Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [67]
The gun and money were mostly for effect, to make the pilots feel better about their chances of survival, which Allen Dulles privately estimated at one in a million. “We told Eisenhower that it was most unlikely that a pilot would survive,” Bissell recalled, “because the U-2 was a very light aircraft, more like a glider, and would disintegrate” if it were shot down. Only three bolts, for instance, connected the tail section to the fuselage. “Holy smokes, this thing is made out of toilet paper,” the test pilot Bob Ericson had exclaimed on first seeing the craft. During a training exercise in Germany, a U-2 had broken apart by simply flying into the turbulent wake of another jet. If anything ever went wrong, Eisenhower was assured, there would be no evidence of the intrusions. The president, however, had not been entirely convinced. “Well, boys,” he had said, “I believe the country needs this information, and I’m going to approve [the program]. But I’ll tell you one thing,” he added prophetically. “Some day one of these machines is going to be caught, and we are going to have a storm.”
Bissell, Eisenhower later recalled, had agreed with his assessment of the political dangers. But John Foster Dulles, ever the hawk, “laughingly” scoffed at their concerns. “If the Soviets ever capture one of these planes, I’m sure they’ll never admit to it,” he said haughtily. “To do so would make it necessary for them to admit also that for these years we have been carrying on flights over their territory while they had been helpless to do anything about the matter.”
Secretary Dulles’s overconfidence, and his policy of purposefully provoking the Soviets, would later earn scorn from historians, who would label him “reckless.” But on that day he carried the argument, as he often did. Eisenhower relied on his foreign policy adviser and trusted his judgment on international affairs, even if he had reservations about his frosty personality, as his diary entries made clear. Some said Ike was even a little intimidated or scared of Dulles, who was frequently so forceful with the mild-mannered president that Bissell initially wondered “who was really in charge” in the White House. But after observing the pair’s interactions for several years, Bissell came to the conclusion that Eisenhower really ran the show.
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Shortly before 5:00 AM in Lahore, E. K. Jones was “integrated” into a fully pressurized suit and began breathing pure oxygen for the hour prior to takeoff. He did this to lower the nitrogen level in his blood to avoid getting the bends, in much the same way deep-sea divers decompressed in special chambers before surfacing—only in reverse, as he would be climbing rather than descending. The pressurized suit Jones wore would keep his body from boiling and exploding at the altitude he would travel, a height where the air is so thin that atmospheric pressure drops to one-twenty-eighth that of sea level. Gases at such low-density atmospheres expand rapidly, and the boiling point of liquids falls to ninety-eight degrees, just below body temperature. Wernher von Braun had demonstrated this effect, known as Boyle’s law, for television viewers on one of his Disney programs. Explaining why astronauts would need pressurized suits to survive, he had shown training footage of a special chamber designed to simulate the vacuum of outer space. Inside the chamber was a beaker of water at