Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [73]
A few days later, US spy planes photographed Soviet missiles in secret bases on Cuba, and public attention in that terrifying autumn of 1962 turned from space to the very real prospect of global nuclear war – not as some dim and distant prospect but as a horror that might be unleashed at any moment. President Kennedy initiated a naval blockade of all Soviet shipping approaching Cuba. Given the stark alternatives – a formal US invasion of Cuba or an air strike against the missile bases – the blockade seemed the least dangerous of several extremely high-risk strategies available to him. As is now clear from recently released tapes of White House crisis meetings, Kennedy and his staff went to bed on the night of October 23 not knowing if they, or anyone else in the world, would be alive next morning. Kennedy and Khrushchev very nearly backed themselves into a corner from which they could not withdraw.
Boris Chertok, a senior rocket engineer, recalls in an interview with James Harford that another attempt to launch a Mars probe from Baikonur that fateful October was interrupted when the military ordered Chertok ‘to get the launch vehicle off the pad so they could replace it with an ICBM, because there was some kind of a national emergency. The military was using all the phone links, so I couldn’t get hold of Korolev, who was at home in Moscow ill with a cold. They told me I’d be court-marshalled if I didn’t move the Mars rocket away from the pad, and they began to check the systems on their missile. Only Korolev could have got through to Khrushchev to countermand these terrible instructions.’8
Chertok flew to Moscow and went to Korolev’s house, where the Chief Designer solved the problem with a quick call to the Kremlin. By a horrible irony, when the Mars probe was launched on October 24, right in the middle of the Cuban crisis, it blew up, causing the ultra-alert US Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) to suspect a nuclear attack. Fortunately, the BMEWS tracking computers got to grips with the situation within a few seconds, and a counterstrike was not initiated.
Another terrible irony: the catastrophic R-16 missile explosion at Baikonur on October 24, 1960, which killed 190 people, may have precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis. Quite apart from the vainglorious Marshal Nedelin, a significant number of skilled military missile engineers died that day, and the development of a credible intercontinental Soviet nuclear-strike capability was severely delayed by their loss. For the time being, US strategic targets could not be reached from within the Soviet Union. The one fully functioning ICBM available to Khrushchev was the Chief Designer’s R-7, which took too long to prepare for launch and was not available in sufficient numbers to pose much of a threat. The missiles despatched to Cuba were simpler and less powerful battlefield nuclear weapons: small, numerous, easy to launch, but capable only of short flights.
Once the Cuban crisis was over, Khrushchev may have thought it better to carry on playing harmless space games with the Americans rather than risk all-out nuclear confrontation on the ground. As far as can be judged, the next orbital propaganda coup seems mainly to have been his idea. He wanted Korolev to launch the kind of person no one had thought of before: a woman.
By 1962, up to 400 women candidates had been screened for a possible space flight. On February 16, five were selected for training. In keeping with Khrushchev’s orders, the women were chosen from the ranks of peasants and factory workers, rather than from specialist scientific or academic professions. The most suitable candidates were those who could combine humble origins with at least some kind