The Arms Race and Command Economies since 1945 367their first hydrogen bomb only nine months after the United States in
November 1952 had used Eniwetok atoll in the Pacific for its first
experimental test of the fusion reaction.
Even though complex in construction, hydrogen warheads could
readily be made far lighter than the first clumsy uranium and plu
tonium bombs. This made rockets an obvious and preferred instru
ment for their delivery. No means of intercepting a speeding rocket
existed, and Germany’s bombardment of England by V-2s in 1944
had shown how effective such weapons could be. The Americans
accordingly put new urgency into rocket research and development,
beginning in the early 1950s; but the Russians started a good deal
sooner than the United States at a time when heavier atomic warheads
required larger and more powerful rockets to get off the ground.^3 As a
result, in October 1957 the Russians launched a rocket powerful
enough to put a small satellite—Sputnik—into orbit around the earth,
and in ensuing months sent larger and larger payloads after it into
space.^4
The Russian achievement left no doubt of their technical capacity to
drop atomic warheads anywhere on the face of the earth. American
rockets lagged behind in size and power until 1965. This did not mean
that American ability to deliver atomic warheads really fell short of
Russian capabilities, for United States bombers, stationed within easy
striking distance of the Soviet Union, together with newer submarine-
based missiles, capable of being launched from beneath the seas,
kept Russian cities under the same threat of annihilation that hung
over the people of the United States after 1958.
Americans were not comforted by knowing that their new vulnera
bility merely brought them to the level of their rivals. For generations
before Sputnik, the territory of the United States had been immune to
any real danger of foreign attack. As a result, the shock of discovering
that this was no longer the case and that Russians had outdistanced
America's own vaunted technical skill in at least one important field
- At the conclusion of World War II the United States organized a strategic airforce
and soon developed bases from which airplanes could carry atomic bombs to any part of
the USSR. For a decade thereafter, a strong vested interest in piloted planes as the
supreme deterrent inhibited American research and development of long-range
rockets. Cf. Edmund Beard, Developing the ICBM: A Study in Bureaucratic Politics (New
York, 1976). - The first Sputnik weighed 84 kilograms; a second, launched a month later, weighed
508 kilograms; and in 1965 the Russians put a payload of no less than 12,200 kilograms
into orbit. Cf. Charles S. Sheldon, Review of the Soviet Space Program with Comparative
United States Data (New York, 1968), pp. 47–49.