For the men of Stalin’s inner circle, participation in the purges had been a matter of personal survival. But now that Khrushchev had unmasked Stalin’s reign of terror, would they survive an accounting for their actions? That was the real danger of Khrushchev’s speech—not the professed knowledge of the purges but the official acknowledgment of them, as the CIA report on the secret speech underscored. “A change from violence to diplomacy and from tension to relaxation cannot but have a deep psychological impact on the people inside the communist orbit” was the analysis in Washington. “The question arises whether the leaders of the CPSU can dispense with permanent tension without at the same time undermining their monolithic dictatorship.”
For the first time, a Soviet leader had admitted that horrible crimes had been committed in the name of communism, that terror as a tool of the state was wrong. It was still too early to tell what that meant. But as the CIA predicted, there were almost certainly going to be dire consequences.
These, and other, thoughts troubled Korolev’s distracted guests. The Chief Designer would not have known what weighty matters preoccupied his visitors because he had not been privy to the secret speech. But he was intimately acquainted with its contents. He had been among the 1,548,366 people arrested in 1938, an ordeal that began, as in the case of countless others, with a knock at the door in the middle of the night and nearly always ended in death, either by outright execution or later in the camps. “He was taken to Lefortovo prison, interrogated, beaten,” a colleague of Korolev’s would later inform the biographer James Harford. “He remembered asking for a glass of water from one [guard] who handed him the glass and then hit him in the head with the water jug. He was called an enemy of the people.”
Korolev didn’t need Khrushchev to tell him how cold it could get in Kolyma, or what it was like to sleep barefoot in the snow with a broken jaw. He had not needed to be told how it felt to lose all your teeth from malnutrition. And he didn’t need to listen to a speech to know that the prosecutions had been shams. In fact, the scientist at his side during most of the Presidium visit, the propulsion expert Valentin Glushko, had provided testimony against him at his own trial, which had ended with a ten-year sentence “for crimes in the field of a new technology” and a perfunctory “Next.”
What Korolev did need from Khrushchev that day was the green light to embark on an ambitious new project. So the Chief Designer smiled his pearly denture smile at the men who had robbed years from his life and continued his lecture. The first full-scale R-2, he explained, had been field-tested in October 1950. The launch was not a success. After tinkering throughout the harsh winter, the designers attempted another series of test firings in the spring of 1951. This time it flew 390 miles—in the right direction. “Which brings us to the present,” said Korolev, gesturing toward the largest of the three missiles. “This is the R-5,” he said, tapping the rocket with a pointer, “the first Soviet strategic rocket,” built entirely by Russians without German help.
The R-5, the Presidium members could immediately see, was radically different from its predecessors. It was longer by half than the original V-2 replica, slimmer, more fragile in appearance, and tubular in shape. The four big, graceful stabilizer fins that had made the tapered V-2 instantly recognizable had been lopped back to tiny triangle wedges on the R-5, and the nose cone had been blunted into an ungainly snout.
“The construction looked utterly incapable of flight,” Sergei Khrushchev recalled, a sixty-six-foot-long pencil in need of sharpening, with an engine for a rubber eraser. “The [R-l and R-2] at least had streamlined shapes and a certain refinement in the form of stabilizers,” he would later write. “Apparently I wasn’t the only one to have this reaction, since Father looked surprised.”
Korolev, at last, had his guests’ undivided attention. Not only did the R-5 fly, he explained, but it spent most of its flight above the atmosphere. Large stabilizer fins were not necessary because of servomotors for the small aerodynamic rudders. The rocket’s tubular shell doubled as the propellant tank wall, further reducing design mass by a full ton while increasing fuel capacity by 60 percent. The engine, an RD-103 designed by Glushko, also produced 60 percent more thrust than its predecessors, and thanks to the introduction of coolant flowing through integrated solder-welded ribs around the combustion chamber, it could operate longer and more efficiently, without overheating or cracking under the intense temperatures and pressure generated by forty-four tons of thrust. Glushko’s engine propelled the R-5 to a top speed of 10,000 feet per second, or twice as fast as the V-2. A new thermal shield protected the nose cone from the excess heat generated by the increased velocity and atmospheric reentry, while targeting accuracy had been greatly improved with the addition of longitudinal acceleration integrators, which could control engine cutoff with greater precision.
