Dr. John P. Hagen arrived early at the party; he wanted to talk to a few Soviet scientists, those he considered personal friends from long years of association in international scientific organizations, to learn their true feelings about efforts to launch an artificial satellite as part of the International Geophysical Year (IGY). Hagen, a senior scientist with the Naval Research Laboratory, headed the American effort on Project Vanguard, and the rocket was behind schedule and over budget. Was the same true of the Soviet Union, or would the satellite go up in 1958 as planned?
Hagen had been through a wringer in the past week. Beginning on Monday, September 30, the international scientific organization known as CSAGI (Comité Spécial de l’Année Géophysique Internationale) had opened a six-day conference at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington on rocket and satellite research for the IGY. Scientists from the United States, the Soviet Union, and five other nations were meeting to discuss their individual plans and to develop protocols for sharing scientific data and findings. Hints from the Soviets at the meeting, however, had thrown the conference into a tizzy of speculation. Several Soviet officials had intimated that they could probably launch their scientific satellite within weeks instead of months. Hagen worried that the offhand remark on the conference’s first day by scientist Sergei M. Poloskov that the Soviet Union was “on the eve of the first artificial earth satellite” was more than boastful rhetoric. What would a surprise Soviet launch mean for his Vanguard program and for the United States, Hagen wondered.
Hagen did not have long to wait to learn the answer. The party had gathered in the second-floor ballroom at the embassy when a little before 6:00 P.M. Walter Sullivan, a science reporter with the New York Times who was also attending the reception, received a frantic telephone call from his Washington bureau chief. Sullivan learned that the Soviet news agency Tass had just announced the launch of Sputnik 1, the world’s first Earth-orbiting artificial satellite. When he returned to the party, Sullivan sought out Richard W. Porter, a member of the American IGY committee, and whispered, “It’s up.” Porter’s ruddy face flushed even more as he heard this news, although he too had suspected Sputnik’s imminent launch. He glided through the gaggles of scientists, politicians, journalists, straphangers, and spies in search of Lloyd V. Berkner, the official American delegate to CSAGI.
When told the news Berkner acted with the characteristic charm of his polished demeanor. Clapping his hands for attention, “I wish to make an announcement,” he declared. “I’ve just been informed by the New York Times that a Russian satellite is in orbit at an elevation of 900 kilometers. I wish to congratulate our Soviet colleagues on their achievement.” On the other side of the ballroom Hagen’s face turned pale. They had beaten the Vanguard satellite effort into space. Were they really the greatest nation on Earth, as Soviet leaders boisterously reminded anyone who would listen? Were they really going to bury us, as Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had announced at the United Nations in 1960, as he pounded his fist and then his shoe on his desk? What could the United States do to recover a measure of international respect?
At the IGY reception the scientists immediately adjourned to the Soviet embassy’s rooftop to view the heavens. They were not able to see the satellite with the naked eye. Indeed, Sputnik 1 twice passed within easy detection range of the United States before anyone even knew of its existence. The next morning at the IGY conference, the Soviet Union’s chief delegate, Anatoli A. Blagonravov, explained details of the launch and the spacecraft. The CSAGI conference officially congratulated the Soviets for their scientific accomplishment. But what was not said, but clearly thought by many Americans in both the scientific and political communities, was that the Soviet Union had staged a tremendous propaganda coup for the communist system, and that it could now legitimately claim leadership in a major technological field. The international image of the Soviet Union was greatly enhanced overnight.
The inner turmoil that Hagen felt on “Sputnik Night,” as October 4–5, 1957, has come to be called, reverberated through the American public in the days that followed. Two generations after the event, words do not easily convey the American reaction to the Soviet satellite. The only appropriate characterization that begins to capture the mood on October 5 demands the use of the word hysteria. A collective mental turmoil and soul-searching followed, as American society thrashed around for the answers to Hagen’s questions. Almost immediately, two phrases entered the American lexicon to define time, “pre-Sputnik” and “post-Sputnik.” The other phrase that soon replaced earlier definitions of time was “Space Age,” for with the launch of Sputnik 1 the space age had been born and the world would be different ever after.
Figure 3. A Soviet engineer completes some last-minute work on the Sputnik 1 spacecraft, launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957.
The Nature of Cold War Competition
The Sputnik launch created such broad repercussions because of the long-standing difficult relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. From the time of the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917 that brought Lenin and the communists to power in Russia, the United States had resisted the creation of a state that sought to level society through wealth redistribution. American troops intervened to support more moderate Russian forces in the revolution. These efforts failed, and American troops finally evacuated Russia only in 1920. The United States also refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Soviet government until November 16, 1933, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt ended almost sixteen years of American nonrecognition of the Soviet Union following a series of negotiations in Washington, D.C., with the Soviet commissar for foreign affairs, Maxim Litvinov.
