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<text> <title> (1950s) The Arms Race </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1950s Highlights </history> <link 07789> <link 07797> <link 08122> <link 08073> <link 00122><article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> The Arms Race </hdr> <body> [A large part of the climate of fear that had infected the U.S. by 1950 stemmed from the loss of the nuclear monopoly the U.S. had enjoyed from its first atomic explosions in 1944 to the Soviet breakthrough in 1949. A deadly arms race began that could result in the destruction of the entire human race. One momentous decision came early in 1950.] (February 13, 1950) The President's announcement that he had ordered development of the hydrogen bomb was a decision that most U.S. citizens obviously approved, but about which none could be happy; driven by inexorable forces, the U.S. was setting out to make a weapon that would pale the deadliness of the atomic-fission bomb. As events had turned, it was essentially a defensive measure. The Russians could build and doubtless were building their own hydrogen bomb. If undeterred by threat of retaliation in kind, the Russians could deliver it by aircraft almost anywhere in the U.S.; by submarine, or in a sneak attack from a commercial freighter in the harbor, they could use it to devastate the great coastal cities of the U.S. [The first American test of hydrogen weapons came in November 1952, but the Soviets re-established the balance of terror nine months later.] (November 24, 1952) At dusk on a drowsy Sunday, reporters filed hurriedly past the guards at the Atomic Energy Commission building in Washington for a special announcement. The announcement was muffled in the AEC's usual cautious language, but its import was still overwhelming: the U.S. has succeeded in a test explosion of a hydrogen weapon in mid-Pacific. The bomb was unloaded at a small island, about 35 miles from Eniwetok. Ships of the task force ringed the island at a radius of about 30 miles on the morning of the explosion. Zero hour was 7:15 a.m., Nov. 1. The men put on dark glasses, turned their backs and covered their eyes. Then the bomb exploded with the light of "at least ten suns," as a ship's navigator reported. Mastery of the H-bomb meant that the U.S., in its search for ever more powerful weapons, had caught something of the secret of the sun's own power. It was the kind of event to date the beginning of a new era. But the men who watched the test--including a sailor who drew a diagram of the explosion in his letter--caught the meaning better than any of the headlines. They simply called the explosion "Lulu." (August 31, 1953) In Paris, so the story goes, an American was challenged by a Frenchman to a duel. As the challenged party, he had the choice of weapons. His choice--"Double-barreled shotguns at 20 paces"--posed such a strong threat of mutual annihilation that the Frenchman called the whole thing off. Such negative protection is now the principal insurance which the U.S. has against an attack by Soviet strategic bombers. Last week the Russians announced that they have set off a hydrogen bomb explosion. The U.S. Government, within a few hours, confirmed that this was so. Administration leaders made no wild or hasty pronouncements about the effect of the new Russian hydrogen power, but their concern was very real. Given the enormous destructive potency of the atom and hydrogen bombs, and the knowledge that Russia has solved the principle of both, there can be only fleeting comfort from the fact that the U.S. stockpile of bombs is currently bigger than the Russian. If X number of bombs will cripple a nation, it will be of small importance whether the U.S. has X plus 2,000 and the Russians have only X plus one. [As American test pilots soared ever further from earth in rocket planes and balloons, the U.S., and the Soviet Union raced to be the first to put a rocket-borne payload into space. The U.S. program was plagued with glitches and interservice rivalries, and in October 1957 the Russians won the first lap of the "space race," launching the first artificial satellite, and a month later, the first living cosmonaut, a dog.] (October 14, 1957) Hurtling unseen, hundreds of miles from the earth, a polished metal sphere the size of a beach ball passed over the world's continents and oceans one day last week. As it circled the globe for the first time, traveling at 18,000 m.p.h., the U.S. was blissfully unaware that a new era in history had begun, opening a bright new chapter in mankind's conquest of the natural environment and a grim new chapter in the cold war. The news came in a broadcast by Moscow radio, and it got to Washington in an ironic way. At the Soviet embassy on 126th Street that evening, some 50 scientists of 13 nations, members of the International Geophysical Year rocket and satellite conference, were gathered at a cocktail party. After the vodka, Scotch and bourbon started to flow, New York Times Reporter Walter Sullivan got an urgent phone call from his paper, hurried back to whisper in the ear of a U.S. scientist. A moment later Physicist Lloyd Berkner tapped on the hors d'oeuvre table until the hubbub quieted. "I wish to make an announcement," he said. "I am informed by the New York Times that a satellite is in orbit at an elevation of 900 kilometers (560 miles). I wish to congratulate our Soviet colleagues on their achievement." By then, the world's communication systems were already buzzing with the story that the Russians had