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States,” Khrushchev later conceded, and was “reliable neither as a defensive nor offensive weapon.” The very qualities that made it so adept at hurling large payloads into orbit rendered it almost useless as a fast-strike strategic weapon. It was just too big and unwieldy for war. It couldn’t be hidden in silos, moved on mobile launchers, or adequately protected. It took too long to fuel, and the huge infrastructure it required made too inviting a target. Khrushchev exaggerated somewhat when he boasted that his factories would roll out R-7s like sausages. In the end, only seven were ever deployed, and only four launchpads were built capable of handling the mammoth missile, which meant that Moscow could realistically depend on getting off only four shots in a first-strike scenario. If the United States attacked first, only one or two of the big missiles might be fired in time. Or possibly none. Whichever the case, the R-7 would not keep America at bay. As a security shield, it was a failure.

Ultimately, the R-7 cost Russia its missile lead because Moscow had to go back to the drawing board to develop an entirely new ICBM. In that regard, Korolev’s ploy to distract Khrushchev from the R-7’s failings by launching satellites worked all too well. By the time the Soviet leader fully realized that he did not have a reliable intercontinental rocket, the United States was pumping billions of dollars into its neglected missile programs because of the Sputnik scare, rapidly making up the lost ground. Khrushchev’s bluff ended up backfiring. When Dwight Eisenhower left office in January 1961, the United States had 160 operational Atlas ICBMs and nearly one hundred Thor and Jupiter IRBMs stationed in Europe to Moscow’s meager reserve of four vulnerable R-7s. Ironically, the additional Jupiters that were produced to mollify Lyndon Johnson and the jittery American public after the Sputnik scare now haunted Washington. “It would have been better to dump them in the sea than dump them on our allies,” Ike later commented. But the need to find a home for the superfluous missiles preoccupied Washington, exasperating superpower tensions. Great Britain had the Thors, which could hit only the Warsaw Pact countries and the westernmost parts of European Russia. But no frontline NATO allies wanted the Jupiters. In the end, Italy and Turkey reluctantly agreed to accept them in late 1959, and since they were geographically closer to Soviet borders, the Kremlin reacted furiously. “How would you like it if we had bases in Mexico and Canada?” fumed Khrushchev, angrily denouncing the deployment.

Tensions escalated further still, six months later, on May 1, 1960, when a U-2 was finally shot down over Soviet territory. Eisenhower, who was playing golf that day, as he had on the day of the very first U-2 mission four years earlier, would initially deny the incident, presuming that the pilot was dead and that the fragile aircraft had disintegrated, leaving little incriminating evidence. But as the Soviets kept pressing the issue, on May 5 the State Department would be forced to concede that a “civilian pilot of a weather-research plane” had indeed experienced problems with his oxygen supply over Turkey. “It is entirely possible that having a failure in the oxygen equipment, which would result in the pilot losing consciousness,” the statement coyly reasoned, “the plane continued on automatic pilot for a considerable distance and accidentally violated Soviet airspace.” A few days later, Washington would be further forced to eat its words when a beaming Khrushchev produced the CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers and the U-2’s intact spy gear at an international press conference.

The incident caught Eisenhower in the devastatingly embarrassing lie that he had long predicted and feared, and spelled the end of manned reconnaissance flights into Russia. But just a few months later, on the same day that a Moscow court convicted Francis Gary Powers of spying, a new era of robotic, outer-space espionage began. On August 19, 1960, Richard Bissell’s spy satellite successfully