Taylor Dinerman: A Sputnik Moment?
[Taylor Dinerman is a senior editor at the Hudson Institute’s New York branch and co-author of the forthcoming Towards a Theory of Spacepower: Selected Essays, from National Defense University Press.]
Democrats should be careful when they invoke Sputnik. Their party’s response to the Soviet Union’s achievement may have helped win them three elections, in 1958, 1960, and 1962, but it also helped bring about the Cuban missile crisis and durably poisoned the political atmosphere around national-security issues.
After Sputnik was launched on Oct. 4, 1957, President Eisenhower reacted calmly; he knew that by not complaining about the overflight of U.S. territory by the Soviet spacecraft, he was setting a precedent. He understood the significance of Sputnik in large part because in 1953, almost immediately after taking office, he had ordered work to begin on America’s first spy satellite, the WS-117. As the Russians were basking in the glow of their space triumph, Deputy Secretary of Defense Donald Quarles said that the Soviets “might have done us a good turn unintentionally, in establishing the concept of international freedom of space.” Three years later, when the first U.S. spy satellites successfully delivered pictures from deep inside the USSR, no one in Moscow denounced the Americans for violations of the sacred airspace of Mother Russia. The U.S. no longer needed to fly U-2 missions in order to look inside their borders.
It is hard to imagine today what a huge advantage totalitarian states had in the pre-Sputnik era. They were closed societies, allowing the rest of the world to see only a carefully molded image of military strength, political regimentation, and economic success. They were aided in this by Western intellectuals, journalists, and celebrities such as George Bernard Shaw, Walter Duranty, and Charles Lindbergh. From Hitler’s march into the Rhineland in 1936 to the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, Western governments had to estimate the strength of their enemies in a fog of ignorance. Spy satellites dispersed that fog. Totalitarian power became a lot less total....
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Democrats should be careful when they invoke Sputnik. Their party’s response to the Soviet Union’s achievement may have helped win them three elections, in 1958, 1960, and 1962, but it also helped bring about the Cuban missile crisis and durably poisoned the political atmosphere around national-security issues.
After Sputnik was launched on Oct. 4, 1957, President Eisenhower reacted calmly; he knew that by not complaining about the overflight of U.S. territory by the Soviet spacecraft, he was setting a precedent. He understood the significance of Sputnik in large part because in 1953, almost immediately after taking office, he had ordered work to begin on America’s first spy satellite, the WS-117. As the Russians were basking in the glow of their space triumph, Deputy Secretary of Defense Donald Quarles said that the Soviets “might have done us a good turn unintentionally, in establishing the concept of international freedom of space.” Three years later, when the first U.S. spy satellites successfully delivered pictures from deep inside the USSR, no one in Moscow denounced the Americans for violations of the sacred airspace of Mother Russia. The U.S. no longer needed to fly U-2 missions in order to look inside their borders.
It is hard to imagine today what a huge advantage totalitarian states had in the pre-Sputnik era. They were closed societies, allowing the rest of the world to see only a carefully molded image of military strength, political regimentation, and economic success. They were aided in this by Western intellectuals, journalists, and celebrities such as George Bernard Shaw, Walter Duranty, and Charles Lindbergh. From Hitler’s march into the Rhineland in 1936 to the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, Western governments had to estimate the strength of their enemies in a fog of ignorance. Spy satellites dispersed that fog. Totalitarian power became a lot less total....