Russia taking the lead

The race is getting interesting

Russia winning a very literal race 

Russians getting ahead:

·     October 4^th1957 Sputnik is launched, the world’s first man-made satellite 

·     Two months earlier they had made the first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM)

·     Eisenhower was angry and worried 

·     As a response the US set up medium-range ballistic missiles in Italy and Turkey these were no match 

·     The Russians also lied and said that their GDP was nearly twice that of the Americans 

·     The pressure on Eisenhower was building, but he refused to panic 

·     The Gaither Report by H. Rowan Gaither outlined how the Soviet GNP was increasing far faster than the US and that Russian spending on the armed forces and heavy industry was the same as the Americans by 1959

·     The Soviets may have been able to launch 100 ICMBs carrying megaton-sized nuclear warheads 

The Gaither Report:

The best I can do is $40,000,068.96

·     Similar to NSC-68

·     Recommended much improved defence spending 

·     Suggests fallout shelters to be built on a major scale 

·     Improvements in air defence 

·     Increase in offensive power 

·     Missile development 

·     Reorganising the Pentagon 

·     Increased defence spending to $48bn 

·     Eisenhower said no and kept the defence budget at $40bn 

·     He rejected the demands for fallout shelters 

·     He increased the conventional war capability and the number of tactical air wings from active duty 

·     Speed up the ballistic-missile program 

·     Congress appropriated more funds for the ICBM and Polaris missile 

Why was Eisenhower so stingy?

·     In 1956 the CIA used U-2 bombers, specially built high-altitude plans, to fly over the USSR and take photographs which proved that the Russian’s had been lying about their military capabilities 

·     Khrushchev knew these were happening but didn’t have plans that could reach that altitude to take them down

·     Eisenhower didn’t make a statement about the Soviet weakness and as a result Khrushchev respected him 

·     However, it did also prove that Eisenhower is a man of moderation 

·     Eisenhower had accepted that neither of them could win the arms race as neither of them wanted nuclear war 

·     The events in Lebanon set ground rules for the cold war 

·     The soviets indicated that they would not interfere with the West’s vital interests 

(Left to Right)
Eisenhower, Dulles, Khrushchev

Friends?

·     Eisenhower didn’t want an arms race and he was eager for détente

·     Negative signals from both sides showed they would keep the threshold of conflict high 

·     Eisenhower’s second term was a period of high bipolarity what the Big two wanted, they got 

·     But Eisenhower and Khrushchev were both struggling to control the hardliners in their own countries 

·     But Berlin was about to disrupt the road to détente