If we think about weapons today, we often produce the pictures of guns, tanks, atomic bombs, aircraft carries and fighter jets in our minds. However, one of the most influential weapons is invisible to the human eye: Fear. The phenomenon fear is being studied by the military discipline “psychological warfare” (PSYWAR) and is being used also today on the global battlefields to discredit and weaken an enemy. This paper presents examples from the Cold War period when fear was used as a weapon in order to inform the reader how fear might be used as a weapon today.
