Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [116]
“They are well provided for,” Khrushchev said of his nameless missile experts. Their identities, he regretted, had to remain secret for national security reasons. But one day, he vowed, “we shall erect a monument in honor of those who created the rocket and Sputnik and shall inscribe their glorious names in letters of gold so that they will be known to future generations.”
For now, they would have to make do with medals they could not wear publicly. In addition to the Order of Lenin and Hero of Socialist Labor awarded to all those involved with PS-1, Korolev received an honorary doctorate and was elevated from corresponding to full member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Those accolades, however, were fairly meaningless. His chief reward came with his October 10 summons to the Kremlin—and the visit’s tacit recognition of his admission into Khrushchev’s inner circle of court favorites. “Our most brilliant missile designer,” Khrushchev raved, noting that other rocket designers “could not hold a candle to Sergei Pavlovich Korolev.” That status would confer on the Chief Designer a rare and privileged position, and the ability to cut through red tape and circumvent bureaucratic hurdles on his future ventures. Henceforth, he would have a direct line to the Soviet Union’s sole decision maker and could bypass the sort of annoying obstacles that the R-7 State Commission had thrown in his way prior to Sputnik’s launch.
While Korolev knew he could not take public credit for Sputnik, he was hardly blind to the considerable political capital he had earned with Khrushchev. The Soviet leader was making so much hay from his satellite that he would be hard-pressed to deny him any reasonable requests—and Korolev was not the sort of person to shy away from pressing his advantage. Neither, of course, was Khrushchev, which made them an ideally suited pair.
The first secretary might have been slow recognizing the propaganda value of the hand Korolev had dealt him, but once he had belatedly realized what kind of cards he held, he had wasted no time capitalizing on his windfall. He had already summoned James Reston, the New York Times bureau chief, to his Kremlin office so he could communicate directly to the American people. “When we announced the successful testing of an intercontinental rocket,” Khrushchev told Reston, “some American statesmen did not believe us.” The Soviet leader was referring to Charlie Wilson’s famously dismissive comments on the R-7, perhaps even to Eisenhower’s veiled skepticism. “The Soviet Union, they claimed, was saying it had something it did not really have,” Khrushchev went on, revealing a glimpse of his bruised ego. “Now that we have successfully launched an earth satellite, only technically ignorant people can doubt this.”
The Americans had also laughed, Khrushchev continued in this wounded vein, when the Soviet Union had announced its intention to launch a satellite. Sputnik was up, he chortled, and where was the American satellite—the one the size of a grapefruit? “If necessary, we can double the weight of the satellite,” he boasted, adding that the ICBM it rode on was “fully perfected” and could strike anywhere in the world. What’s more, Khrushchev vowed, growing overly animated as he often did when discussing sensitive subjects, the R-7 would soon go into mass production, and ICBMs would roll out of Russian factories “like sausages.”
The tirade, duly relayed in all its frightening implications to alarmed American readers, had not been just an outburst of pent-up frustration or even a manifestation of Khrushchev’s notorious inferiority complex. It had been a coldly calculated feint, a bluff designed to deflect attention away from the fact the Soviets were discovering that the R-7 had serious limitations as a so-called ultimate weapon. “Initially, Father believed the mere existence of an ICBM would deter the Americans,” his son explained. But the assumptions behind that doctrine had been shattered during the R-7 tests, when Marshal Nedelin and the military discovered how