrying out the risky airlifts to save the capital city in 1968.

After the main hostilities had subsided, Pavel Demchenko, the senior Middle East correspondent for the Soviet newspaper Pravda, made arguably the keenest observation of the entire conflict: September 1962 was not a revolution but rather "a centuries-old method of Yemeni regime change."

The Soviets had perceived Yemen through the prism of regional Arab nationalist trends and a global conflict and had failed to comprehend the civil war's local nature.

The Houthi Political Plan: A Return to the Clerical Rule?

In September of this year, the Houthis, following the precedent set by the last Zaydi imam, descended on the capital city with the express intention of challenging the modern Yemeni republic.

Today's images of Houthi tribesmen in traditional Yemeni dress brandishing weapons and ammunition as they near the city's gates echo those from the 1968 siege. Indeed, the tradition of sieges of the city dates back as early as the fifth century, when the Sasanian Empire enacted such a siege.

Also central to the tradition of targeting the capital city as a means of bringing down the state was permission granted to loyal tribesman, upon victory, to loot the city as payment for their military service.

Today, discussions with Sana residents indicate fears that Houthi looting and intimidation may foretell further violence. Those who personally recall the 1968 siege say they half expect to see, as they did four decades ago, the heads of rebels or collaborators adorning the gates of the city's main marketplace.

The historic parallels between the Houthi rebellion and the former Zaydi imam's tribal forces of the 1960s go beyond mere conjecture. The Houthi family leadership claims legitimacy as members of the sayyed class, or direct descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. The select families belonging to this lineage constitute a form of limited nobility in Yemen, with many of them marrying only within the sayyed class.

The current Houthi leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, belongs to a sayyed family and, despite his youthful age of thirty-two, studiously flaunts his title, following the practice of his father, grandfather, and brothers.

More than an indicator of nobility, sayyed status is an essential criterion for becoming imam.

Although official Houthi media and publications deny any intentions of restoring the Yemeni imamate, it is well known in Yemeni society that members of the sayyed class harbor visions of restoring a religious leadership and resuming hierarchical supremacy.

The Houthi resurgence began during the 1990s with a program of Zaydi religious education that was seen as a challenge to the secular Yemeni government and to Saudi influence on Yemeni society.

This program, alongside a platform advocating equal rights for all Yemenis and an end to the state's political corruption, has generated popular support for the Houthi opposition. During the street protests of 2011, Houthi representatives sat alongside Yemeni students in Sana's Tahrir Square calling for President Saleh's resignation and extensive government reform.

As the central government grew weaker and the opposition movement grew stronger, members of the Houthi leadership began advocating a more ambitious political agenda and military expansion aimed at asserting their tribal power over the current government.

In the two years since Saleh's 2012 resignation, massive Houthi protests have devolved into a new phase of armed conflict with the Yemeni government, with Houthi troops advancing southward from their tribal stronghold in the north, reaching Sana by September 2014.

The contemporary defenders of Sana and the entirety of the Yemeni republic cannot rely on today's US targeted strikes or the Soviet airlifts of 1968. Further, they are faced with the difficulty of prolonging a republic with declining support and validity against a popular religious alternative.

Adding to the intrigue, the former imam's grandson Muhammad Hamid al-Din returned from exile in Saudi Arabia to Houthi-controlled Sana on October 26, purportedly at the behest of Houthi officials. Abdul-Malik al-Houthi and the rest of his tribe understand that, in a country dominated by tribal loyalties, a religiously ordained government has significantly more authority and legitimacy than a secular republic.

Yemenis would certainly not be surprised if Abdul-Malik or the former imam's grandson, supported by a Zaydi tribal religious council, claims the right to the Yemeni imamate, thus restoring a system of rule that had governed this southern Arabian country for centuries.

US Policy Implications

However much regional states and foreign media may read the Houthi rebellion as part of a sectarian struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia or as a symptom of the spread of religious extremism, locals are more likely to perceive the conflict as the continuation of decades of political tensions between Zaydi tribal elite and the modern Yemeni state.

US officials should be careful not to repeat the mistakes of Soviet officials during the 1960s by intervening in a conflict that could be understood, with the passage of time, as simply "a centuries-old method of Yemeni regime change."

While even traditional methods of regime change in Yemen often involved some level of foreign intervention, Yemenis are more likely to consider the Houthi assault on Sana by reflecting on the 1968 historical precedent rather than the intentions of an outside power.

Any lasting resolution of the conflict must first recognize the role of Zaydi religious elite within the country's history and in the identity of the common citizen.

Asher Orkaby received his PhD in Middle East history from Harvard University and is currently a junior research fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies. He is the author of a forthcoming book on the international history of Yemen's civil war (1962-1968).

SEE ALSO: An Iranian-backed militia is dismantling the government of a populous Middle Eastern country

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For decades, Israel has maintained a strict policy of opacity surrounding its nuclear arsenal. The country possesses some of the most powerful weaponry on earth, along with delivery systems that give it the ability to strike far beyond its borders. But its nuclear secrecy prevents it from even acknowledging those weapons' existence — and keeps experts and foreign governments guessing.

And some widely held assumptions about Israel's nuclear weapons might be woefully off-base, according to a recent study by Hans M. Kristensen and Robert S. Norris in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, both scholars in nuclear security at the Federation of American Scientists.

Israel is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that entered into force in March of 1970, even though Israel likely developed a nuclear capability before that treaty was signed and received significant assistance in its weapons-building efforts from France, a country permitted to posses nukes under the NPT. It hasn't opened its sites to international inspectors or officially declared an arsenal.

So Kristensen and Norris's study is an authoritative analysis of the available information about Israel's nuclear capabilities. Here's what they found:

Israel probably has far fewer nuclear warheads than is generally assumed. 

"Over the past several decades, news media reports, think tanks, authors, and analysts have sized the Israeli nuclear stockpile widely, from 75 warheads up to more than 400 warheads," the authors note.

But according to Kristensen and Norris, estimates that placed the Israeli arsenal in the hundreds assumed that all of the fissile material produced at the country's Dimona reactor would be put towards building nuclear weapons.

The country may have produced enough plutonium for as many as 250 bombs over the years, a number that would be even higher depending on the diversity of Israel's nuclear arsenal — if, for instance, it included lower-yield tactical or battlefield nukes.

But the authors believe that total plutonium production is a "misleading indicator" of arsenal size. The Israelis likely maintain a strategic plutonium reserve. And while very little is actually known about the design of Israeli nukes, the authors believe that based on available historical evidence, "Israel's nuclear posture has not been determined by war-fighting strategy but by deterrence needs."

In other words, the arsenal exists as a guarantor of the country's survival in a worst-case scenario rather than an integrated part of Israeli battlefield doctrine, meaning the country only has use for high-yield bombs that can also be delivered from hundreds or thousands of kilometers away. 

