Missile gap

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The missile gap was the perceived discrepancy between the number and power of the weapons in the USSR and U.S. ballistic missile arsenals during the Cold War due to exaggerated estimates by the Gaither Committee in 1957 and United States Air Force (USAF) in the early 1960's.

[edit] Introduction

The Soviet launch of Sputnik 1 on the 4 October 1957 highlighted the technological achievements of the Soviets and sparked some worrying questions for politicians and the general public. Not only did it start the space race but also an arms race. The Oxford English Dictionary lists the first use of the term in 14 August 1958 by John F. Kennedy: "Our Nation could have afforded, and can afford now, the steps necessary to close the missile gap." The problem with the term is shown in the dictionary's next quote, merely four years later, from the Listener, 19 April 1962: "The passages on the 'missile gap' are a little dated, since Mr Kennedy has now told us that it scarcely ever existed."

Kennedy was particularly connected to the phrase as he used it frequently during the 1960 American presidential election campaign to attack the Republicans for their supposed complacency on the subject of Russian Intercontinental Ballistic Missles (ICBMs). Both countries had been developing missile technologies since World War II often with the assistance of German scientists gained as a result of initiatives such as Operation Paperclip. The Russian launch of Sputnik 1 was simply the most obvious use of the missile technology compared to the stocks of military missiles both sides already had. The Russians also had concentrated mainly on larger, long distance ICBMs more suited for deployment to space whereas the Americans possessed many more smaller, short-range IRBMs. These were often deployed in Europe closer to Russia than the Russians could manage to get to the continental United States.

Beginning with the collection of photo-intelligence by U-2 overflights of the Soviet Union in 1956, the Eisenhower administration had increasing hard evidence that claims of a missile gap favoring the Soviet Union were false. However, fearing that public disclosure of this evidence would jeopardize the secret U-2 flights, Eisenhower elected not to directly refute the missile gap claims by opponents, including Kennedy during the 1960 campaign, by publicly citing the evidence from the U-2 overflights.

Moreover, Eisenhower was concerned that any direct public proof that the United States held vast superiority in numbers of missiles over the Soviets would publicly humiliate the Soviets by emphasizing their weakness and thus provoke them to behave more aggressively. Consequently, Eisenhower was frustrated by what he conclusively knew to be Kennedy's erroneous claims that the United States was behind the Soviet Union in number of missiles. But knowing the truth that America was substantially ahead in missiles, and confident that Americans would not believe that a professional soldier like him would ever leave America vulnerable to an enemy, Eisenhower chose not to publicly refute Kennedy.

Later evidence has emerged that one consequence of Kennedy pushing the false idea that America was behind the Soviets in a missile gap was that Soviet premier Nikita Kruschev and senior Soviet military figures began to believe that Kennedy was a dangerous extremist who, with the American military, was seeking to plant the idea of a Soviet first-strike capability to justify a pre-emptive American attack. This belief about Kennedy as a militarist was reinforced in Soviet minds by the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 and led to the Soviets placing nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962.

Warnings and calls to address imbalances between the fighting capabilities of two forces are not new, a "bomber gap" had exercised political concerns a few years previously. What was different about the missile gap was the fear that a distant country could strike without warning from far away with little damage to themselves. Concerns about missile gaps and similar fears, such as Nuclear proliferation, continue, with most recently the aggressive missile testing between India and Pakistan.

[edit] Popular Culture

The whole idea of a missile gap was parodied in the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb in which a Doomsday Machine is built by the Soviets because they had read in the New York Times that the U.S. was working along similar lines and wanted to avoid a "Doomsday Gap." Also in the movie, the President of the United States is warned against allowing a "mine shaft gap" to develop. Not a new technical development but a place to hide when the bombs start falling.