Thirteen Days of Atomigeddon 2: The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

[james_davis_nicoll]

“The deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because they are possible to find.” The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

As ever, corrections accepted but I won't be able to act on them until tonight.

Comments

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

You're overlooking the issue of rhetoric. Kennedy took a hardline stance during the campaign and in the early part of his administration, which forced Khrushchev to reciprocate to keep his own hardliners off his back. Americans have built up such a mythology around JFK that it's easy to forget how frightening his "missile gap" talk must have sounded to the Soviets, who knew full well that the Americans were already outproducing them.

[david wilford (from livejournal.com)]

No, Khrushchev was pushing for a nuclear missile buildup in hopes of being able to then reduce the size of the Soviet Union's conventional forces and then be able do more to improve the overall Soviet economy. Sputnik wasn't just a propaganda stunt, it was entirely part of the Soviet Union's nuclear ICBM program. The U.S. of course was stunned by Sputnik and started playing catch-up in a big way, and Eisenhower certainly fumed as Kennedy made his "missile gap" rhetoric work against Nixon, because Eisenhower didn't want it to be known how much ground the U.S. had made up during the last two years of his second term. Kennedy was doing what politicians do best, making hay about a fear of the Soviets that U.S. voters had. That rhetoric wasn't as worrisome to Khrushchev as you seem to believe it was, nor was Khrushchev worried by hardliners in his own party.