The authors assume that Israel wants to keep the size of its nuclear arsenal in line with its number of available long-range delivery systems — a number that doesn't even climb into the low hundreds. They believe Israel has 20-25 nuclear-capable ballistic missiles, two nuclear-capable fighter squadrons capable of carrying 20 bombs each, and possibly a small handful of nuclear-capable submarine-based cruise missiles.

The total number of deployable delivery systems comes out to around 80. The authors don't think the Israeli stockpile greatly exceeds that.

Israel probably has fewer nuclear delivery systems than is widely assumed, too. 

Israel has hundreds of combat planes, but the authors conclude "only a small fraction" of F-16 squadrons, "perhaps one or two ... would actually be nuclear-certified with specially trained crews, unique procedures, and modified aircraft."

The authors use satellite analysis of suspected missile facilities at Sdot Micha in the Judean hills (see map) to rebut widely repeated estimates that Israel has 100 nuclear-capable Jericho ballistic missiles: "Images show what appear to be two clusters of what might be caves for mobile Jericho II launchers. The northern cluster includes 14 caves and the southern cluster has nine caves, for a total of 23 caves." They note that this matched the number of suspected Israeli missiles given in a 1969 White House memo.

While Israel is currently developing a third-generation Jericho missile, there are no proven additional facilities where they could store them, and no evidence of underground silos. They conclude that Israel has around two-dozen Jerichos.

As for submarine-based delivery systems, the authors say it's at least possible Israel has developed nuclear capable Harpoon cruise missiles but don't come down conclusively on either side of the question.

Israel may not have any battlefield nukes. Nuclear weapons can come in all shapes and sizes, although building smaller-yield tactical devices or multi-stage thermonuclear warheads requires a degree of trial and error. Israel has never carried out a confirmed nuclear test and the authors note that without a test history or nuclear testing infrastructure it's unlikely they would have the technical knowledge needed to build a diverse array of nukes.

And there's the issue of nuclear weapons doctrine, which has a direct bearing on the type of nukes Israel might develop.

Israel's arsenal is set up as a deterrent against an outside attack, or as a means of possessing a "second strike" capability in the event of an attack that could threaten Israel's existence.

The authors are convinced that Israel's nukes are not an instrument of warfighting, and may not be factored into Israel's tactical calculus. And they "cannot understand why a country that does not have a strategy for fighting nuclear war would need that many types of warheads or warhead designs to deter its potential adversaries."

Unanswered questions. Nuclear secrecy has its benefits. It prevents Israel from being able to carry out provocative nuclear tests, or mobilizing its nuclear infrastructure in other, equally-calculated ways — familiar behavior from nuclear-armed Pakistan, India, and North Korea. It forces Israel to act as if it doesn't have nuclear weapons and to deal with its neighbors as if didn't enjoy the greatest of all possible strategic backstops. Most of all, official secrecy preserves the veneer of a nuclear-free region (however unconvincing in reality) and gives Israel's neighbors an excuse not to go nuclear themselves. 

At the same time, the secrecy policy means that little is really all that conclusively known about the type of warheads Israel possesses, not to mention the country's specific doctrine for their use or their state of deployment or alert at a given time. For instance, it isn't really known whether all or even most of Israel's warheads are actually assembled at a given time.

And so for now, a report like this is the clearest sense of the country's arsenal that's available in public. 

Read the entire report here.

SEE ALSO: Here's where the world's nukes are stored — and what is says about global security

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Over the decades that have passed since the Vietnam War, there has been a growing movement to turn that history into a more comforting narrative.

The revisionist histories come in different versions, but broadly speaking they present the American war in Vietnam as honorable and well fought, rather than a great national mistake.

In this view, blame for the South Vietnam’s ultimate defeat falls on faint-hearted politicians, or the antiwar movement, or Congress, or journalists, or all of the above — just about anywhere, in fact, except on US policy, the military leadership that carried it out, or the ally we sought to support.

The proponents of that narrative — and those who believe it — should read this book. Frank Scotton, the author of Uphill Battle, is unusually qualified to explain the Vietnam failure. Fluent in Vietnamese, for many years he was closer than nearly all other Americans to Vietnamese life in the countryside where the war was fought.

At the same time, over those years he came to know a remarkable range of South Vietnamese military commanders and other significant figures. Uphill Battle is a personal account, not a history. But the breadth of the author’s first-hand observations and experience makes a completely convincing case for his central thesis: that the war was lost because of the incompetence and political weakness of the South Vietnamese leadership.

Scotton shows that the military-dominated Saigon government was never able to mobilize enough popular support or use its superior manpower and weapons effectively enough to meet the challenge of a far less well-armed but more disciplined, tenacious, and politically skilled enemy.

Just as convincingly, he shows that the United States, for all its military power, never grasped the true nature of the war, consistently deluded itself about what it was accomplishing, and never found a way to remedy its ally’s fatal flaws.

Scotton arrived in Saigon as a junior US Information Service officer in 1962, and served there for the better part of a decade — a period spanning the whole course of the American war, from the military buildup through the gradual drawdown and the final withdrawal after the failed Paris peace agreement in early 1973.

Scotten mounts a completely convincing case that the war was lost because of the incompetence and political weakness of the South Vietnamese leadership.

During that time, Scotton made it his mission to inspire a more effective South Vietnamese war in the hamlets, the center of gravity in the contest between the US-backed government and its Communist enemy.

His concept at the outset was to form and support local defense units on the model of the Communists’ “armed propaganda teams.” They would not just fight the enemy but put into visible practice a political alternative to the Communists’ revolutionary vision — avoiding corruption and mistreatment of civilians, and winning support for the government by demonstrating that it could rule fairly and justly.

The idea evolved through various organizational incarnations over the years but the basic goal of a stronger, more capable government presence in the hamlets remained at the core of his work.

In pursuit of that goal, Scotton traveled extensively in the countryside, often driving alone in his jeep or riding on local buses, staying at village inns or at small government outposts. Those journeys — frequently in dangerous places — convinced him that “it was impossible to understand Vietnam without examining the basic level where most people lived.”

But that understanding consistently eluded not just most American officials but also the South Vietnamese elite from which nearly all of Saigon’s leaders came. Without it, needed reforms were never undertaken, and their government, as experienced by the majority of South Vietnamese, remained abusive and inept.

The most toxic weakness was corruption, which not only poisoned the regime’s relations with the public but badly damaged its battlefield performance as well. A Vietnamese general once told him, Scotton recalls, that “he could name many corrupt officers, but not a single one who was both corrupt and an effective commander.” (The general was eventually fired for his criticisms of the regime, and sent into exile.)

