From the editor.
The history of the Cold War has yet to be written. Dozens of books and hundreds of articles are devoted to this phenomenon, and yet the Cold War remains in many ways a terra incognita, or, more precisely, a territory of myths. Documents are being declassified that make one look differently at seemingly well-known events - an example is the secret "Directive 59", signed by J. Carter in 1980 and first published in the fall of 2012. This directive proves that at the end of the era of "detente", the American military was ready to launch a massive nuclear strike against the Soviet armed forces in Europe, hoping to somehow avoid a total apocalypse.
Fortunately, this scenario was avoided. Ronald Reagan, who replaced Carter, announced the creation of the Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as Star Wars, and this well-calibrated bluff helped the United States crush its geopolitical rival, who could not withstand the burden of a new round of the arms race. Less well known is that the Strategic Defense Initiative of the 1980s had a predecessor, the SAGE air defense system, designed to protect America from a Soviet nuclear attack.
Terra America kicks off its series of publications on the little-explored pages of the Cold War with a large intellectual investigation by the writer Alexander Zorich on the SAGE air defense system and the Soviet "symmetric response" that resulted in the 1961 Cuban missile crisis.
Alexander Zorich is the pseudonym of the creative duet of Candidates of Philosophy Yana Botsman and Dmitry Gordevsky. The duo is known to the general reader primarily as the author of a number of science fiction and historical novels, including the epic chronicle Charles the Duke and the Roman Star (dedicated to Charles the Bold of Burgundy and the poet Ovid, respectively), the War Tomorrow trilogy and others. Also, the pen of A. Zorich belongs to the monograph "The Art of the Early Middle Ages" and several studies on the Great Patriotic War.
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For over 20 years now, discussions about the vicissitudes of the Cold War, the global military-political confrontation between NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries in the 1950s-1980s have not stopped in the domestic expert community, as well as among history buffs
It is significant that in the 2000s, grown-up representatives of the last generation of Soviet pioneers and the first generation of anti-Soviet scouts often perceive the subjects of the Soviet-American military confrontation in the context of the relatively close realities of the mid-to-late 1980s. And since those years were the peak of the development of Soviet military power and there was a reliable balance achieved in the 1970s in the field of strategic offensive weapons, then the entire Cold War as a whole is sometimes perceived through the prism of this Soviet-American parity. Which leads to rather strange, arbitrary, sometimes fantastic conclusions when analyzing the decisions of the Khrushchev era.
This article is intended to show how strong our enemy was in the 1950s-1960s, strong not only economically, but also intellectually, scientifically and technically. And to remind once again that in order to reach the level of "guaranteed mutual destruction" by the mid-1970s, that is, to the notorious nuclear missile parity, even under Khrushchev (and Khrushchev personally) had to take a number of difficult, dangerous, but fundamentally important decisions, which to modern pseudo-analysts seem "thoughtless" and even "absurd".
* * *
So Cold War, mid-1950s
The United States has an absolute superiority over the USSR in naval forces, decisive in the number of atomic warheads, and very serious in the quality and number of strategic bombers.
Let me remind you that in those years intercontinental ballistic missiles and long-range nuclear warheads for submarines had not yet been created. Therefore, heavy bombers with atomic bombs served as the basis of the strategic offensive potential. A very significant addition to them were bombers - carriers of tactical atomic bombs, deployed aboard numerous American aircraft carriers.
While the bombers-"strategists" B-36 Peacemaker and B-47 Stratojet [1], taking off from air bases in Great Britain, North Africa, the Near and Middle East, Japan, had to fly thousands of kilometers deep into the territory of the USSR and drop powerful thermonuclear bombs on the most important cities and industrial centers, lighter bombers AJ-2 Savage, A-3 Skywarrior and A-4 Skyhawk [2], leaving the decks of aircraft carriers, could strike throughout the periphery of the Soviet Union. Among others, cities of major military-economic importance fell under the blows of carrier-based aircraft: Leningrad, Tallinn, Riga, Vladivostok, Kaliningrad, Murmansk, Sevastopol, Odessa, Novorossiysk, Batumi and others.