launched history's first man-made satellite, and scientists across the table were being routed out by newspapers and colleagues. The Russians called it sputnik; it weighed 184.3 lbs., they said, and was sending continuous radio signals. Commercial radio stations, too, picked up sputnik's signals. "Listen now," said an NBC announcer, in a voice his listeners would not soon forget, "For the sound which forever more separates the old from the new." And over thousands of earthbound radios sounded the eerie beep...beep...beep from somewhere out in space. In the nation's reaction to those chilling beeps the impulse to applaud a mighty scientific achievement soon froze in the rigors of the cold war. The Red satellite was a milestone in history, a giant step toward the conquest of interplanetary space. But it was also a Communist achievement with serious implications for the West that the Communists themselves made clear. Cold-war propaganda rang in the Russian announcement: "The present generation will witness how the freed and conscious labor of the people of the new socialist society turns even the most daring of man's dreams into a reality." Despite the official White House line that "the Soviet launching did not come as any surprise," highly surprised scientists and military men drew some quick lessons from sputnik's success. Items: -- To put the 184.3-lb. satellite in its orbit, the Russians had to have an operational ballistic missile driven by a rocket engine at least as big as the U.S.'s biggest and best; hence the Russians probably have a workable intercontinental ballistic missile. -- U.S. intelligence had no warning of the firing of the sputnik. -- U.S. policymakers probably have been seriously underestimating Russian scientific capability; in vital sectors of the technology race the U.S. may well have lost its precious lead. (November 11, 1957) Kudryavka (Little Curly), the first living creature to travel around the earth through space, first barked over the Moscow radio on Oct. 27. Dressed in a custom space suit, she had already ridden a short while before that in a rocket, and had suffered no ill effects. This week she made history as the passenger in Sputnik II--also called Muttnik. The second Soviet satellite, officially named 1957 Beta by International Geophysical Year authorities, is much more ambitious than 1957 Alpha (Sputnik I). According to Moscow, it weighs more than six times as much (1,120.8 lbs.), and it circles on a higher orbit, reaching more than 1,000 miles above the earth at its highest point, and taking slightly longer (1 hr. 43.7 min.) to complete a circuit. Little Curly survived the shock of launching; the Russians reported that she was still alive and apparently well after many times round the earth. One Russian scientist, Professor A. A. Blagonravov, said in Moscow that Little Curly is safe, hinting that means had been provided to bring her back to earth for a second appearance on the Moscow radio. Although not impossible, this would be exceedingly difficult, and official Russian sources have made no such promise. But even if she lives for only a short time, her experiences may help keep the first human space voyagers alive. [The U.S. finally got its first intercontinental ballistic missile, the Atlas, airborne in December.] (December 30, 1957) At 12:35 Big Annie was ready. On the north beach, three miles away, the wife of a man on the firing crew crossed her arms and said softly: "Oh God, please make it go. Help Jerry make it go right." In three minutes flame welled up in the launching stand. "She's going!" howled a woman on the beach. Down dropped the last of Big Annie's moorings. A man cried: "She's off!" All along the beach the chant picked up new voices, a soaring, surging chain reaction sent them into a recitative; "Go!" they yelled. "Go...Go...Go..." Big Annie lifted off smoothly, her twin range exhaust tails bright against the overcast. Up she shot, straight into the first cloud layer at 3,000 ft. as the shock wave, like a thousand backfires, rumbled up the beach and welled over the spectators, MacNabb roared into his head set: "She's still going! She's still going! She's out of sight, and she's still going!" Bursting through the low clouds, Big Annie dashed into view again for a second or two, then bored into the clouds at 8,000 ft., her course true, her engines in harmony. "Damn!" yelled a man falling from his perch to the sand. "She'll make it!" cried MacNabb wildly to an associate: "If you weren't so ugly, I'd kiss you!" [The first U.S. satellite, the Army's Explorer I, was launched into orbit in January 1958, to be followed by others in the series and by the Navy's Vanguard. Finally the Air Force put an entire Atlas ICBM into earth orbit.] (December 29, 1958) The red-coated Marine Band had just broken into the march strains of The Bay State Commandery, and President Eisenhower's 78 diplomatic guests were preparing to flow into the State Dining Room. Ike, in white tie, whispered to his naval aide to order the music stopped, stepped into the center of the East Room. "Ladies and gentlemen," he said, his face creased in smiles. "I have something interesting to announce. I have just been advised that a satellite is in orbit and that its weight is nearly 9,000 pounds." The crowd broke into applause. Even Communist Poland's ambassador, Romuald Spasowski, said, "Terrific, I am myself a physicist, and to put such a big load so high is a great achievement." Said Denmark's new ambassador, Count Gustav Knuth-Winterfeldt: "It was the best Christmas