In an analysis he wrote in 1966, Scotton explained the dynamic: “There is a deadly correlation between corruption at high levels in an administrative system and the spread throughout the system of incompetence as higher-ups encourage and promote corrupt subordinates, and protect them from the consequences of poor performance of duty or direct disobedience of orders.”

The system doesn’t only protect the corrupt, he went on, but also “demoralizes and ‘selects out’ the able and the dedicated who do not play the game and thwarts any attempts at reform initiated at intermediate levels.”

His recollections in the book give example after example of how corruption undermined the military effort.

A case in point: When Scotton and a US Army colleague proposed a plan for interdicting night-time river traffic coming from enemy territory along the Cambodian border into a province in the upper Mekong Delta, the province chief hemmed and hawed and finally admitted that much of the traffic was carried on by traders who had paid off officials as high as the corps commander.

With a pained look on his face, Scotton writes, the province chief told the Americans that “under those circumstances he could not approve interruption.”

That was in 1965, just as the US ground war was beginning. I read that story with a jolt of recognition because seven years later, with the American war nearing its end, I heard a virtually identical story from the national police commander in a different border province.

Also with a pained expression that I bet was a lot like the one Scotton saw, the police official admitted to me that large-scale trading with the enemy occurred in his province, both by river and road, but was so well protected by high-level commanders that he could do nothing to interfere.

The story of corruption, incompetence and poor treatment of civilians by the Saigon government is a constant from the beginning of this memoir to the end. Soon after he arrived in 1962, Scotton writes in the opening chapter, a US military adviser told him that “the biggest problem was that ARVN [Army of the Republic of Vietnam] plundered the rural population, so they were even more disliked than the communists.”

Toward the end of the book, nearly 300 pages farther on, he quotes from a report written ten years later by another US adviser cataloging corrupt practices that undermined South Vietnam’s military effectiveness: “The soldier’s monthly contribution to his commander, the buying of positions and assignments, the reluctance to relieve (not transfer) the inept, the reluctance to assign the able because of lack of schooling or position, the concern for self and not for one’s men, the blatant theft of government and private property.”

Those “and other injustices, corruption and inattention,” the adviser concluded, “bred the reluctance or refusal of the soldier to fight, the NCOs and junior officers to lead, and the senior officers to command.”

Uphill Battle tells Scotton’s own story, not the larger history of the war, and there is no indication that he intended it to counter any of the revisionist accounts by other writers. But his observations are more than enough to demolish such myths as the contention that the war was effectively won before the final stage of the Paris peace negotiations in late 1972 (and that South Vietnam successfully defeated the Communist Easter offensive earlier that year, proving that Vietnamization had worked).

For any reader whose mind is not invincibly closed to unwelcome facts, Scotton’s recollections of that period will completely explode that notion, just as the rest of the book effectively refutes the general thrust of the revisionist version of the war.

Beside those who want to revise the history of Vietnam, another category of readers who should be required to read this book are the evangelists and communicants of the present-day cult of counterinsurgency.

Scotton’s experiences do not disprove the counterinsurgency concept, but they show its limitations — in particular, that success still depends on effective local authorities up and down the governmental ladder.

As one of his like-minded colleagues observed about the Rural Development (also known as Revolutionary Development) program, one of the various incarnations of the Vietnam pacification effort, “Where there is good gov’t and good local officials, the RD program works — where there aren’t, it doesn’t.”

Today’s COIN advocates would do well to remember that that axiom is almost certainly as valid in Afghanistan and other conflict areas today as it was in South Vietnam four and a half decades ago.

Arnold R. Isaacs was a correspondent in Vietnam from 1972 to 1975 and is the author of Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia.

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The Islamic State claims to have reestablished a caliphate in accordance with the prophetic method, misleading at least one historian, Edward Luttwak, to conclude that the Islamic State only seeks “its inspiration from the first four caliphates” that followed Muhammad.

According to Luttwak, not even the mightiest of the caliphates that followed, the Abbasid caliphate, is a model for the Islamic State.

But take a look at the Islamic State’s propaganda, and you will see that from its founding the group has sought to restore the glory days of the Abbasid caliphate based in Baghdad, especially the era of Harun al-Rashid of 1,001 Nights fame.

"Know that the Baghdad of al-Rashid is the home of the caliphate that our ancestors built,” proclaimed an Islamic State spokesman in 2007. “It will not appear by our hands but by our carcasses and skulls. We will once again plant the flag of monotheism, the flag of the Islamic State, in it."

That same year, the Islamic State’s first ruler, the aptly-named Abu Umar al-Baghdadi, announced IS’s claim to the city: “Today, we are in the very home of the caliphate, the Baghdad of al-Rashid." Even after the Islamic State established its primary base of operations in Syria’s Raqqa province, once home to Harun al-Rashid for several years, and captured Mosul in Iraq, its spokesman still referred to “the Baghdad of the Caliphate” and “the Baghdad of al-Rashid."

The Islamic State’s plan to revive the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad has two problems.

The first is ideological: Harun al-Rashid was not terribly pious. He enjoyed poetry about wine and young boys, and his court valued unfettered intellectual debate and pagan Greek learning, boht of which are anathema to ultraconservative Salafis like those running the Islamic State.

But it is al-Rashid’s power the jihadists remember, not his impieties.

The second problem is demographic, which cannot be resolved by selective memory: most of Baghdad’s inhabitants are Shi’a. They will not give it up without a fight. Neither will Baghdad’s patrons in Iran.

In light of this, outsiders might reasonably conclude the Islamic State is foolish to aim for Baghdad rather than consolidate its gains in the Sunni-majority areas it now holds. But sometimes historical imperatives override strategic ones.

SEE ALSO: Baghdadi realeses another audio message amid death rumors

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If George W. Bush's foreign policy was a testament to the perils of overreaction, Barack Obama's foreign policy is becoming, to many experts, a testament to the dangers of underreaction.

On the matter of Syria, in particular, fear of renewed U.S. involvement in the problems of dysfunctional Arab countries (a legitimate fear, of course) kept the Obama administration from trying to shape the Syrian opposition, and therefore the outcome of that country's ruinous civil war. The Syrian war is not Obama's fault (people in Washington have a tendency to think that Washington matters more than it does, and they also have a tendency to avoid holding Arab countries accountable for their own disasters), and he has had his victories in Syria—most notably, the removal of most of Bashar al-Assad's chemical-weapons stockpile.

But Syria is a catastrophe, and our Syria policy is a hash, and the U.S. is not winning its struggle against ISIS, and is no longer much interested in removing Assad from power.

Our own policy dysfunctions matter a great deal in all of this, David Rothkopf argues in his latest book, National Insecurity: American Leadership in an Age of Fear. Rothkopf, the preeminent historian and analyst of the crucially important and usually misunderstood National Security Council (NSC), argues that, “It is not strategy to simply undo the mistakes of the recent past.” (This is a corollary to an observation Hillary Clinton made not long ago about Obama administration foreign policy.)