Thus, as of the mid-late 1950s, the United States had every opportunity to deliver a massive and devastating nuclear strike against the USSR, which, if it did not lead to an instant collapse of the Soviet state, would make it extremely difficult to conduct a war in Europe and, more broadly, to provide organized resistance to NATO aggressors.
Of course, in the course of delivering this strike, the American Air Force would have suffered very serious losses. But a high price would be paid for achieving not tactical or operational, but strategic success. There is no doubt that the planners of the Third World War were willing to pay this price.
The only significant deterrent factor for the aggressor could be the threat of an effective retaliatory strike directly against the territory of the United States, against the most important political and economic centers of the country. Losing millions of our citizens in a matter of hours under a Soviet nuclear bombardment? The White House and the Pentagon were not ready for such a turn of affairs.
What was there in those years in the Soviet strategic nuclear arsenal?
In large numbers - obsolete four-engine piston bombers Tu-4 [3]. Alas, when basing within the borders of the USSR, the Tu-4, due to insufficient range, did not reach the main part of the United States.
The new, Tu-16 jet bombers [4] also did not have sufficient range to strike across the ocean or across the North Pole at key American centers.
Much more advanced, four-engine jet bombers 3M [5] began to enter service with the Soviet Air Force only in 1957. They could strike most facilities in the United States with heavy thermonuclear bombs, but Soviet industry was slow to build them.
The same applies to the new four-engine turboprop Tu-95 bombers [6] - they were quite suitable in order to nullify the price of real estate in Seattle or San Francisco for a long time, but their number could not be compared with the American B-47 armada (which over 2000 were produced during 1949-1957!).
Serial Soviet ballistic missiles of that period were suitable for strikes on European capitals, but they did not finish off the United States.
There were no aircraft carriers in the USSR Navy. And, accordingly, there was not even a ghostly hope of reaching the foe with the help of single or twin-engine strike aircraft.
There were very few cruise or ballistic missiles deployed aboard submarines. Although those that were there, they still posed some threat to coastal cities like New York and Washington.
Summing up, we can say that the Soviet Union could not deliver a truly crushing nuclear strike on the territory of the United States in the 1950s.
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However, it should be taken into account that military secrets were traditionally well guarded in the post-war USSR. American military analysts had to deal with very fragmentary information about Soviet strategic potential. Accordingly, in the United States, the Soviet military threat during the 1950s could be interpreted in the range from “not a single Soviet atomic bomb will fall on our territory” to “we may be subject to a serious strike, in which several hundred strategic bombers and a number of missiles will take part. from aboard submarines.
Of course, the low assessment of the Soviet military threat did not suit the most powerful military-industrial complex of the United States, and, let's be fair, it was contrary to the interests of national security. As a result, it was decided “optimistically” that the USSR was still capable of sending hundreds of “strategist” bombers of the Tu-95 and 3M level to the cities of the United States.
And since 7-10 years ago the direct military threat to the territory of the United States from the USSR was assessed in a completely different way (namely: it was close to zero due to the lack of not only adequate carriers, but also atomic warheads in noticeable quantities at the Soviets), the fact (albeit a virtual fact) plunged the American headquarters into despondency.
It turned out that all the military planning of the Third World War, in the center of which was the possibility of bombing Soviet industry and infrastructure with impunity, would have to be redrawn taking into account the possibility of a retaliatory strike directly on the territory of the United States. Especially, of course, the American political establishment was depressed - after 1945 it was not used to acting with its hands tied, and indeed with an eye on someone's foreign policy interests.
To keep a free hand for the next decade (1960s), the United States needed to create … SDI!
True, in those years the impenetrable strategic umbrella over the United States did not have a space component that was fashionable in the 1980s and was called not the Strategic Defense Initiative, but SAGE [7] (the transliteration adopted in Soviet literature is “Sage”). But substantively, it was precisely the strategic national air defense system, designed to repel a massive atomic strike on the territory of the United States.
