Chapter Four
The Missile Gap
“We have got to get tough with the Russians. We have got to teach them how to behave.”
—President Harry S. Truman, April 1945
The year of 1960 was a presidential election year in America. Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower had served two terms as president, and his incumbent vice president, Richard Nixon, stood against Democrat John F. Kennedy. The balance of nuclear power was a major issue during the election with Kennedy claiming that the Eisenhower administration had allowed the Soviet Union to overtake America in the production of nuclear missiles. Kennedy contended that this imbalance, which came to be known as the missile gap, was dangerous, and he pledged to increase American production and deployment of ICBMs if he was elected.
The controversy about the missile gap began in 1957 with a U.S. intelligence report, which suggested that by 1965 (this was later revised to 1961) the Soviet Union might be producing as many as 500 new ICBMs each year. During the same period, it was estimated that the United States would produce around 70 new ICBMs. This, the report claimed, would lead to a dangerous gap between
the number of American nuclear missiles and the number of Russian nuclear missiles. In truth, the report grossly overestimated Soviet ICBM production capacity, something that President Eisenhower knew but could not publically announce.
American Lockheed U-2 spy planes were regularly performing clandestine overflights of the Soviet Union, and these provided the president with detailed information about just how many ICBMs the Russians had. Eisenhower knew that there was indeed a missile gap, but it was in America’s favor, and it would take many years for Russia to even catch up; in 1962, Russia had just 36 ICBMs compared to over 200 American ICBMs. However, Eisenhower could only announce this by admitting the existence of the U-2 program and confessing that American aircraft had been conducting illegal overflights of Soviet territory.
Due to the need to maintain the secrecy of the U-2 program, Eisenhower and Nixon were therefore unable to refute Kennedy’s claim about a missile gap, even though they knew this to be untrue. When John F. Kennedy won the presidential election, he was also given access to information about Soviet ICBMs and must therefore have realized that his claims during the election had been mistaken. However, just like Eisenhower before him, he couldn’t publically admit this and found himself in office on a pledge to push the production and deployment of ICBMs even though he now knew that this wasn’t a military necessity
.
In terms of the location of ICBMs, America already had a distinct advantage over the Soviet Union. The few Russian ICBMs were all located within the borders of the Soviet Union, far distant from targets in America. A secret CIA report produced in the early 1960s claimed that none of the Russian ICBMs had the range to reach American cities. Russia did have bombers capable of dropping nuclear bombs on the United States, but these were much easier to intercept than supersonic missiles.
The United States, however, had in 1960 and under the Eisenhower administration placed a number of Thor Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBMs) in the United Kingdom and West Germany where they could quickly reach the main Russian cities including Moscow and Leningrad. The Thor missiles were equipped with nuclear warheads, and their placement in Europe was a source of serious concern to the Russians.
Most Americans believed in the missile gap and feared that the United States was falling behind the Soviet Union in terms of nuclear capability. This unease was reinforced when, in April 1961, Russia put the first man in space. This seemed to confirm the feeling that Soviet technology was ahead of U.S. technology and left Americans feeling even more vulnerable. This wasn’t true—the Soviets placed the first man in space by ignoring potential risks while the more cautious Americans took longer because they insisted on ensuring the safety of astronauts before sending them outside the earth’s atmosphere.
Despite the hysterical political rhetoric of the 1960 American presidential election, America had not fallen
behind Russia in terms of nuclear weapons or technology in the early 1960s. The opposite was true—by the time that President John F. Kennedy took office in early 1961, the United States had more nuclear weapons of every type and more delivery platforms located closer to the Soviet Union. In the early 1960s, there was indeed a missile gap—but it was a gap between the Americans in the lead and the Russians lagging far behind.
Kennedy came to understand this when he took power, but he had been elected on a pledge to strengthen America’s nuclear deterrent and to close what he now knew was an imaginary missile gap. Kennedy was trapped into a course of U.S. nuclear proliferation that he knew wasn’t necessary or even wise.