Rothkopf was an acidic critic of the Obama administration's policy-formulation process long before such criticism became the thing that one does in Washington. Writing in the Financial Times, Edward Luce says that Rothkopf's new work "could lay claim to being the definitive book on how 9/11 affected US foreign policy."

I interviewed Rothkopf recently about his beliefs and findings. Here is a transcript of our conversation.

Jeffrey Goldberg: You're an expert on the organization and purpose of the NSC. Why are most national security advisors—Brent Scowcroft being one obvious exception—perceived to be failures? Susan Rice is in the barrel right now, but she's not the first.

David Rothkopf: I'm not sure I agree with that characterization. While the job is tough and a clear lightning rod for criticism given its importance, proximity to the president, and the number of hot-button issues its occupants must tackle, it really can't be said that most of its occupants can be perceived as failures. Rice's immediate predecessor, Tom Donilon, was certainly not perceived that way—getting a mixed grade, perhaps, but hardly a failing one. His predecessor, Jim Jones, was not seen as a success, but that was largely because he was undercut by a coterie of staffers close to the president and, indirectly, by a president who didn't fully empower him or back him up. Steve Hadley was quite successful, actually, as Bush's national security advisor, helping with the benefit of a largely new team elsewhere in the administration to enable Bush to change course in his last couple of years and finish much stronger than he had started.

Condi Rice oversaw a deeply troubled period in U.S. foreign policy in Bush's first term, but that was largely attributed to the president enabling others in the administration, notably the vice president and the secretary of defense, to gain too much traction and to backdoor the interagency process. Sandy Berger was quite a successful national security advisor in the Clinton second term. Tony Lake, not as successful—he was, like Rice and Jones, an example of a "learning curve" national security advisor, overseeing the process while his boss was getting his sea legs—but he was not seen as a failure. His greatest challenge, in some respects, was that his predecessor, Scowcroft, was seen as the gold standard in the job. You can go back further through history and pick out others who were seen as capable, like Colin Powell or Frank Carlucci, and some who were seen as particularly strong, like Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger. So it is a mixed bag.

JG: Your answer suggests that success in this job is derivative, meaning that if a president is prepared to meet the challenges, his national security team will look good, not dysfunctional. Maybe there's only so much she can do.

DR: If there are lessons to be drawn from this track record, they include the fact that it's harder to be the first national security advisor of a president with little foreign-policy experience and, in the end, more broadly, the national security advisor is really only ever as good as his or her president enables him or her to be.

If the president knows what he wants, is committed to respecting the policy-formation process and entrusting it to the national security advisor and his or her team, and fully empowers the national security advisor, the advisor has a good chance of being successful. This is a job that's not mentioned in the Constitution, not described at length in the National Security Act of 1947 that formed it, and therefore is largely whatever the president wants it to be. A national security advisor with a committed, trusting, experienced president is always more likely to be successful—although if the national security advisor lacks the right traits, experience, relationship with colleagues inside and outside the government, etc., then even with the backing of the president, they can and will fail. The fact is, I think your question largely flows from the fact that right now, under President Obama and Susan Rice, we are in the midst of a particularly dysfunctional period for the NSC.

JG: So this is really about Obama, in your mind?

DR: If Obama had any material management or foreign-policy experience prior to coming in to office or if he had the character of our stronger leaders on these issues—notably a more strategic than tactical orientation, more trust in his team, less risk aversion, etc.—she would be better off, as would we all. But his flaws are compounded by a system that lets him pick and empower those around him. So, if he chooses to surround himself with a small team of "true believers" who won't challenge him as all leaders need to be challenged, if he picks campaign staffers that maintain campaign mode, if he over-empowers political advisors at the expense of those with national-security experience, that takes his weaknesses and multiplies them by those of the team around him.

And whatever Susan Rice's many strengths are, she is ill-suited for the job she has. She is not seen as an honest broker. She has big gaps in her international experience and understanding—Asia. She is needlessly combative and has alienated key members of her staff, the cabinet, and overseas leaders. She is also not strategic and is reactive like her boss. So whereas the system does have the capability of offsetting the weaknesses of a president, if he is surrounded by strong advisors to whom he listens and who he empowers to do their jobs, it can also reinforce and exacerbate those weaknesses—as it is doing now.

There have been signs of dysfunction in this administration from earlier. Jim Jones was never really given a chance as the president's first national security advisor, being cut out by a small group of former Obama campaign members. The first Afghan review was convoluted. And the memoirs of Panetta, Gates, Clinton, Vali Nasr, and others pointed to other issues, whether with the president, or with exclusion of cabinet members. But matters began to deteriorate last year.

JG: Go into this dysfunction you're talking about in greater depth. Is the “red line” with Syria crisis the moment you thought that the current process was dysfunctional?

DR: Even before the Syria red-line fiasco, there was confusion around how to respond to the overthrow of the Morsi regime in Egypt—marked by poor communications between the State Department and the White House. You also had the fumbled response to the National Security Agency (NSA) scandal that involved lying to and alienating allies; the very weak response to Putin in Crimea that also involved miscommunications between the White House and the State Department; the failure to respond to ISIS when it was clearly emerging as a major threat almost a year ago (remember, it took Fallujah in the beginning of 2014); the self-inflicted wound of touting the Bowe Bergdahl release; and the president's own communications gaffes associated with the process, from his assertion that his guiding principle was "don't do stupid shit" to his assertion that he didn't have a strategy versus ISIS. And, most recently, we have the poorly managed, strategy-less mission against ISIS that is unfocused, inadequate to the challenges, and has already revealed major rifts with the Defense Department's military and civilian leadership.

All administrations make errors. No process is perfect. But here, everything you look for in a high-functioning process—a national security advisor seen as an honest broker among cabinet departments; the full inclusion and empowerment of the cabinet to harness the resources of the administration; the formulation of good policy options for the president; the effective implementation of the choices the president makes; the effective communication of White House positions; the formulation of strategic perspectives (a role really only the White House can do); the effective separation of political and national-security decision-making processes ... good management, good execution, good results—all of that has been missing or disappointing.

It's as poorly functioning an NSC process as we have seen since Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney back-doored the process in the early years of the Bush administration, or, perhaps, since the Reagan years, the acknowledged nadir of NSC performance. What is especially distressing, however, is that this dysfunction is coming in year six of the administration, at a time when most two-term administrations actually start to perform better. Unfortunately, President Obama's process is actually regressing.

