The story is set in the early 1980s and explores the consequences of the Pabodie expedition in H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness.[2][3] Although the story has similarity to the later Stross novel The Atrocity Archives, they are set in different universes.[4]Teresa Nielsen Hayden describes the story on Making Light as, "the Oliver North/Guns for Hostages scandal, seen from the viewpoint of a CIA bureaucrat, in a universe in which the entire Cthulhu Mythos is real."[5]
It was one of Locus Online's 2000 'Recommended Reading' novelettes.[6]
^"Back in 1997 when I began to explore this area, I started with a novelette titled "A Colder War", which made it pretty explicit. ACW was set in the future of Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" – a future in which Nazi Germany, the USSR, and the USA had all found their uses for the ancient alien technologies found by the Pabodie expedition to Antarctica. It all ends in tears (and a fate worse than global thermonuclear annihilation – the point of that story was to inject some horror back into Lovecraftiana by linking it implicitly to something truly horrifying, to anyone who grew up during the Cold War), but not before a Senator in a congressional hearing gets to utter the words, “Mister President, we cannot allow a Shoggoth Gap to emerge.”" "Ian Tregillis in conversation with Charlie Stross on The Laundry Files"
^"The online story "A Colder War" is *not* part of the Bob Howard/Laundry series, but is an earlier short story along a similar vein, but far more serious (and deadly); there is no humor at all in this shorter story." From Marty HalperArchived 26 June 2011 at the Wayback Machine, Stross' editor on the relevant stories