present we could have got." The news quickly flashed across the world: the Air Force's 85-ft., 8,600-lb. ICBM Atlas had been fired, not in a trajectory whose end was a watery South Atlantic target but into the skies. Its tape recording of President Eisenhower's greetings heralded the beginning of worldwide communications through outer space. Earlier U.S. satellites were fired in stages, dropped sections after burnout, and finally flung small instrumented payloads into orbit around the earth. But somehow there was greater impact in the fact that the body of the Atlas went up in one piece, was circling the globe as the U.S.'s biggest satellite, its weight easily comparable to the heaviest the Russians have put up so far. Moreover, the Atlas needed no extra rocket stages to help it change course and move into orbit (as other satellites do); the course was directed from the ground. Said one Atlas man happily: "We steered it into orbit." The day after his dramatic announcement of success, the President hurried into Press Secretary Hagerty's office to listen with newsmen to a playback of his taped message. Ike's amazement was written all over his face as he sat in Hagerty's chair, cocked his ear toward the loudspeaker, heard the eerie sound of his voice coming from 400 miles above the earth. Turning to the reporters, he said: "That's one of the astounding things again in this age of invention. Maybe the next thing they'll do is televise pictures down here." [Meanwhile, the U.S. had been searching for ways to respond to the March 1958 suspension of nuclear testing by the Soviets without jeopardizing American security. A committee of scientists concluded that "rogue-proof" nuclear test detection was feasible, and in July talks between the U.S. and the Soviet Union opened at Geneva. For the first time since World War II, the Soviets agreed to the principle of international inspection.] (September 1, 1958) Thirteen years and 113 announced nuclear and thermonuclear blasts after the first fateful mushroom cloud at Alamogordo, N. Mex., the U.S. committed itself to a grave decision. President Dwight Eisenhower, appearing before TV and newsreel cameras in Washington, announced that the U.S. was ready to suspend its nuclear-weapons tests for one year effective Oct. 31. The President attached two major conditions. He required that 1) the U.S.S.R. agree to begin political talks by Oct. 31, aimed at setting up a world network of posts equipped to detect nuclear explosions, presumably in Red China as well as the U.S.S.R., and 2) the U.S.S.R. refrain from resuming its own nuclear-weapons tests, which it unilaterally suspended last March. The President continued with terms for the more distant future. The U.S., he said, was ready to suspend tests on a year-to-year basis after Oct. 31, 1959, provided that 1) the world detection network is installed and working satisfactorily, and 2) progress is begin made in U.S.-U.S.S.R. negotiations on disarmament, such as stoppage of nuclear-weapons production. Said Ike: "As the U.S. has frequently made clear, the suspension of testing is not in itself a measure of disarmament. An agreement in this respect is significant if it leads to other and more substantial agreements. It is in this hope that the U.S. makes this proposal." [The talks adjourned in deadlock in December, but the following summer, the Soviets announced that they would not conduct further tests unless the U.S. did. The subsequent moratorium lasted until 1961. The next space achievement was also the Soviets': a rocket launch past earth orbit toward the moon.] (January 12, 1959) Streaking through space out of the gravitational pull of man's world, past the moon, toward an orbit around the sun last week went the most breathtaking new object of the century. It was the first manmade planet--a Russian rocket. "On January 2, 1959," Moscow radio proclaimed, "a cosmic rocket was launched toward the moon. The launching again demonstrates to the world the outstanding achievements of Soviet science and technology." The rocket, Moscow added. was a multi-stage rig that weighed 3,245 lbs., with a 796.5-lb. payload of instruments and pennants bearing the U.S.S.R. coat of arms. Its speed: 25,000 m.p.h. The rocket missed the moon by 4,660 miles--about the distance from Moscow to Manhattan. U.S. missilemen at the Pentagon and Cape Canaveral studied the figures, agreed that the Russians were ahead in terms of weight of payload, propulsion power, general rocket reliability. The U.S.S.R.'s rocket was also the first far-out Russian rocket detected by U.S. tracking systems. Whatever their secret launching-pad failures, the Russians apparently scored with the first rocket they got off the ground. [The U.S. followed suit in March, with a much smaller satellite. In May the U.S. scored a first, sending two monkeys into space and recovering them safely.] (June 8, 1959) The Jupiter take-off from Cape Canaveral last week was routine. The fat, 60-ft. ICBM rose from its pad, climbed through thin clouds, curved toward the southeast and vanished among the stars. No one was surprised; of the 20 Army Jupiters fired so far, only one has failed. But in the roomy nose cone rode an extraordinary cargo: two young female monkeys, Able and Baker. Inside the nose cone, Monkey Able was dressed in a space suit and strapped to a carefully shaped contour couch of fiber-glass plastic. She wore gauze and charcoal diapers for daintiness. Since the g-forces of launching are much less (15g) than those of hitting the atmosphere (38g), she was suspended face