Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [154]
And yet Bissell’s triumph would be short-lived, as he was undone by the Bay of Pigs fiasco the following year. Begun under Eisenhower and executed under the new Kennedy administration, the botched attempt to topple the Cuban president Fidel Castro would prove even more embarrassing than the U-2 shoot-down. As the failed mission’s architect and primary planner, Bissell—along with his patron and boss, Allen Dulles—would be forced out by the newly elected president, who would soon find himself baptized by rocket fire and international crisis.
“Those friggin missiles,” as John F. Kennedy derisively referred to the Jupiters, finally caused Khrushchev to snap when they became operational in Turkey in late 1961. From their Turkish bases, they could hit military installations in the heart of the Soviet Union, effectively restoring the very same strategic imbalance that had prompted Moscow to build rockets in the first place. The net result was the Cuban missile crisis.
As it turned out, it would be a U-2, and not the top-secret Corona, that snapped the incriminating photographs of Soviet launchpad preparations on Castro’s island that would spark the most dangerous showdown of the cold war. For Khrushchev, the attempt to station intermediate-range rockets on Cuban soil in the autumn of 1962 was a desperate gambit to redress the R-7’s shortcomings. By placing smaller missiles within striking distance of America’s shores, he sought to buy time for Yangel’s R-16 to finish trials and go into mass production. The Soviet military, by then, had long switched its allegiance from Korolev’s R-7 to rival missile designs, but the R-16 had suffered a series of developmental setbacks, including a catastrophic explosion of Glushko’s acid propellant that claimed the lives of Marshal Nedelin and 112 other Soviet rocket scientists in 1960, when Nedelin disregarded Glushko’s advice and ordered repairs performed on a fully fueled missile without draining it first. Only after the R-16 was fully ready, Khrushchev reasoned, would the balance of power be restored and security reestablished. To achieve that balance, he would risk confrontation. But in Cuba, Khrushchev made the wrong bet, and it would cost him the throne.
In the missile crisis it was Khrushchev who blinked first, promising to withdraw the IRBMs from Cuba. And even though Kennedy secretly agreed to remove the offending Jupiters from Turkey in exchange for the Soviet pullback, Khrushchev’s days were numbered. In that sense, the R-7 was the vehicle through which Khrushchev’s career soared and sank. Sputnik’s glory cemented his grip on power. But when the R-7 proved a battlefield bust, and the missile foray into Cuba turned into a humiliating retreat, the resulting political wounds proved equally fatal. Rumblings of discontent started almost immediately in the Presidium. In 1963 they grew louder and bolder as Khrushchev’s position further weakened due to his disastrous agricultural experiments. The ambitious farming reforms he had stubbornly rammed through the reluctant Presidium in 1957—the cultivation of millions of acres of “virgin lands” in Siberia and central Asia and the tripling of livestock quotas to overtake the United States in meat and dairy production—had completely collapsed. Not only were the thin-soiled Siberian fields ill suited for annual planting, but the quota system for increased meat and milk supplies served only to bankrupt many collective farms. To meet Khrushchev’s unrealistic norms, wily farm bosses used funds allocated for machinery and buildings to buy cattle on the sly and then resold the animals to government agencies at a third of the price. The purchase and upkeep of tractors and combine harvesters were sacrificed for the paper gains, and the charade lasted just long enough to devastate the countryside.