JG: Compelling case, but two questions come to mind: Am I wrong to say that this is far from the most disastrous foreign-policy presidency we've had, post-World War II? The second question is, can anyone possibly manage this process anymore? Information—good and bad—comes in unceasing waves. I'm thinking of what [Deputy National Security Advisor] Tony Blinken [now nominated to be deputy secretary of state] told you for your book about the exponential increase in constant, unceasing communication. Even if the NSC were to manage this process successfully, how would anyone know? Do you think this can be slowed down—or would having a grand strategy do the slowing for you? (i.e., If you're not buffeted from issue to issue all the time because you have a target on the horizon, would that help significantly? Or is this just a matter of events upending everything?)

DR: It's too early to say whether it is far from the most disastrous foreign-policy presidencies we've had post-World War II. It is certainly not among the best. Among the worst we have some strong choices—Vietnam was calamitous (although, today, Vietnam is more market-oriented and friendly to the West than we might have thought possible back then, and we did win the Cold War so we achieved our goals to a greater extent than we thought we had in the 1970s). The first term of the Bush administration was a mess and the invasion of Iraq was particularly ill-conceived and damaging. Iran-Contra marks a low point for the NSC's operations.

Will we someday say our impulse to pull out of the Middle East and our failure to effectively confront the rise of militant extremism or the adventurism of Putin unleashed prolonged instability and real damage to American interests? Possibly. A new administration in 2016 might reverse our stance quickly or, someday, history might say it was really beyond our ability to control events linked to longer term trends.

But I don't think being the worst or just being average is really what we should focus on now. That's for historians benefiting from the perspective of time. The real question is, are we doing the best that is possible? Is the system working well? Are we making unnecessary mistakes? Can we, by understanding the origins of those mistakes, do better? I think we can.

Even in the face of the kind of avalanche of information to which Tony referred or the growing complexity, speed of events, and overall volatility of the planet, we could certainly avoid the self-inflicted wounds of gaffes that offend allies, mismanagement that alienates key parts of the U.S. government and key appointees of the administration, dithering and convoluted decision processes that produce late action and contradictory or halfway measures, and the failure to follow through on promises or actions—from the Cairo speech to the invasion and pull-out from Libya, now in flames.

JG: Do you think I'm overvaluing grand strategy?

DR: Grand strategy would help, of course. It is useful to have a course. America does best when its foreign policy is aspirational, linked to our desire for growing peace, prosperity, stronger alliances, a healthier planet, than when it is reactive as it has been for the past several years. Frankly, setting aside dreams of grand strategy and the kind of playbook we had in the Cold War that did make many foreign-policy decisions easier, as Brent Scowcroft recently pointed out to me, how about just having clearly defined national interests and a discussion about medium-term strategy, rather than the reactive, tactical, politically driven small-think that has dominated the "don't do stupid shit" era?

JG: Given the tone of your comments, I'm not sure you have an answer for this, but: Can you name something good the Obama administration has done overseas? I have some achievements in mind, but I'd rather not lead the witness.

DR: The Obama administration has done a number of good things overseas—far too many to list here. But the idea behind the pivot to Asia was excellent (even if the execution has been spotty in the second term). His early speeches set an important tone; coordination with the European Union during the economic crisis was vitally important—their export-promotion team including the Export-Import Bank and the Department of Commerce especially have done a great job; approving LNG exports was a good idea; the Syria chemical deal reduced a specific threat; he got Osama bin Laden and other key terrorists, which was a positive; helping to get rid of Qaddafi was good, even if the post-crisis Libya results have been pretty awful; the political deal they just struck in Afghanistan was not easy and should be stabilizing for at least a while. He put together a pretty good team in the first term. In short, Barack Obama doesn't get a zero on foreign policy by any means. He gets a C or a low C.

Some of his failures and missteps may have greater long-term negative consequences than the gains. It remains to be seen. But what is indisputable is that especially during his second term the quality of the policy process has deteriorated and the errors and gaffes have added up and, seemingly, accelerated. Right when he should be getting stronger, refreshing his team, learning from his errors, he doesn't seem to be doing so. But there are still two years left. Hopefully between bad results and the elections and a glance at the calendar he will see that time is ticking away, and that if he wants a successful international legacy, he may have to embrace changes and approaches he has resisted to date.

JG: I've noticed, as have you, a tendency by the president to analyze events from the podium. Is this sort of public analysis a good thing? It's high-level analysis, but does it help the public orient itself around an issue? Or does it convey detachment, rather than leadership?

DR: President Obama's tendency to "analyze from the podium" is, as you suggest, a mixed bag. It shows his thought process and often reveals his great intelligence. It also looks like he is improvising, doesn't have a clear worldview or strategy and does not have a policy process that is preparing him properly.  It's a kind of academic trait, one you would expect in a professor. It would be tolerable from him if he were a better manager, had a more disciplined policy process, had a more diverse team that he actually listened to, and if he had more faith in the ability of the United States to engage internationally and in so doing advance our national interests.

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In the history of terrible mistakes, accidentally dropping a nuclear bomb on your own country has to rank pretty damn high. That's exactly what happened when a really, really stupid accident resulted in America tossing an atom bomb on rural South Carolina.

On March 11, 1958, an Air Force B-47 Stratojet was making its way to the United Kingdom from the Hunter Air Force Base in Savannah, Georgia. It was sent out with the intention of helping out in Operation Snow Flurry, but it never made it.

As the plane was cruising over South Carolina, the pilots noticed that a fault light in the cockpit was indicating a problem with the locking pin on the bomb harnesses in the cargo bay. You see, back then, the plane was required to carry nuclear weapons at all times just in case a war broke out with the Soviet Union. The nuclear bomb in question was as 26-kiloton Mark 6, even more powerful than the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Great idea, right?

Air Force Captain Bruce Kulka was acting as the navigator on the flight and decided to go back and check out the problem. While pulling himself up from the plane floor, he reached around the bomb to steady himself, but ended up grabbing the the bomb 's emergency release pin instead. Whoops. Kulka could only look on in horror as the bomb dropped to the floor, pushed open the bomb bay doors, and fell 15,000 feet toward rural South Carolina.

Fortunately for the entire East Coast, the bomb's fission core was stored in a separate part of the plane, meaning that it wasn't technically armed. Unfortunately for Walter Gregg, it was still loaded with about 7,600 pounds of traditional explosives. The resulting explosion leveled his house, flattened a good section of the forest, and created a mushroom cloud that could be seen for miles. When the dust had settled, the bomb had caused a 25-foot-deep crater that measured 75 feet wide, and while it had injured a number of Gregg's family members, miraculously, not a single person was killed.

While you may have never heard about the strange tale of the Carolinas' first brush with a nuke, the crater still exists just off of South Carolina Highway 76, marked by a historical plaque. Visitors can trek down the path that leads to the Mars Bluff Atomic Bomb Crater where they can see the impact site and read an informational board complete with a mock up of the bomb's size. Just make sure you ask the current property owners for permission before you head down the trail. They're generally pretty keen to show the crater off.

