There is an excellent autobiography of General Bernard Schriever, who ran USAF missile programs…gives an excellent sense of what it took to do this work in a rapid time frame, rather than the swimming-in-glue mode typical to large bureaucracies: “A Fiery Peace in a Cold War,” Neal Sheehan. I reviewed it several years ago:

https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/24503.html

Thanks for the additional information on the US missile programs of the early 1950s. My father’s Army job in the late 1950s was making liquid oxygen for the missiles in West Germany (Bad Kreushnach (sic) and Mannheim). It was a useful skill, and his next posting was Ft. Belvoir, VA, making oxygen for the DeWitt US Army hospital. Childhood memories.

There are many films (videos) of US missile launch failures from the 1950s; risky business.

https://www.history.nasa.gov/sputnik/harford.html

Well, we “got” Werner von Braun.
Who’d the Soviets “get”?

According to the Russian rocket designer Boris Chertok, the genesis of the Sputnik project was that the Soviets were having great difficulty with doing ballistic missile reentry in a way that didn’t burn up the warhead on the way down. So, someone suggested: ‘Hey, if we put up a satellite, we don’t *need* to worry about reentry for that mission.”

Chertok’s memoir is very interesting:

https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/60780.html

US ballistic missile programs were already well underway when the Sputnik launch happened. Atlas got started in 1953 and flight testing began in 1956.

Thor..a non-intercontinental missile but still capable of reaching Moscow from the UK…started development in 1955 and was successfully flight tested in September 1957, ie just before the Sputnik launch.

I imagine that a lot of the public panic about Sputnik was based on people not understanding how much the US was already doing in the missile field…also, on the shock of finding out that the Russians weren’t as primitive as many had thought.

But we have been provoking the Roosians lately, just like when the U-2s were reading their newspapers.

Poor Vladimir nearly no one to defend him,

I’d bet that after WWII and Korea, when Ike was Pres. there was little public support for fighting the Soviets with conventional forces.

You’re absolutely right there; the quagmire in Korea was one of America’s costliest wars and also brought down Truman’s Presidency. Ike was elected in large part by promising to go to Korea to hammer out the peace and he did that. And of course the Western public has always had at best moderate appetite for directly fighting Soviet forces, as shown by the backlash to the interventions in the Russian Civil War and why Operation Unthinkable never got beyond a staff plan. Especially if it was a case of Western forces attacking the Soviets without provocation.

The issue of course is that it’s one thing to rule out going into conventional war willy-nilly, but one needs to be prepared for it to some degree. The fatal overfocus on the new Air Force and nuclear weapons predated Ike in Truman’s time and helped cause Korea to be so bloody, and it would be a major reason for the West’s growing weakness in the 1950s and especially 1960s.

Nor would the American public have supported freely using our nukes, when only we had them.

The problem is that US doctrine- particularly under Ike- essentially required “Massive Retaliation” or none at all for pretty much any issue, the sort of freely using the bombs you point out the US Public would not support. Stalin and his successors detected the gap as well as anyone and happily started a Conga Line right through it.

Plus, didn’t the Soviet’s wait until they had the bomb before they ramped up the brush wars?

That they did.

In war, the enemy gets a vote. And the Soviet’s ‘vote’ was to fight proxy wars with America, a kind of guerilla campaign.

Exactly. The problem is that this is something America’s immediate post-WWII Leadership was slow to grasp or at least slow to respond appreciably to, moreso in terms of military doctrine than diplomacy. It also shouldn’t have come as even the moderate surprise it seems to have, since this is exactly the sort of stuff the Comintern had been made for and Soviet leadership did throughout the Interwar period.

We beat the overt Soviet threat but ignored the March Through the Institutions. Naively assuming that in a free society, liberty would prevail over Marxism. Failing to grasp that “The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.”

Very true indeed. As it stands out it helped that we underestimated this in part because the Bolsheviks placed a premium on ideological conformity, and so were baffled and frustrated by the sort of mutation they had. They probably would’ve shot the likes of Marcuse and Foucault in the back of the head if they had to deal with them on their territory (and frankly the world would have been a better place for it), but so long as these nutjobs were mostly running amok in the West they were tolerable assets to be supported.

We got rid of the outright Communist system built by the Soviets but underestimated the risk of the Red Chinese, and the informal/heterodox Marxists among us.

“I do think Ike-as-President is sorely overrated at least from a Military standpoint. The “Pentomic” US Military and the gutted conventional forces seriously invited aggression.”

I’d bet that after WWII and Korea, when Ike was Pres. there was little public support for fighting the Soviets with conventional forces. Nor would the American public have supported freely using our nukes, when only we had them. Plus, didn’t the Soviet’s wait until they had the bomb before they ramped up the brush wars?

In war, the enemy gets a vote. And the Soviet’s ‘vote’ was to fight proxy wars with America, a kind of guerilla campaign.

We beat the overt Soviet threat but ignored the March Through the Institutions. Naively assuming that in a free society, liberty would prevail over Marxism. Failing to grasp that “The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.”

First, our adversaries realized they could operate below the threshold of nuclear retaliation. They responded by challenging the United States by means of “peoples’ wars” and insurgencies. Of course, “small wars” had been a part of conflict since time immemorial, but they became a staple of communist strategy during the 1950s and ’60s.

The truth is far darker. The Communists and affiliated groups (like Javanese/Indonesian Nationalists) began pinprick conventional wars or uprisings earlier, in the 1940s, hence why the second part of the decade was dominated by things like the Greek Civil War, the stirrings of the Indochinese Wars and a(n ultimately failed) attempt by North Korea to invade the South by infiltration rather than overt force, the Chinese Civil War, and so on. This is one reason why I do think Ike-as-President is sorely overrated at least from a Military standpoint. The “Pentomic” US Military and the gutted conventional forces seriously invited aggression.

What a lot of people do not realize- or rather would prefer not to realize- is that until MAYBE very late in the game- like Gorbachev- the Soviet leadership had zero interest in permanent peaceful co-existence. Up until at least the Cuban Missile Crisis, Soviet doctrine was always about preparing the field to be favorable enough to launch a conventional war of aggression in order to spread the worldwide revolution, and a world without nuclear weapons would almost certainly have already seen a WW3 with the Soviets trying to imitate Lenin in 1918 with a conventional attack all across the width of Europe.

We were very fortunate and skilled to prevent them from ever being comfortable enough.to do it. Now we need to reassess how we deal with the PRC, Russia, and above all Islamist crazies and NGOs who might not conventionally care about the “Will not survive” an exchange.