Fully fueled and armed, the R-5 weighed twenty-nine tons. Its range was 1,200 kilometers, roughly 800 miles. Its payload was an eightykiloton nuclear warhead, the equivalent force of six Hiroshima bombs. And the R-5 was not a mock-up or test vehicle. It was operational. Three weeks earlier, on February 2, the missile had carried its lethal cargo 800 miles, setting off a mushroom cloud over a target area near the Aral Sea in Soviet central Asia. The test had marked the world’s first nuclear detonation delivered by a ballistic missile, the dawn of a new age in warfare. The Soviet Union had fired the first salvo of an arms race that would consume trillions of dollars and hold the planet hostage for the next forty years.
The Presidium members stared intently at their revolutionary new weapon. It seemed incomprehensible that such a strange, fragile object could wield such power; that with one push of a button it could vaporize an entire city in an instant. Khrushchev and a few of the other Presidium members had seen war, and they knew that it was incremental, a process of attrition. In the sieges of Stalingrad and Kursk, Leningrad and Kiev, the devastation had been progressive. A little bit of each city had died each day, and the process had lasted for agonizing months. With the R-5, everything would be over within seven minutes of launch. You didn’t need planes, tanks, or troops, or an invasion fleet. You didn’t need to worry about logistics or supply trains. You didn’t need to put your soldiers in harm’s way. It made war seem almost effortless.
For nearly a minute no one spoke. Khrushchev finally broke the silence. Which countries were in its range? he wanted to know. His son recorded the scene: “Korolev walked over to a map of Europe, which was hanging on a special stand. It looked just like the ones we had had in school, except that this one had arcs of intersecting circles against the blue background of the Atlantic Ocean. Thin radii drawn with India ink stretched to [the Soviet bloc’s] western borders, to the frontier of East Germany. In the upper right-hand corner of the map there was a calligraphic inscription: ‘Highly classified. Of special importance.’ Slightly below that was Copy Number—I don’t remember the number, but it was no higher than three.”
The map showed that the R-5 could strike every nation in Europe, except Spain and Portugal, which were still out of range. A murmur of satisfaction rose from the Presidium members. “Excellent,” said Khrushchev. “Until recently we couldn’t even dream of such a thing. But the appetite grows by what it feeds on. Comrade Korolev, isn’t it possible to extend the rocket’s range?”
No, the Chief Designer replied flatly, a new missile would be required. Khrushchev and the others seemed disappointed. But Korolev appeared unperturbed; his authority was already well established within Kremlin circles. The delegation remained rooted in front of the map for some time, contemplating Armageddon. “Father stared piercingly at it,” Sergei Khrushchev recalled.
“How many warheads would be needed to destroy England?” the party leader finally asked. “Have you calculated that?”
Dmitri Ustinov, the armaments minister, fielded the question. “Five. A few more for France—seven or nine, depending on the choice of targets.”
Only five? Khrushchev seemed skeptical. The British h
ad withstood a daily barrage of V-2s. They had shrugged off the Junker bombers during the Blitz, displayed a tenacity that even Stalin had praised. But now Great Britain was America’s closest ally; it would have to be taken out first.
“Five would be enough to crush defenses and disrupt communications and transportation, not to mention the destruction of major cities,” Ustinov explained. His tone, Sergei Khrushchev remembered, “did not allow for even a shadow of a doubt.”
“Terrible,” said Khrushchev, trailing off in thought. Five flicks of a switch to break the will of a nation like Britain. Astonishing. Cost-effective, too.