Notice how I said this was just the Carolinas' first brush with a nuclear weapon? There was an even scarier accident that happened just a bit north a few years later, and it's one that no even knew about until last year. 

Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, investigative journalist Eric Schlosser discovered that on January 23, 1961, a B-52 bomber broke up mid air, dropping two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs over Goldsboro, North Carolina. While one bomb never activated, the second one had its trigger mechanisms engage and its parachute open, two things that only happen when the bomb is intended to explode on target. In fact, only one low-voltage trigger kept it from detonating upon landing.

Scary stuff.

After that, you're probably looking for the best places to ride out the impending (accidental) nuclear apocalypse. Let me suggest checking out the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site, the The Greenbrier Nuclear Bunker, or the Satsop Nuclear Plant, all fine places to set up the perfect fallout shelter.

SEE ALSO: This Giant Rolling Hotel Trails Polar Bears In Their Natural Habitat

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Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai has shed some light on his administration's troubled relationship with Washington, describing his country as a young boy pitted against a muscular, weapon-toting "bully."

"When that strong, muscular guy begins to beat this 7-, 8-year old boy in the street, the only tool he has is to cry loud and to let people know that he is being attacked," Karzai said. "I had no other means to salvage Afghanistan from the excesses, the violence, and the mistreatment by the foreign military presence here other than to speak -- and speak loud."

The comments came in a wide-ranging interview with RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan in Kabul on November 16, in which Karzai reflected on his 13 years in power and also fired off a number of parting shots.

"I wanted the West to come to Afghanistan, thinking that the West would bring help and liberation to Afghanistan," he told RFE/RL Regional Director Akbar Ayazi.

But his views began to change, he said, when he saw that his country was often treated as if it did not exist and that "our people, our casualties, were numbers rather than human beings who had suffered."

Karzai listed the "night raids, the bombardments, the arrests and imprisonments of Afghans in their own country" as among the negative aspects of the U.S. and NATO military presence in Afghanistan.

But worse, Karzai said, was the "neglect" of the presence of sanctuaries and training grounds for militants in neighboring Pakistan.

He claimed that U.S. officials and generals would admit in closed-door discussions that they knew terrorists were being trained in Pakistan and that Afghanistan was under attack, but at the same time "they would stop us from speaking out and not do anything about it."

When he began to speak out during his second term, the former president said, Kabul's relationship with Washington became "extremely tense."

"I sensed that there was a broader interest at issue for the United States and I wanted to protect Afghanistan from being stepped over in pursuit of that interest of the United States," he said, adding that "after the signing of the strategic partnership, it became even more clear."

The 2012 agreement committed the United States to defending Afghanistan in the event of foreign aggression, according to Karzai. But just days after it was signed, he said, Afghanistan was hit by gun and rocket fire from Pakistan and "the U.S. not only did not help stop attacks from Pakistan, they tried to hide it and deny it."

It was then, he said, that he became "extremely suspicious" and decided that he would not give the United States the Bilateral Security Agreement it sought in order to maintain a long-term troop presence in Afghanistan "until the United States gave us a clear pledge" that it would bring peace to Afghanistan. 

"They did not give me that clear pledge," he said. "I began to feel that these documents are meaningless, that in the eyes of the United States they have no real value." 

Turning to U.S. and international reconstruction efforts, Karzai said that "there was massive corruption" that was "deliberately caused" by the way international and U.S. support was given to Afghanistan. 

"It was designed to cause weakness in the Afghan government," Karzai alleged. "To divide people, to buy loyalties, and then to blackmail people through those resources spent to cause corruption."

Karzai said that he did not consider the U.S.-led military campaign "a total failure." However, he added, "it has not brought what we expected."

"I was a great friend of the West, and a supporter of their presence in Afghanistan," he said. "Now I am a great friend of the West, but with a note [caveat]."

SEE ALSO: Afghanistan's Karzai slams US, Pakistan in farewell speech

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Japan's war hawks and imperial apologists are alienating the country’s allies and making a confrontation with its rivals more likely.

For four brutal years in the mid-20^th century, the United States and Japan fought a bloody war in the Pacific—a conflict bracketed by the dueling national traumas of Pearl Harbor in the United States and the atomic bombing of Japan.

Despite this ugly history, the United States and Japan are now staunch allies and trade partners with a shared love of sushi.

However, for Japan’s neighbors in China and Korea—the former subjects of an aggressive Japanese empire in the Pacific—deep wounds remain open, and relations are still chilly.

After over a half century, the biggest powers of East Asia still can’t get along. Even as Japan and Korea face a shared challenge from a rising China, their troubled history is precluding meaningful cooperation with each other. And with the United States less likely to assert itself in the region in the years to come, rising nationalism on all sides is increasing the likelihood of new confrontations.

Many of these conflicts are playing out in theaters large and small—including among elderly Korean ladies, shrines to war dead, and Japanese schoolbooks.

Living History

A small group of Korean women and their supporters gather every Wednesday in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. They have done so without fail since 1992, even as their numbers have dwindled—their ages average 88 years. These victims of wartime sexual trafficking, often called “comfort women,” are protesting the Japanese government’s failure to sufficiently recognize and atone for the sexual slavery of an estimated 200,000 mostly Korean women during World War II.

The Japanese government denied these charges for many years. But proof from Japan’s own Defense Ministry documenting the government’s management of brothels—or “comfort stations” —for Japanese soldiers forced Japan to acknowledge the mass human trafficking and government-sponsored rape of women by the Imperial Army. Issued in a proclamation called the Kono Statement, this acknowledgment—while historic—offered no concrete path for atonement or reparations.

Earlier this year, the United Nations Human Rights Committee issued a statement calling on Japan to “ensure that all allegations of sexual slavery or other human rights violations perpetrated by Japanese military during wartime against the ‘comfort women’ are effectively, independently, and impartially investigated and that perpetrators are prosecuted and if found guilty, punished.” As Jeff Kingston, director of Asian Studies at Temple University in Tokyo, explains, “Japan needs to keep apologizing, making gestures of contrition, and seeking a fuller understanding of its shared past with Asia.”

Instead, however, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has backpedaled by trying to deny and downplay the issue. He has threatened to revise the Kono Statement, claiming there was no actual proof of forced prostitution—a threat that triggered a wave of outrage and international condemnation. Other Japanese politicians have piled on with even more egregious statements, such as the claim by Osaka mayor Toru Hashimoto that the sexual slavery was a “necessary” wartime measure that “anyone can understand.”

But comfort women are far from the only wartime legacy that Abe has aggravated.