This active resistance by the United States to the establishment of the Soviet state created an environment of distrust. The Cold War that coalesced in the late 1940s rested on this long-standing situation and proved much more than just a military standoff. This rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union manifested itself in an all-out competition between two divergent political and economic systems. While the United States and the Soviet Union were allied in World War II to defeat the Axis Powers led by Nazi Germany, that alliance rested on the core understanding that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” No sooner had the Allies won that war than the nations returned to an uneasy relationship.
After the war, these two rival nations nearly came to blows, and by that time each had nuclear weapons that could annihilate the other. The rivals squared off over the future of Central and Eastern Europe beginning in the late 1940s and lasting until the early 1990s. Accordingly, for nearly four decades the Soviets and the Americans squared off in this Cold War. Virtually every place in the world was a potential flashpoint; the United States sought to “contain” the spread of communism outside of the areas controlled by the USSR at the end of World War II. In July 1947, the quarterly journal Foreign Affairs published an anonymous article entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” which advocated a strategy of containment in dealing with the Soviet Union. Its author, soon revealed as U.S. State Department official George F. Kennan, proposed active opposition to any expansion of communist power. Kennan wrote, “We are going to continue for a long time to find the Russians difficult to deal with. It does not mean that they should be considered as embarked upon a do-or-die program to overthrow our society.” Place Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union, in a box, and limit his ability to do anything internationally.
Containment became America’s official strategy, and in seeking to accomplish it the United States forged numerous alliances in Western Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. The strategy, however, engendered many controversies, some of which verged on erupting into full-scale wars. The Berlin blockade (1948–1949), the Korean War (1950–1953), the Vietnam War (1959–1975), the Cuban missile crisis (1962), and the Soviet-Afghan War (1979–1989) all served to heighten tensions. In at least one instance, the Cuban missile crisis, nuclear holocaust almost came to pass. There w
ere also periods when tensions declined, especially during the détente of the early 1970s, when the nations opened more amiable relations. In the end, direct military actions were deterred by the potential for mutual assured destruction, MAD—certainly the most appropriate acronym ever dreamed up, since it referred to annihilation of both combatants through the use of nuclear weapons.
By the time of the launch of the world’s first artificial satellite in 1957, the United States and the Soviet Union each faced critical strategic challenges. Both were consumed by fears of an advance of the other into territories. The United States and its allies were on the watch for Soviet advances in Europe and Asia. The Soviet Union and its allies considered themselves surrounded by hostile nations led by an aggressive United States. The Soviets, moreover, had no bases close enough to American soil to strike should war break out, yet they felt threatened by a plethora of U.S. military capabilities based in Europe and Asia. Not until the rise of ballistic missiles would this change.
Depending on how one viewed this geopolitical confrontation, either side looked surrounded. A polar projection map suggested that the Soviet Union was hemmed in by unfriendly forces, most of which were allies of the United States. Europe to the west, various Asian nations to the east, and, after 1952, NATO allies such as Turkey to the south all created nervousness in the Kremlin. That feeling of being boxed in proved psychologically powerful to Soviet leaders and helped to prompt a series of aggressive responses. In the early ballistic missile era of the late 1950s, moreover, the United States placed nuclear weapons on Jupiter missiles in Turkey and Italy and based strategic bombers in other parts of Western Europe and in Japan and South Korea. The seeming paranoia of the Soviet leaders, especially Joseph Stalin and his successor Nikita Khrushchev, may be partially explained by this sense of being crowded by hostile powers. They forever seemed to be seeking breathing room and buffer territory that could make the Soviet Union invulnerable to attack.
A world map in a more common Mercator projection shows an expansion of the Soviet Union as a result of World War II. It depicts the belligerence of Stalin in subsuming Eastern Europe under Soviet control. Out of the war the Soviets incorporated into the Russian sphere of influence much of Eastern Europe, including Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, East Germany, and other smaller nations. Struggles in Greece and other parts of Europe narrowly turned back communist takeovers. A theory of foreign relations emerged from this setting that was called the domino effect; its proponents asserted that if one part of a region came under the influence of communism, then surrounding areas might well follow from revolutionary efforts sparked by the neighboring communist state. President Dwight D. Eisenhower accepted this theory, stating on April 7, 1954, “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. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.” Successive U.S. presidents applied this idea to Soviet relations, justifying American intervention around the world, in dealing with presumed threats from the Soviets.
At the same time, playing on the fears Americans had felt for years of a Soviet threat to their way of life, the development of highly sophisticated nuclear weapons raised the stakes in this confrontation. And the Soviets felt the same way about the Americans. The United States had developed the first atomic bomb in World War II, and had used it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 not only to force Japan’s unconditional surrender but also to demonstrate this devastating capability for Stalin. The Soviets followed by exploding their own atomic warhead in 1949. The Americans upped the ante in 1952 with the testing of the much more powerful hydrogen thermonuclear device, but the Soviets followed with their own test of a hydrogen weapon in 1953. It appeared as if the Soviet Union was overtaking the United States in the development of new and ever more powerful weapons.
