Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [23]
Korolev stood aside and savored the moment. The rulers of the Soviet empire, among the most ruthless and powerful men on the planet, were frozen with awe. They had stopped dead in their tracks, reduced momentarily to the status of mere mortals. “Father later told me that he was simply numb, intimidated by the grandeur of such an object created by human hands,” Sergei recalled.
“The R-7,” announced Korolev with theatrical flair. The Presidium members recovered some of their composure and slowly circled the mammoth missile. In weight and mass it was ten times the size of the R-5, and almost twice as heavy as the Hindenburg Zeppelin, the largest aircraft ever built. Whereas the R-5 had one engine, the R-7 boasted five giant boosters that would consume 247 tons of fuel in four minutes. The nearly one million pounds of lift they generated could hurl the missile more than 5,000 miles at a speed of over 24,000 feet per second, four times faster and forty times farther than the original V-2.
The Presidium members drank this all in like a golden elixir. They poked their bald pates into the missile’s twenty burnished copper exhaust nozzles and craned their creaky old necks up at the inky black nose cone where the thermonuclear warhead would sit, a five-ton device that would have an explosive yield nearly one hundred times that of the atomic bomb the Americans had dropped on Hiroshima. The men of the Presidium shook their heads in wonder, whistled softly, and shot one another glances that brimmed with satisfaction. At last the Soviet Union would have its ultimate weapon, a rocket that could reach New York and Washington with the deadly force of all the combined ordnance dropped in the Second World War.
But try as they did, the Presidium members could not entirely fathom the full lethal potential of the R-7. Just how fast is 24,000 feet per second? Khrushchev tried to imagine.
“How long would it take to fly to Kiev?” he asked Korolev. When he was Stalin’s Ukrainian viceroy, Khrushchev had made the arduous three-hour air commute between Moscow and the Ukrainian capital several times a week in his old Douglass.
“Maybe a minute,” Korolev replied.
Khrushchev whistled appreciatively. Bulganin stroked his goatee. That meant the R-7 could reach the United States in less than half an hour. Even if the radar stations the Americans had built in Norway, Turkey, and Iran picked up the launch, they would not have enough time to react, to scramble the Strategic Air Command or evacuate their cities. The R-7 really could make all the difference, change the entire security dynamic—if it worked. And that would not be known until later that year, when testing could begin.
“Why is the rocket tapered in the middle?” Molotov asked, interrupting Khrushchev’s train of thought. The R-7 had a slightly hourglass-like shape because the four big boosters strapped around the central core flared out like a skirt. Korolev began to explain that the narrow midriff was necessary for the strapped-on engines to attach and jettison properly, but Khrushchev snapped impatiently: “Why do you ask such stupid questions? You don’t understand anything about these technical matters. Leave them to the experts.”
Molotov shrank back at the public rebuke but said nothing. There was a time when Khrushchev would never have dared to humiliate him so openly, when Khrushchev had fawned over him and genuinely admired him. But now the upstart was putting on airs, interfering in foreign affairs—even though he had never traveled abroad until after Stalin’s death. Once, when they had been coconspirators, Khrushchev had known his place. But now he was becoming impossible, an expert on everything. Behind his back Molotov called Khrushchev a “smalltime cattle dealer. Without a doubt a man of little culture. A cattle trader. A man who sells livestock.” Khrushchev, on the other hand, derided the old diplomat as a geriatric Stalinist relic. “Their relations had become tense,” Sergei Khrushchev recalled, “especially after the secret speech.”
Like Kaganovich, Molotov