A launch and a bombshell effect in 1957

Vladimir Radyuhin
The Hindu, 4 October

The launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union 50 years ago recast the strategic equations. For the first time, the U.S. felt defenceless to an enemy attack.

It is hard to believe today but when the Soviet Union launched the world’s first Sputnik 50 years ago, the event failed to grab the headlines in Soviet newspapers. The Communist Party’s mouthpiece, Pravda, carried only a brief TASS report inconspicuously placed in a side column of the front page.

“Neither we nor our media first grasped the historical significance of our feat,” Sputnik rocket scientist Boris Chertok recalled. “We believed this would mainly interest us scientists and our students.”

For Russian scientists, the Sputnik, a beach-size metal ball with a radio transmitter and four antennas, was a “no-brain” spin-off of the country’s missile programme, a whim of chief missile designer Sergei Korolev, who is acclaimed today as the founder of the Soviet space programme.

It took the Soviet scientists and Communist Party leaders some time to realise that the event ushered in the space age. However in the West, the Sputnik’s famous “beep… beep… beep…” signals picked up by radio fans produced a bombshell effect. “There was a sort of collective national shock in the United States — some called it the technological Pearl Harbour,” space historian Asif Siddiqi said.

The shock deepened when, a month later, the Soviet Union launched a much bigger satellite. Sputnik-2 weighed more than 500 kilograms, was cone-shaped and carried a dog named Laika, the first animal to travel in space.

Shortly afterwards, the U.S. tried to launch its own satellite but the rocket rose a few feet off the launch pad and exploded. The attempt was dubbed Kaputnik. It was not until January 1958 that the U.S. succeeded in orbiting a tiny 8-kg satellite. When America finally caught up with the Soviets, it was thanks to German space pioneer Wernher von Braun, the most valuable U.S. World War II trophy.

In October 1957, Americans were shocked to realise that communist Russia had stolen a march over them in cutting-edge technologies. It was an even greater shock for them to find out that the country of ferocious bears and backward farmers had superior education and science; that Soviet schools churned out 1.5 million graduates with solid knowledge of mathematics every year compared to 100,000 such students in the U.S.; that Russia had 2.5 times more diploma-holding engineers than the U.S.

Arther S. Trace’s 1961 eye-opening bestseller What Ivan Knows That Johnny Doesn’t explained to Americans why the Soviets beat them to space. By the 4th grade, he wrote, Russian children’s reading vocabulary was nearly 10,000 words, while their peers in American schools had a command over fewer than 1,800 words. American schools were also “woefully behind” Soviet schools in the teaching of mathematics and the sciences.

Beyond the shock of discovering that the Soviet Union was a nation of better educated and more technologically trained people, Americans were awestruck by the knowledge that the 183-tonne R-7 missile, which lobbed the Sputnik into space, could also drop atomic bombs into their heartland.

For the first time in its history, the U.S. had the chilling feeling of becoming defenceless to an enemy attack overnight. Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson whipped up fears with his warning that the Soviets “will be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks on to cars from freeway overpasses.”

The launch of Sputnik recast the strategic equations. While the Soviet Union had atomic bombs even earlier, it lacked the means to deliver them across the ocean. For its part, the U.S. had hundreds of nuclear-capable, long-range bombers that flew daily missions towards and across Soviet borders from bases not only on the American soil but also all around the Soviet Union as the Cold War gained momentum.

“Throughout the campaign, to demonstrate overwhelming American air superiority, the United States violated Soviet airspace more than 10,000 times,” writes Matthew Brzezinski, author of Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age. “Our thermonuclear stockpile increased tenfold, while [the Strategic Air Commander, Gen. Curtis] LeMay publicly speculated about the 60 million Soviet citizens targeted for annihilation under the Dulles doctrine of massive retaliation. The term was a bit of a misnomer because Soviet planes at the time did not have the range to reach U.S. soil and never once infringed on U.S. territory.”

Sputnik put an end to U.S. invulnerability. The R-7 ballistic missile was far more powerful than anything the Americans had. By 1960, the missile was armed with a nuclear warhead and inducted into the Soviet strategic arsenals. In the next few years, the Soviet Union built enough long-range missiles to wipe out the U.S. nuclear superiority. America was compelled to give up its doctrine of “massive retaliation” and the strategy of a preemptive nuclear strike, and recognise strategic parity with the Soviet Union by embracing the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). According to MAD, even a surprise missile attack by either country would not destroy the other’s potential for a retaliatory strike.

Americans learned some lessons from the Sputnik shock. They overhauled technical education system and poured money into science training: allocations for research and development jumped by nearly 50 per cent from 1958 to 1959.

But the U.S. failed to grasp the main lesson. As Brzezinski put it: “Sputnik should serve as a reminder of what happens when you goad the Russian bear.” The U.S. threw out a historic chance offered by the end of the Cold War to turn space into an arena of peaceful cooperation as symbolised by the 16-nation International Space Station project.

When the Soviet Union fell apart, the U.S. gloated over its unmitigated victory in the space race and moved to assert its ultimate military supremacy through a new conquest of space. In 2002, Washington pulled out of the 30-year-old Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, freeing itself from the commitment not to deploy missile defences in outer space. In 2005, the U.S., for the first time, voted in the United Nations against a call to ban space weapons, casting the only “no” against 160 “yes” votes.

Last year, President George W. Bush signed a new National Space Policy that rejects any future space arms-control agreements and asserts a right to deny access to space to anyone “hostile to U.S. interests.” Next year, the Pentagon plans to begin building a missile base in Poland and a radar system in the Czech Republic that would be able to target and intercept Russian missiles. The new Bush policy on space calls on the U.S. military to provide “space capabilities” to support missile-warning systems as well as “multi-layered and integrated missile defenses,” giving the go-ahead to placing some components of the system in space.

The U.S. resurrected and expanded President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” programme. As The New York Times reported last week, the U.S. is building “antimissile interceptors that would speed into space to smash enemy warheads”, “jets that can shoot deadly laser beams and orbital battle stations that can hurl swarms of lethal munitions.”

Renewed obsession

Fifty years after the Soviet Sputnik shattered its dream of achieving nuclear primacy, the obsession has again gripped America. What the U.S. fails to factor in is that Russia, throughout its history, which is at least 10 times longer than American history, has demonstrated tremendous capacity to bounce back after falling on its knees.

Today, as 50 years ago, resurgent Russia is not prepared to concede defeat. Three years ago, Russia’s then Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov said Russia was embarking on building an integrated “air and space defence” that would “definitely” include deploying space-based systems in response to the U.S. “star wars.” In fact, Russia had first developed a space-based, anti-satellite weapon system as far back as in the 1960s and deployed it in space till 1983 when Moscow imposed a unilateral ban on space-based weapons as long as other nations refrained from deploying such systems.

Flush with oil export revenues, Russia has earmarked over $150 billion for the re-armament of its military till 2015. Next year, Russia’s spending on space is projected to equal about $1.5 billion, which is still less than one-tenth of the NASA budget, but 10 times more than the funding the Russian space programme received a decade ago.

Ahead of the Sputnik jubilee, Moscow issued a stern warning to Washington that it would retaliate if the U.S. deployed weapons in space. “We don’t want to wage a war in space, we don’t want to gain dominance in space, but we won’t allow any other nation to dominate space,” Russia’s Space forces chief Col.-Gen. Vladimir Popovkin said. “If any country deploys weapons in space, then the laws of warfare are such that retaliatory weapons are certain to appear.”

The world seems to be heading for a new space race and this time, it will be a purely military race. The U.S. push to militarise space as also the war in Iraq show that in the 21st century, America remains a land of unlearned lessons.