• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 521 0

nuclear bombs. What’s more, they were expensive; soldiers had to be clothed, fed, housed, and provided with costly trucks, tanks, and artillery whose role in a nuclear standoff was of limited or no value. Khrushchev could try to compete with the Americans by bulking up his aging fleet of World War II-era bombers, but it was becoming clear that he could not keep pace with the U.S. Air Force. Even if Khrushchev ramped up spending, he could not hope to match the new B-52 superbomber that Boeing was beginning to mass-produce. In heavy aviation, the Soviet Union had simply fallen too far behind to make the investment worthwhile.

In the high-stakes arms race, Khrushchev was a pauper playing at a rich’s man table. Given the vast financial gulf between America and the Soviet Union, he had to marshal his resources more carefully than Eisenhower, and he saw that missiles were the cheapest, most cost-effective way to stay in the game. Their costs were mostly up-front, in research and development. And Khrushchev felt that he would not need to produce them in significant numbers. That hadn’t been the case in World War II. Hitler, after all, had bet the Reich on the V-2, built thousands of them, and lost. But that was before the atomic age. Nuclear warheads dramatically changed the equation. Now you could defeat England with only five rockets and keep America at bay with a few dozen more. From a financial point of view, focusing on missiles made more sense than maintaining a huge standing army or sinking money into giant bomber fleets that rockets would soon render obsolete anyway.

And so Khrushchev was betting the farm on Korolev. He had slashed spending on conventional forces to free up funds for foodstuffs and housing, while he hoped that the Chief Designer’s missiles would provide the USSR with a shield against American bombers. Just how big a wager he was placing would stun the CIA, which in a 1958 report underscored “the striking re-allocation of expenditures within the [Soviet military] mission structure. The most dramatic examples are the 34% decline in expenditures for the ground mission, and the 127% increase for the strategic attack mission. . . . Increasing expenditures on strategic attack reflect the replacement of the manned bomber by long range missiles.”

Khrushchev, in short, was gambling that the Americans had put their money on the wrong weapons system.

• • •

“Well,” asked Khrushchev, “what else do you have to show us?” This was the moment Sergei Korolev had been waiting for; the moment he had prepared for ever since the day he was released from prison and sent to Germany to join Chertok and Glushko to uncover the secrets of Nazi missiles. (Chertok, alas, could not share in the triumph. He had been demoted from his post as NII-88 deputy director during one of Stalin’s anti-Semitic roundups. After Stalin’s death, Korolev eased Chertok back into a senior position at OKB-1, but his rank was not high enough to meet Presidium members.) Now NII-88’s most senior scientists stirred anxiously as Korolev prepared to unveil their collective masterpiece, the product of over a decade of research and millions of man-hours of dedicated work.

“We have seen the past and the present of Soviet rocketry,” said Korolev, leading his guests to a large double door, where a pair of crisply uniformed guards stood rigidly at attention. “This is the future.”

The doors swung dramatically open, and Sergei Khrushchev gasped. “I was amazed. I had never seen anything remotely like it, no one had,” he said, the excitement and wonder of that first glimpse still evident even after fifty years. Sergei and his father stepped into the top-secret inner room. The structure was brand-new, so spotless that everything shone, and its walls soared upward instead of lengthwise like the hangar they had just come from. These walls were constructed entirely of glass, and they had been painted white to allow light in but to keep prying eyes out. At the center of the gigantic atrium stood a rocket larger than Sergei Khrushchev had ever imagined. “It looked like