down so that the bed would support her when the nose cone plunged back toward the earth. The capsule, a 250-lb. cylinder 41 in. long and 18 in. in diameter, contained a heating and cooling system and provided a change of air every 30 seconds. Before Able's eyes was the light that would flash red, and close to her skinny fingers was the button that she had been trained to push. Monkey Baker, a graduate of the Naval Aviation School of Medicine at Pensacola, was a fluffy South American squirrel monkey weighing only 11 oz. Wearing a tiny helmet, she rode in a smaller cylindrical capsule and lay on a molded bed of silicone rubber covered for her comfort with a thin mattress of rubber foam. As the Jupiter with its living cargo soared off, its transmitters radioed back a sheaf of telemetered information. Fourteen electronic channels reported the symptoms of Monkey Able, including her muscular reactions, heart sounds, temperature and respiration. There were only two failures: her electrocardiograph failed to work; at the last minute, the button that she was supposed to push had been disconnected before launch because the scientist found that it interfered electrically with other apparatus. As medical men intently watched the graphs, Able's pulse quickened from a normal 140 beats per second to 175 during acceleration. But for Able's nine long minutes of weightlessness, her pulse was normal and steady. Under the 38-g stress of re-entry, it rose to 222--high, but within acceptable bounds. [A major strategic problem was emerging that was to trouble planners and politicians and become a campaign issue in the 1960 elections: the "missile gap."] (February 9, 1959) Looking ahead to the mid-1960s, when Minuteman and Polaris will account for most of the U.S.'s deterrent-retaliatory power, Administration planners are convinced that it would be wildly wasteful to build in the meantime a huge force of obsolescence-doomed Atlases and Titans to replace SAC bombers. So the Administration is partially leapfrogging the Atlas-Titan generation. During the early 1960s, the U.S. will continue to rely for much of its retaliatory power on SAC's manned bombers. Meanwhile, SAC will be kept updated, with B-58s and B-70s gradually replacing B-47s. So long as the U.S. can rely on SAC's destructive might, the ICBM gap of the early 1960s will not mean any gap in the U.S.'s retaliatory power. The missile gap, as Secretary McElroy argued, is no cause for alarm, much less panic. [The decade ended with two Soviet space spectaculars.] (September 21, 1959) The three-quarter moon rose over Europe last week as serene and remote as ever, but dropping faster and faster through its gravitational field was a small, alien object: a metal sphere blazoned with the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union. The world waited; crowds gathered in the streets of Moscow to watch the moon sailing coldly overhead. U.S. radio receivers were on the wrong side of the earth, but at Jodrell Bank the beeping continued while the moon climbed higher. As the predicted moment approached, the beeps wavered slightly. Then they stopped. In Moscow the radio stopped its program for an announcement. After an unexplained delay (perhaps for rechecking), the radio played a few bars of the International and the announcer said: "Attention, Moscow speaking. Today, the 14th of September, at 00:02:24, Moscow time, the second Soviet cosmic rocket reached the surface of the moon. It is the first time in history that a cosmic flight has been made from the earth to another celestial body." The Soviet moon rocket, with a last-stage weight of 3,342 lbs., treated against bacteria so as not to contaminate the surface of the moon, carried red pennants and a hammer-and-sickle emblem inscribed "The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 1959." (November 9, 1959) Just before midnight, Soviet TV viewers sat up and paid rapt attention. On the screen flashed the first pictures men had ever seen of the moon's hidden face. The Soviet's Lunik III had performed just as Russian space scientists predicted, in a display of engineering virtuosity that was the greatest achievement yet in man's exploration of space. Next day the Russians released a picture of Lunik III and a fairly detailed explanation of how it took its epoch-making pictures. Lunik III, a notably sophisticated mechanism, proved to be a top-shaped 614-lb. object incrusted with antennas and solar cells, and packed with instruments. As Lunik passed 4,000 miles below the moon's south side, the moon's gravitation tugged at it, pulling it upward (south to north) and behind the moon. This was as planned, the Russians said, so that when Lunik III returned to earth it would come closest to the Northern Hemisphere, where radio stations on Soviet territory could communicate with it to best advantage. The moon pictures released so far look fuzzy, but experts consider them extraordinarily good, considering the fantastic difficulty of getting them at all. To laymen, the moon's far side, long populated by storytellers with strange beasts and weird civilizations, looks disappointingly like its visible side. But astronomers find it surprisingly different. They point to the comparative lack of the big, roundish, dark "seas" that are so common on its known face. The area newly pictured shows only one really big sea, which the Russians named the Sea of Dreams. A smaller sea they named the Sea of Moscow, and to several craters they gave the names of Communist or Russian scientist heroes. </body> </article> </text>