Last December, Abe visited the war cemetery at Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine. The shrine memorializes the 2.5 million Japanese killed in wartime—including, controversially, 14 Class-A war criminals responsible for such atrocities as the Rape of Nanjing and the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Before Abe’s visit, no Japanese Prime Minister had stepped into the political minefield of the shrine for seven years. The visit occurred at a particularly tense moment in Japan’s relations with China—just after Beijing’s announcement of a new Air Defense Identification Zone for the East China Sea.

In his visit to Beijing following the announcement, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden declined to criticize China’s declaration—despite having just told Tokyo that “the United States firmly backed Japan’s opposition to China’s actions.” Following Abe’s visit to Yasukuni, Beijing “shut the door to dialogue.”

Finally, as though in a grand provocative finale, Abe’s government is literally rewriting the history of the war for future generations. Textbooks around the country are now being changed to reflect a more “patriotic” view of Japanese history. Education minister Hakubun Shimomura says that the new material will “teach a balance of good as well as the bad parts, so that children can be proud of and have confidence in our country’s history.”

A “balanced” view of wartime history apparently entails adhering to Abe’s insistence that there’s no proof the comfort women were coerced, and downplaying the death toll of the “incident” at Nanjing. These attempts, as the New York Times put it, to “recast wartime history with a less apologetic tone” have resulted in Japan effectively pulling the rug out from under its regional diplomacy, reneging on its past admissions and apologies, and endangering its relationships with its neighbors.

A Fraught Regional Climate

This is where matters get vastly more interconnected and consequential.

Tokyo’s ongoing failure to make, in the eyes of its victims, satisfactory amends for past transgressions has poisoned the narrow seas that divide Japan from its neighbors.

As China increasingly asserts its influence in the region, and as the U.S. “pivot to Asia” falls flat on its face, these seemingly isolated squabbles could pose a serious threat.

While U.S.-Japan relations are still strong, Japan now recognizes that the United States can no longer wield the influence it once did in the region. Abe’s response has been to loosen the leash on Japan’s military, to permit its “Self Defense Forces” to defend Japan’s allies and act as a “security counterbalance” to China’s rising military power. Yet under the guise of warding off Chinese antagonism, Japan’s hawkish government is antagonizing everyone.

There are certainly other matters to be attended to within the region, such as territorial disputes in the East and South China Sea. Yet many of these problems stem from, or are fueled by, Japan’s growing insecurities. Abe should be finding ways to rebuild bridges and form stronger relationships with Japan’s neighbors, particularly South Korea.

Yet instead of constructively addressing some relatively minor domestic and regional problems, Abe has unnecessarily increased tensions by enabling Japan’s war hawks and imperial apologists. The result is a snowballing crisis among heavily armed neighbors. The more insecure the region becomes, the more it militarizes—and the more it militarizes, the more insecure it becomes.

Tokyo holds that all war reparations on issues such as comfort women were settled in 1965—when diplomatic ties were established with South Korea—and many Japanese feel that their country has done enough apologizing and guilt tripping for events long past.

While it is important to expect that, as Nancy Snow observes, “regional rivals will take every ideological advantage of Japanese missteps, raising hackles about Japanese militarism,” it still behooves Abe to make every gesture he can afford to attempt to clean the slate.

Japan has the power to gain a far more positive and favorable image, at a reasonably low cost, by addressing such issues as comfort women, the Yasukuni Shrine, and school books.

History can’t be unmade, but it needn’t determine the future either. As South Korean President Park Geun-hye has said, “The Japanese government must make a right and bold decision for the two countries to overcome a painful past… They should stop denying the past and face the truth of history. Otherwise, they will be isolated.”

If the wounds from Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and Pearl Harbor can be mended into what is now a strong alliance, the Japanese government can do some mending here too.

Kaja Baum is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus.

SEE ALSO: Japan's military is revving up to meet China's growing regional ambitions

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The iPhone 6 isn't the only Apple hardware in high demand.

The company's first computers have become collectors' items in recent years. 

An Apple I computer thought to be one of the first ever made sold for nearly a million dollars in October.

Apple cofounders Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne recently sat down with Computerworld to talk about Apple's beginning and their first computer, the Apple I.

Apple fans may have heard of Steve Wozniak, but fewer know Ron Wayne's story.

Steve Jobs asked Wayne to persuade Wozniak to join the company.

At one point, Wayne owned 10% of Apple. That stake would be worth north of $68 billion today, based on Apple's market capitalization on Friday. 

Wayne cashed out days after officially joining Apple. He was paid $800 for his shares. That's roughly three grand in 2014 dollars, according to the US Inflation Calculator.

Wayne doesn't harbor any regrets about the partnership, though.

"I'm just amazed, to be perfectly candid," he said. "I just played a small part. It's all about Steve Wozniak creating this product."

Wozniak told Computerworld he wasn't shocked by the uptick in demand for old Apple products.

"It doesn't seem that unusual at all," he said. "It's the largest brand in the world, so many people know Apple, and the Apple-1 is so rare. But it's also because the world's changed since Apple was started."

The Apple cofounder remembered the company's early days fondly.

"We started with nothing," said Wozniak. "But the fun was in designing computers. It was an exciting time in our lives, and memorable for the friends you made and the conversations you had."

SEE ALSO: Apple to Xiaomi: Talk Is Cheap

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The only medieval sword found in Siberia may have belonged to legendary Russian ruler Ivan the Terrible.

Russian archaeologist Vyacheslav Molodin has called on European experts to help him validate his claim and solve a mystery that has had him stumped for nearly 40 years.

In 1975, Molodin led an excavation in Siberia’s Vengerovo district to study Bronze Age settlements and cemeteries on the banks of the River Om.

On a whim, excavation team leader Alexander Lipatov disobeyed an order and began scratching around under a large old birch tree nearby.

He turned up what he first thought was some kind of farming equipment, but soon turned out to be a large and incredibly well-preserved sword just 3-5cm under the topsoil.

Molodin told the Siberian Times that Lipatov had a gut feeling the team wasn’t excavating a particular burial mound thoroughly enough.

“If it wasn’t for his ‘mistake’ we would have never found the sword,” Molodin said.

After an hour, the team had lifted the entire sword from the earth.

“It was as if it just descended from some knights’ fairytale,” Molodin told The Siberian Times.

“I slowly twisted it, noting sparkles of silver on the guard and blade. It was so well preserved that you could in fact use it in the battle almost straight away.”

Little did he know, 40 years later, the owner of the sword would still remain a mystery.

The sword was found far from home, and is a 12th or 13th century blade more typical of the type used by European knights.

An inscription reads “NMNStEtDSE” on one side of the blade and “CtIhCt” on the other.

Experts at the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg say its a kind of acronym for: “In the name of the mother of our saviour eternal, eternal Lord and Saviour. Christ Jesus Christ.”

It was forged in the Rhine basin of Germany then taken to Sweden where it received the inscription.