The launch of Sputnik in 1957 suggested that Americans had lost out to Soviet technology. Investment banker and Republican operative Frank Altschul wrote to President Eisenhower on this issue on October 8, 1957, outlining the loss of atomic supremacy, general deterioration in the position of the non-Soviet world, successful activities by the Soviet Union in the Middle East, crushing of anti-communist uprisings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, communist forays into Southeast Asia, and a host of other apparent setbacks for the West. All of this created world doubt about the outcome of the Cold War for democratic nations in general and the United States as its leader in particular. Sputnik was the final straw in a long series of problems. Altschul suggested that “the impression of impotence created by the failure of the Western world to find practical measures to counteract overt acts of Soviet aggression” made this a crisis.
The International Geophysical Year and the Origins of the Space Age
The International Geophysical Year (IGY) served magnificently as a vehicle for the birth of the space age. The genesis of the IGY was a dinner party in the home of scientist James A. Van Allen in Bethesda, Maryland, in the summer of 1950. This event has taken on legendary status as everything from a nearly mystical gathering to the reaffirming of the authority of science in modern life. At some level the IGY may be viewed as a cabal led by Van Allen, British physicist Sydney Chapman, and American science entrepreneur Lloyd V. Berkner to “hoodwink” the nations of the world into pursuing an aggressive scientific program to ensure funding and status for activities never dreamed of before. At another, it may be interpreted as cagey politicians manipulating the scientific community to provide a stalking horse for the resolution of a thorny geopolitical problem. Indeed, it is both of these.
Pressed by Berkner, the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) agreed in 1952 to pursue a comprehensive series of global geophysical activities to span the period July 1957—December 1958. Sixty-seven nations agreed to conduct cooperative experiments to study solar-terrestrial relations during a period of maximum solar activity in 1957–1958. In October 1954, at the behest of essentially this same group of U.S. scientists, ICSU challenged nations to use missiles being developed for war to launch scientific satellites to support the IGY research program.
In response to ICSU’s announcement, on May 26, 1955, the National Security Council (NSC), the senior defense policy board in the United States, approved a plan to orbit a scientific satellite as part of the IGY effort. The NSC’s endorsement was provisional: the effort could not interfere with the development of ballistic missiles, it must emphasize the peaceful purposes of the endeavor, and it had to contribute to establishing the principle of “freedom of space” in international law. Eisenhower supported this effort and on July 29 publicly announced plans for existing organizations within the Department of Defense to develop and launch a small scientific satellite, “under international auspices, such as the International Geophysical Year, in order to emphasize its peaceful purposes[;] . . . considerable prestige and psychological benefits will accrue to the nation which first is successful in launching a satellite . . . especially if the USSR were to be the first to establish a satellite.”
There followed a heady competition between the Naval Research Laboratory on the one hand and the army’s Redstone Arsenal, where von Braun led the effort to win permission to develop the IGY satellite. Project Vanguard, proposed by the navy, was chosen on September 9, 1955, to carry the standard in launching a nonmilitary satellite for the IGY effort, over the army’s “Explorer” proposal. The decision was made largely because the Naval Research Laboratory candidate did not interfere with high-priority ballistic missile programs—it used the Viking launcher as its basis rather than a ballistic missile—while the army’s bid was heavily involved in those activities and proposed adapting a ballistic missile for the purpose. In addition, the navy rocket seemed to have greater promise for scientific research because of a larger payload capacity.
The Viking launch vehicle was also a proven system; an early version of it had first flown in the late 1940s, while t
he army’s proposed rocket, the Redstone, had been launched for the first time only in August 1953. Finally, the Naval Research Laboratory’s proposal was more acceptable because it came from a scientific organization rather than from a weapons developer, in this case the Redstone Arsenal.
Although he approved the IGY satellite, Eisenhower was cost conscious about the program, especially as it seemed to grow in cost and complexity with every review. He repeatedly wondered about its voracious appetite for public funds, especially since Vanguard supposedly took a back seat to real national security space activities, most notably the accelerating program to develop ballistic missiles. From its initial cost estimates, Vanguard had mushroomed to a cost of $67.9 million by August 1956 and to $110 million by the summer of 1957.
During the next several months the Eisenhower administration became increasingly concerned with the tendency of Project Vanguard to get bogged down. Eisenhower was especially concerned about the probability that the scientific instruments were slowing it down. About five months before the Soviets orbited Sputnik 1, the president reminded his top advisers, as his aide Andrew Goodpaster recorded, “Such costly instrumentation had not been envisaged,” and the president “stressed that the element of national prestige . . . depended on getting a satellite into its orbit, and not on the instrumentation of the scientific satellite.” Eisenhower’s perception of the budgetary growth of the Vanguard program, transforming it from the simple task of putting any type of satellite into orbit into a project of launching a satellite with “considerable instrumentation,” reminded him of the worst type of technological inflation, as every scientist seemingly wanted to hang another piece of equipment on the vehicle.
Reaching for the Moon Page 2