Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon(4)

At first, Americans marveled at the accomplishment, and the best part was that they could witness it for themselves. The Soviets provided radio frequencies on which Sputnik broadcast a beep every three-tenths of a second, along with the satellite’s overhead location. Anyone with a shortwave radio could listen to Sputnik. Anyone with a pair of binoculars (or good eyes) could see it, or more likely its carrier rocket, streaking overhead. Millions of Americans gathered outside or by their radios to take in this flash from the future.

But as Monday came, America’s weekend of wonderment gave way to darker realities.

The United States was the most technologically advanced nation in the world; twelve years earlier, it had helped end World War II in dramatic fashion when it used the nuclear bomb it developed in strikes against Japan. It should have been the first to put a satellite into orbit. Instead, on the same night that Sputnik launched, CBS aired the debut episode of Leave It to Beaver, a sitcom about a squeaky-clean family living in picket-fenced suburbia with all the modern conveniences. To many, it seemed America had been caught fat and happy—becoming Cleavers—while the Soviets had leaped ahead.

And who were the Soviets, anyway? To most Americans, they comprised a technologically backward people living in an all-gray country with a peasant economy and prewar tractors. Yet overnight, they’d made one of history’s great scientific breakthroughs. That changed the balance of power; anyone could see it.

“If the Russians can deliver a 184-pound ‘Moon’ into a predetermined pattern 560 miles out in space,” wrote the Chicago Daily News that Monday, “the day is not far distant when they could deliver a death-dealing warhead onto a predetermined target almost anywhere on the Earth’s surface.”

Stories like that whipped the nation into a frenzy. The pitch increased on Tuesday when it was learned that the Soviets had detonated a newly designed hydrogen bomb, one more powerful than any they’d ever tested. Already frightened, many Americans flew into a panic.

Five days after Sputnik’s launch, President Dwight Eisenhower, the legendary general and hero of World War II, gave a press conference in which he seemed uncharacteristically out of his depth when asked about the Soviet satellite. He spoke haltingly, sounding little like the man who, five years earlier, had said, “Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.” Texas senator Lyndon Baines Johnson was more direct about the threat posed by Sputnik. Soon, he said, “the Russians will be dropping bombs on us from space, like kids dropping rocks onto cars from freeway overpasses.” The nuclear physicist Edward Teller, considered to be the father of the hydrogen bomb, said on television that the United States had “lost a battle more important and greater than Pearl Harbor.” His warning was echoed by other experts as Sputnik continued to orbit overhead, passing over American airspace, impervious to gravity and democracy and all the fears of the greatest nation on Earth.



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The United States and the Soviet Union had been allies during World War II, but their cooperation began to collapse after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in 1945. The bomb was America’s effort to end the war in the Pacific Theater, but the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin saw it as more than that: To him, it was a sign of America’s intention to dominate the world. Just fourteen days after Hiroshima, Stalin issued a secret decree ordering the urgent development of Russia’s own nuclear weapon.

The idea seemed a pipe dream. Twenty-seven million Soviet citizens had died in the war, and the nation’s industries had been decimated. Cities and villages lay in ruin. People were left homeless, and food was scarce. An atomic bomb required cutting-edge technology and the marshaling of vast resources and great scientific minds. The Soviets could hardly build a good car.

But the Soviet Union still had the biggest army in the world. And it had proved itself able to sustain massive casualties in war. So American diplomats paid attention in 1946, when Stalin blamed World War II on capitalism and promised that the Soviet Union would overtake the West in science and technology. By now it was clear that good science made good weapons.

This was a new kind of conflict, one that would be fought not with bodies on a battlefield, but with propaganda and threats, military buildups, and the formation of alliances—a cold war. Perhaps most important, it would be a race to see which side could harness technology to achieve things that, until now, had seemed unimaginable.

In August 1949, the Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic bomb—three years sooner than American experts had believed possible. Memories of bodies burned at Hiroshima and piled at Auschwitz remained fresh in the American psyche. No one had to imagine what a mass annihilation looked like, or to wonder whether human beings were capable of inflicting it on each other—they remembered it all too well.

It was around this time that Americans learned to protect themselves—or at least try to survive—during a nuclear attack. In 1952, in schools across the country, a film featuring Bert the Turtle showed children how to “duck and cover” when they “saw the flash.” “We all know the atomic bomb is very dangerous,” the friendly narrator said over footage of children hiding under their desks. “Since it may be used against us, we must get ready for it.” By 1954, atomic bomb drills were being run throughout the country.