And here, on the example of SAGE, the highest level of American scientific and military-industrial potential of the 1950s is perfectly visible. Also, SAGE can be called almost the first serious success of what much later began to be described by the ubiquitous term IT - Intellectual Technologies.
SAGE, as conceived by its creators, was supposed to represent a thoroughly innovative, cyclopean organism, consisting of means of detection, data transmission, decision-making centers and, finally, "executive bodies" in the form of batteries of missiles and supersonic unmanned interceptors.
Actually, the name of the project already indicates the innovativeness of the project: SAGE - Semi-Automatic Ground Environment. The disclosure of this abbreviation, which is strange for the Russian ear, literally means "Semi-automatic ground environment". An equivalent, that is, imprecise, but understandable to the Russian reader, the translation is something like this: "Semi-automatic computerized air defense control system."
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To understand the breadth of the idea of the creators of SAGE, one should recall how the most perfect for its time Moscow's strategic air defense system Berkut [8] looked like in those same years, designed to repel massive raids by American B-36 and B-47 bombers.
The "Berkut" system received preliminary target designation from the "Kama" all-round radar stations. Further, when enemy bombers entered the zone of responsibility of a specific air defense fire battalion armed with B-300 anti-aircraft missiles of the S-25 complex, the B-200 missile guidance radar was included in the case. She also performed the functions of tracking the target, and issued radio guidance commands on board the B-300 missile. That is, the B-300 missile itself was not homing (there were no calculating devices on board), but completely radio-controlled.
It is easy to see that, thus, the domestic system "Berkut" was highly dependent on the operation of the B-200 radar stations. Within the coverage of the radar field of the B-200 stations, which, roughly speaking, coincided with the Moscow region, the Berkut system ensured the destruction of enemy bombers, but outside it was completely powerless.
Once again: the "Berkut" system, very expensive and very perfect for its time, provided protection against atomic attacks from the bombers of Moscow and the Moscow region. But, unfortunately, it did not cover strategic objects in other regions of the European part of the USSR. This was due to both the insufficient range and flight speed of the B-300 missiles, and the modest range of the B-200 radar.
Accordingly, in order to cover Leningrad in a similar way, it was required to place around it, in turn, a B-200 radar and dozens of battalions with launchers of B-300 missiles. To cover Kiev - the same thing. To cover up the Baku region with its richest oil fields - the same thing, and so on.
The American analogue of the Berkut, the Nike-Ajax air defense system [9], had similar constructive and conceptual solutions. Covering its largest administrative and industrial centers, the United States was forced to produce Nike-Ajax and radars for them in huge quantities in order to create classic air defense rings, similar to the Soviet Berkut.
In other words, the entire strategic air defense of the 1950s, both in the USSR and in the United States, was focused on protecting an object or a group of objects located within a relatively compact zone (up to several hundred kilometers across). Outside such a zone, at best, the establishment of the very fact of movement of air targets was ensured, but their steady tracking from radar to radar was no longer provided and, moreover, not the guidance of anti-aircraft missiles at them.
By creating the SAGE system, American engineers decided to overcome the limitations of this approach.
The idea behind SAGE was to create a continuous coverage of the United States with a radar field. Information from the radars creating this continuous coverage had to flow to special data processing and control centers. The computers and other items of equipment installed in these centers, united by the common designation AN / FSQ-7 and manufactured by the more than well-known company today, IBM, provided the processing of the primary data stream from the radars. Air targets were allocated, classified, and set for continuous tracking. And most importantly, target distribution was carried out between specific fire weapons and the development of anticipated data for firing.
As a result, at the output, the computers of the AN / FSQ-7 system gave a completely clear blunder: which particular fire division (squadron, battery) should release so many missiles where exactly.
“This is all very good,” the attentive reader will say. - But what kind of missiles are we talking about? These AN / FSQ-7s of yours can find the optimal rendezvous point with a Soviet bomber anywhere a hundred miles from Washington over the Atlantic, or two hundred miles southeast of Seattle, over the Rocky Mountains. And how are we going to fire at targets at such a distance?"