• • •
It was not only the search for a new weapon to counter American air superiority that had brought Khrushchev to Korolev’s design bureau. He was also looking for ways to save money because, unlike the booming American economy, Soviet central planning was in trouble. The years of rapid growth after the war, when entire cities and industries had been rebuilt from rubble, were over by the mid-1950s. Most Western European nations had made remarkable recoveries by then, due in part to the Marshall Plan. But the command economies of the Eastern bloc had spurned American financial aid and were now beginning to suffer from a crisis of inefficiency. Put simply, Soviet central planning was suffering from the law of diminishing returns. No matter how many rubles the Russians sank into their wobbly industries, they were getting a smaller and smaller return on their investment. And the problem was only going to get worse over time.
For Khrushchev, the economic slowdown came just as his treasury faced the twin challenge of meeting the raised American threat and rising consumer demands at home. After years of sacrifice, first during the war and then during reconstruction, Soviet citizens were beginning to yearn for a higher standard of living. Encouraged in part by a slew of lighthearted films and musicals after Stalin’s death that featured fashionable clothes, fast cars, and the joys of shopping, Soviet citizens had embraced this new material slant on life. Khrushchev had approved the cinematic thaw and the departure from the austere militarist offerings of Stalinist directors because he understood that he could not rule by fear alone. Stalin had shrewdly substituted a diet of national pride and terror for material well-being that had given his subjects comfort in the notion that while they were frightened and poor, they were building a great empire and a better tomorrow. Khrushchev preferred the carrot to Stalin’s stick. Parades were not enough. People had to have tangible rewards from the socialist miracle touted by the new propaganda films.
To bring his movies more in line with reality, Khrushchev needed to free up hundreds of billions of rubles to pay for housing projects, to recapitalize decrepit automobile factories, and to finance agricultural reforms that would put food on people’s tables. As things stood, the Soviet Union could barely feed itself. Yields were so low that in 1953 per capita grain production had fallen to 1913 levels. All told, the USSR’s muddy collective farms were producing less food in the early 1950s than they had in 1940. If the trend continued, the Soviet Union would starve.
To reverse the decline, Khrushchev had embarked on a hugely ambitious and controversial program to develop 80 million acres of virgin steppe in central Asia that was intended to increase agricultural production by 50 percent. Molotov, in particular, had vehemently opposed the plan, which required relocating three hundred thousand farmworkers and fifty thousand tractors to cultivate the raw fields in Kazakhstan and southern Siberia. It was far too expensive, Molotov argued, and the climate was too harsh. But Khrushchev had overruled him; the money, he said, would be found somewhere, trimmed from the fat of various other budget allocations.
Military expenditures ate up between 14 and 20 percent of the Soviet economy, compared to 9 percent for the United States, whose economy was much larger. And yet, despite the large outlays, the Soviet armed forces could not adequately address the new American jet-bomber threat. The Red Army had more than 3.5 million men under arms, but they were useless against B-47s carrying nuclear bombs. What’s more, they were expensive; soldiers had to be clothed, fed, housed, and provided with costly trucks, tanks, and artillery whose role in a nuclear standoff was of limited or no value. Khrushchev could try to compete with the Americans by bulking up his aging fleet of World War II-era bombers, but it was becoming clear that he could not keep pace with the U.S. Air Force. Even if Khrushchev ramped up spending, he could not hope to match the new B-52 superbomber that Boeing was beginning to mass-produce. In heavy aviation, the Soviet Union had simply fallen too far behind to make the investment worthwhile.
In the high-stakes arms race, Khrushchev was a pauper playing at a rich’s man table. Given the vast financial gulf between America and the Soviet Union, he had to marshal his resources more carefully than Eisenhower, and he saw that missiles were the cheapest, most cost-effective way to stay in the game. Their costs were mostly up-front, in research and development. And Khrushchev felt that he would not need to produce them in significant numbers. That hadn’t been the case in World War II. Hitler, after all, had bet the Reich on the V-2, built thousands of them, and lost. But that was before the atomic age. Nuclear warheads dramatically changed the equation. Now you could defeat England with only five rockets and keep America at bay with a few dozen more. From a financial point of view, focusing on missiles made more sense than maintaining a huge standing army or sinking money into giant bomber fleets that rockets would soon render obsolete anyway.