Ivan the Terrible’s acquisition of European land between 1533 and 1584 makes him the most likely candidate to have somehow acquired the sword.

The most popular theory has been that it was carried and dropped by traders, but the steppe on which it was found, between sections of the lower and middle Ob, was likely to have been too difficult to navigate for traders.

What archaeologists do know is that Russian warrior Ivan Koltso was ambushed and killed just several kilometres away during Ivan the Terrible’s reign.

Molodin is proposing Koltso may have been given the sword as a gift from his ruler.

Here is where the sword was found, 3000 km east of Moscow:

Read more about the sword at the Siberian Times

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The average Thanksgiving Day dinner this year will cost $49.41, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation.

Each year, the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates the cost of Thanksgiving around the country based on feeding 10 people a meal with a 16-pound turkey, bread stuffing, sweet potatoes, rolls with butter, peas, cranberries, carrots, celery, pumpkin pie with whipped cream, and coffee with milk.

The average costs has hovered around $49 since 2011, and results were based on 179 volunteer shoppers checking prices at grocery stores in 35 states.

But what would the same dinner have cost a century ago?

The Morris County Library in New Jersey researched the advertised prices of common Thanksgiving goods from November 18-22, 1911 in the NJ newspaper, The Daily Record. They discovered the cost of everything from sweet potatoes to plum pudding on the newspaper's old microfilm, and shared it with Business Insider.

Here's what a Thanksgiving dinner would have cost in 1911:

Turkey: $.28/pound ($4.48 for a 16-pounder)

Bread stuffing: $.05/pound

Sweet potatoes: $.29/6 quart basket

Rolls (bread): $.05/pound

Butter: $.37/pound

Peas: $.05/can

Cranberries: $.13/quart

Carrots: $.25/6 quart basket

Celery: n/a

Pumpkin pie: (milk, eggs, flour, sugar, pumpkin, nutmeg, cinnamon) ~$.84 to make (recipe)

Whipped cream: n/a

Coffee: $.25/pound

Milk: $.05/pint

Total cost: ~$6.81

Of course, these prices don't take inflation into account: That measly sounding $6.81 suddenly jumps to a staggering $167.77 when you consider inflation (calculated here for 2013 prices).

It's mostly due to the sheer size of the turkey since a 16-pounder in 1911 prices would cost roughly $110 today (this year, that same-sized turkey will cost Americans $21.65, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation).

See the full list of prices from New Jersey in 1911 over at the Morris County Library website, and be thankful that your turkey this year didn't cost over $100.

SEE ALSO: 17 Thanksgiving Hacks For The Best Meal Of Your Life

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A recent Quora post prompted the question, "What are some of the most mind-blowing facts that sound like 'BS', but are actually true?"

They might be hard to believe, but these facts about geography, people and events are in fact true. 

Produced by Justin Gmoser

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It is hot and muggy in the upstairs gallery of Surgeons' Hall in Edinburgh. I walk past shelves upon shelves of jars that contain 18th-century specimens suspended in liquid: an amputated arm here, a cancerous bowel there. Compared with the lower level of the museum, it is eerily quiet up here. This section is not open to the public and so these objects are rarely gazed upon with such naked curiosity as I am experiencing now.

In this instance, I am not Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris, medical historian. I am as inquisitive as any person who would be granted access to the collection up here, bubbling over with questions and observations about the bits of body parts floating before my eyes. But before I can seek answers to these questions, I must first view the object I've come to write about: a pocketbook bound in the skin of the 19th-century murderer, William Burke.

I make my way to the end of the gallery where the Director of Heritage, Chris Henry, is standing in the corner. In his gloved hand, he holds the notorious pocketbook which has attracted tourists from around the world to Surgeons' Hall for decades. I have never seen it outside of a glass case. It looks less "sacred" without the dim spotlights and laminated cards describing its origins.

It looks almost normal.

But of course, it isn't normal. Far from it. In 1828, William Burke and William Hare murdered 16 people over the course of 10 months. Masquerading as bodysnatchers, the two murderers then sold the fresh corpses onto surgeons in Edinburgh where the bodies were then dissected in private anatomy schools dotted around the city.

Burke and Hare were eventually apprehended when one of their victims was discovered in the dissection room of Dr. Robert Knox, who had been purchasing many of the suspiciously fresh bodies from the two men over the past several months. Hare turned King's evidence and was released, while Burke took the blame and was sentenced to death. What awaited him at the end of the rope was much worse than even he could imagine.

Chris hands me a pair of white gloves. He's an expert on this object, so the interview flows easily. He regales me with stories about how it came into existence, telling me that Burke's body was privately dissected as a mob of several hundred people gathered outside the surgeons' window demanding to be let in.

As Chris speaks, it suddenly happens. He hands me the pocketbook, almost as if he is handing me any book from a library shelf. I can't feel it in the same way I would if I wasn't wearing gloves, but I have a visceral reaction to the object nonetheless. This is the actual skin of a notorious murderer — a man I had been reading about for years in my own research.

This is the closest I will ever get to Burke's physical self. It's as if I've reached out and touched his arm, which of course I just may have given the material this object is made from.

After my initial reaction, I begin inspecting the pocketbook more carefully. It is remarkably well preserved considering this was meant to be a functioning item. Indeed, the original pencil that came with the pocketbook is still tucked neatly inside its covers. Looking at it, I can hardly believe someone would use it to carry money. Even for me — the Queen of Macabre — this is all a bit too much.

Its covers are soft and pliable after all these years, reminding me that this was indeed used on a regular basis. In faded gold letters, the front reads: BURKE'S SKIN POCKET BOOK. When I turn it over in my hands, the words — EXECUTED 28 JAN 1829 — complete the story.

Emma Black, who heads public engagement at the museum, talks to me after the interview. As with any museum containing human specimens, Surgeons' Hall has several pieces on display that are controversial. Interestingly, Burke's skin book isn't often mentioned as one of them. She wonders if, given the atrocity of the crimes committed, some of us have come to accept that this object is suitable for display. At the time, the dissection and book acted as a further punishment for Burke's crimes and was seen as a form of justice which fitted the horrific nature of the murders themselves. Burke's skeleton is also on display in the museum (right).

For me, however, the pocketbook is much more than this. It represents the growing need for bodies in the dissection room at the beginning of the 19th century, and the willingness by some anatomists to turn a blind eye to the dubious doings of those who procured the dead on their behalf.

In short, the pocketbook represents a dark and sordid part of our medical history.

After several minutes, I hand the pocketbook back to Emma. Once more back in its case, the object takes on that "sacred" glow.

SEE ALSO: Modern Londoners Picnic On Top Of 17th Century 'Plague Pits'

IN DETAIL: 10 Terrifying Knives That Doctors Used To Use On Patients

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