Indeed. The maximum range of the Nike-Ajax missiles did not exceed 50 km. The highly sophisticated Nike-Hercules, which was just being developed in the mid-1950s, was supposed to fire a maximum of 140 km. It was an excellent result for those days! But if you calculate how many Nike-Hercules firing positions should be deployed to provide reliable air defense only on the US East Coast according to the above concept of continuous radar coverage of the SAGE system, we get huge numbers, ruinous even for the American economy.
That is why the unique unmanned aerial vehicle IM-99, which is part of the CIM-10 Bomarc complex [10], developed and built by Boeing, was born. In the future, we will simply call the IM-99 "Bomark", since this is a very common practice in non-specialized literature - to transfer the name of the complex to its main firing element, that is, to the rocket.
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What is a Bomark rocket? This is a stationary-based ultra-long-range anti-aircraft guided missile, which had extremely high flight performance for its time.
Range. "Bomark" modification A flew at a range of 450 kilometers (for comparison: from Moscow to Nizhny Novgorod - 430 km). "Bomark" modification B - for 800 kilometers!
From Washington to New York 360 km, from Moscow to Leningrad - 650 km. That is, Bomarc-B could theoretically start from Red Square and intercept the target over the Palace Embankment in St. Petersburg! And, starting from Manhattan, try to intercept the target over the White House, and then, in case of failure, return and hit the air target over the launch point!
Speed. Bomarc-A has Mach 2, 8 (950 m / s or 3420 km / h), Bomarc-B - 3, 2, Mach (1100 m / s or 3960 km / h). For comparison: the Soviet 17D rocket, created as part of the modernization of the S-75 air defense system and tested in 1961-1962, had a maximum speed of Mach 3.7, and an average operating speed of 820-860 m / s. Thus, "Bomarks" had speeds approximately equal to the most advanced experimental samples of Soviet anti-aircraft missiles of the first half of the 1960s, but at the same time showed an absolutely unprecedented flight range!
Combat load. Like all other heavy anti-aircraft missiles, the Bomarks were not designed for a direct hit on an intercepted target (it was impossible to solve such a problem for a number of technical reasons). Accordingly, in the usual equipment, the rocket carried a 180-kg fragmentation warhead, and in a special one, a 10-kt nuclear warhead, which, as is commonly believed, hit a Soviet bomber at a distance of up to 800 m. kg warhead was considered ineffective, and as a standard, the "Bomarkov-B" was left only atomic. This, however, is a standard solution for any US and USSR strategic air defense missiles, so the Bomarka nuclear warhead does not represent any particular breakthrough.
In 1955, the United States approved truly Napoleonic plans for the construction of a national air defense system.
It was planned to deploy 52 bases with 160 Bomark missiles on each. Thus, the number of "Bomarks" put into service was supposed to be 8320 units!
Considering the high characteristics of the CIM-10 Bomarc complex and the SAGE control system, and also taking into account that the Bomarks were to be supplemented in the air defense structure of the North American continent with numerous interceptor fighters, as well as the Nike-Ajax and Nike-Hercules air defense systems, it should be admitted that the American SDI of those years should have been a success. If we even multiply the size of the fleet of Soviet strategic bombers 3M and Tu-95 and assume that, say, in 1965, the USSR could send 500 such machines against the United States, we will get that for each of our aircraft the enemy has 16 pieces Bomarkov alone.
In general, it turned out that in the person of the SAGE air defense system, the Americans received an impenetrable heavenly shield, the presence of which nullifies all Soviet post-war achievements in the development of strategic bomber aviation and atomic weapons.
With one little caveat. An impenetrable shield for targets moving at subsonic or transonic speeds. Assuming the operating speeds of "Bomarkov-B" to be Mach 3, we can assume that a target with a speed of no more than Mach 0.8-0.95, namely, any bomber of the late 1950s capable of carrying atomic weapons, will be reliably intercepted, and most of the mass-produced cruise missiles of those years.
But if the speed of the attacking carrier of atomic weapons is Mach 2-3, a successful interception by the Bomark will become almost unbelievable.
