Abstract
No event focused popular attention on America’s vulnerabilities to attack more than the launching of the world’s first artificial earth satellite, Sputnik I, by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957. It brought home the fact that the United States no longer enjoyed invulnerability to the ravages of war. The peoples of Western Europe were familiar with the effects of aerial bombardment and were already growing accustomed to being well within the range of Soviet bombers and missiles. Before the capability to destroy the United States provided the Russians with a retaliatory option, the Western Europeans had served as a hostage. Now Americans also began to suffer the uncomfortable sensation of being candidates for annihilation in the event of total war.
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Notes
On the response to Sputnik, see J. R. Killian, Sputniks, Scientists and Eisenhower (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977)
and Herbert York, Race to Oblivion: A Participant’s View of the Arms Race (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971). Killian reports how the Soviet satellite did violence to a belief so fundamental that it was almost heresy to question it. A belief I shared that the United States was so far advanced in its technological capacity that it had in fact no serious rival. That others possessed their share of technology I was aware, but somehow I pictured them all laboring far behind this country, looking towards the United States for guidance, envying our skills, our trained capacity, and above all our enormous industrial substructure that could be put to the task of converting advanced technological notions into performing hardware (p. 3).
The evidence upon which these projections were based is discussed in Lawrence Freedman, US Intelligence and the Soviet Strategic Threat (London: Macmillan, 1977). Though the Air Force was the most extreme in its projections, many of the fears were shared by other intelligence analysts, including those in the CIA.
General Thomas S. Power, Design for Survival (New York: Coward-McCann, 1964), p. 111.
P. M. S. Blackett, Studies of War — Nuclear and Conventional (London: Oliver & Boyd, 1962), p. 139.
Colonel G. C. Reinhardt, ‘Atomic weapons and warfare’ in B. H. Liddell Hart (ed.), The Soviet Army (London: Wiedenfeld & Nicolson 1956), p. 429.
Herbert S. Dinerstein, ‘The revolution in Soviet strategic thinking’, Foreign Affairs, xxxvi:2 (January 1958), p. 252.
See Arnold Horelick and Myron Rush, Strategic Power and Soviet Foreign Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).
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© 2003 Lawrence Freedman
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Freedman, L. (2003). Sputniks and the Soviet Threat. In: The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230379435_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230379435_10
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