And so Khrushchev was betting the farm on Korolev. He had slashed spending on conventional forces to free up funds for foodstuffs and housing, while he hoped that the Chief Designer’s missiles would provide the USSR with a shield against American bombers. Just how big a wager he was placing would stun the CIA, which in a 1958 report underscored “the striking re-allocation of expenditures within the [Soviet military] mission structure. The most dramatic examples are the 34% decline in expenditures for the ground mission, and the 127% increase for the strategic attack mission…. Increasing expenditures on strategic attack reflect the replacement of the manned bomber by long range missiles.”
Khrushchev, in short, was gambling that the Americans had put their money on the wrong weapons system.
• • •
“Well,” asked Khrushchev, “what else do you have to show us?” This was the moment Sergei Korolev had been waiting for; the moment he had prepared for ever since the day he was released from prison and sent to Germany to join Chertok and Glushko to uncover the secrets of Nazi missiles. (Chertok, alas, could not share in the triumph. He had been demoted from his post as NII-88 deputy director during one of Stalin’s anti-Semitic roundups. After Stalin’s death, Korolev eased Chertok back into a senior position at OKB-1, but his rank was not high enough to meet Presidium members.) Now NII-88’s most senior scientists stirred anxiously as Korolev prepared to unveil their collective masterpiece, the product of over a decade of research and millions of man-hours of dedicated work.
“We have seen the past and the present of Soviet rocketry,” said Korolev, leading his guests to a large double door, where a pair of crisply uniformed guards stood rigidly at attention. “This is the future.”
The doors swung dramatically open, and Sergei Khrushchev gasped. “I was amazed. I had never seen anything remotely like it, no one had,” he said, the excitement and wonder of that first glimpse still evident even after fifty years. Sergei and his father stepped into the top-secret inner room. The structure was brand-new, so spotless that everything shone, and its walls soared upward instead of lengthwise like the hangar they had just come from. These walls were constructed entirely of glass, and they had been painted white to allow light in but to keep prying eyes out. At the center of the gigantic atrium stood a rocket larger than Sergei Khrushchev had ever imagined. “It looked like the Kremlin tower,” he said.
Korolev stood aside and savored the moment. The rulers of the Soviet empire, among the most ruthless and powerful men on the planet, were frozen with awe. They had stopped dead in their tracks, reduced
momentarily to the status of mere mortals. “Father later told me that he was simply numb, intimidated by the grandeur of such an object created by human hands,” Sergei recalled.
“The R-7,” announced Korolev with theatrical flair. The Presidium members recovered some of their composure and slowly circled the mammoth missile. In weight and mass it was ten times the size of the R-5, and almost twice as heavy as the Hindenburg Zeppelin, the largest aircraft ever built. Whereas the R-5 had one engine, the R-7 boasted five giant boosters that would consume 247 tons of fuel in four minutes. The nearly one million pounds of lift they generated could hurl the missile more than 5,000 miles at a speed of over 24,000 feet per second, four times faster and forty times farther than the original V-2.
The Presidium members drank this all in like a golden elixir. They poked their bald pates into the missile’s twenty burnished copper exhaust nozzles and craned their creaky old necks up at the inky black nose cone where the thermonuclear warhead would sit, a five-ton device that would have an explosive yield nearly one hundred times that of the atomic bomb the Americans had dropped on Hiroshima. The men of the Presidium shook their heads in wonder, whistled softly, and shot one another glances that brimmed with satisfaction. At last the Soviet Union would have its ultimate weapon, a rocket that could reach New York and Washington with the deadly force of all the combined ordnance dropped in the Second World War.
But try as they did, the Presidium members could not entirely fathom the full lethal potential of the R-7. Just how fast is 24,000 feet per second? Khrushchev tried to imagine.
“How long would it take to fly to Kiev?” he asked Korolev. When he was Stalin’s Ukrainian viceroy, Khrushchev had made the arduous three-hour air commute between Moscow and the Ukrainian capital several times a week in his old Douglass.
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