If the target moves at speeds of the order of kilometers per second, that is, faster than Mach 3, then the Bomark missiles and the whole concept of their use can be considered completely useless. And America's heavenly shield turns into one huge donut hole …
* * *
And what are these targets that move at speeds of the order of kilometers per second?
Such in the 1950s were already well known - the warheads (warheads) of ballistic missiles on a downward trajectory. Having flown through the prescribed segment of the suborbital trajectory, the warhead of the ballistic missile passes the stratosphere in the opposite direction, from top to bottom, with great speed, and, despite some loss of speed from friction against the air, in the target area has a speed of about 2-3 km / s. That is, it surpasses the range of interception speeds of the "Bomark" with a margin!
Moreover, such ballistic missiles were not only created by that time, but were also produced in series of tens and hundreds of units. In the USA, they were "Jupiter" and "Thor" [11], in the USSR - R-5, R-12 and R-14 [12].
However, the flight range of all these products lay within 4 thousand km and from the territory of the USSR, all of the listed ballistic missiles did not reach America.
It turned out that we, in principle, have something to pierce the heavenly shield of the SAGE system, but only our stylet of ballistic missiles with their hypersonic warheads was short and did not reach the enemy.
Well, now let's remember that our would-be analysts are incriminating N. S. Khrushchev.
"Khrushchev destroyed the surface fleet of the USSR."
Well, first of all, there would be something to destroy. If the USSR had 10 aircraft carriers in 1956, and Khrushchev scrapped them, then, of course, yes, it would be a shame. However, we did not have a single aircraft carrier in the ranks and not a single one in the construction.
If the USSR fleet had 10 battleships in service, similar to the American Iowa or the British Vanguard [13], and Khrushchev turned them all into block ships and floating barracks, it would look barbaric. However, the USSR did not have a single even relatively new battleship either then or earlier.
But both the new battleship and the newest aircraft carrier - even with a super-fashionable nuclear power plant - did not carry on board a weapon capable of sufficiently effective impact on the US territory covered by the SAGE air defense system and armada of Bomark unmanned interceptors. Why? Because in those years on board aircraft carriers and battleships there were not and could not be fast enough supersonic carriers of nuclear weapons of at least medium range. The deck bombers flew relatively slowly. Serial supersonic sea-based cruise missiles with a flight range of at least 500-1000 km were also not created.
It turned out that for the solution of the main strategic task - an atomic strike on the territory of the United States - a surface fleet modern by the standards of the 1950s is completely useless!
Well, why then did it have to be built using enormous resources?..
What else is Khrushchev supposedly bad in the matter of military construction?
"Khrushchev suffered from rocket addiction."
What other "mania" could you have suffered in the face of SAGE?
Only a huge multistage ballistic missile, as shown by the famous Korolev's R-7 [14], can fly far enough to finish off the USA from the territory of the USSR, and, moreover, accelerate a warhead with an atomic warhead to hypersonic speeds, guaranteeing evasion of any SAGE system firepower. …
Naturally, both the R-7 and its close counterparts were cumbersome, vulnerable, very difficult to maintain, cost a lot of money, but only they, full-fledged intercontinental ballistic missiles, in terms of their combat qualities, promised in the next ten years the formation of a serious strike group capable of becoming truly dangerous to any facility throughout the United States.
Accordingly, although I myself am a flotophile myself and I am fascinated by visions of a huge Soviet surface fleet, mighty aircraft carriers and brilliant battleships plying the Central Atlantic abeam New York, I understand that for the not so impressive Soviet economy of those years, the question was tough: either an ICBM, or aircraft carriers. The Soviet political leadership made a decision in favor of ICBMs and, I think, was right. (Since, by the way, the strategic security of modern Russia in the face of the terrifying superiority of the United States in conventional weapons is guaranteed exclusively by the presence of combat-ready ICBMs, and not by anything else.)
* * *
And finally, the most interesting and controversial: the Cuban missile crisis
Let me remind you that as such, as a crisis, it happened in October 1962, but the fatal decisions were made in the USSR on May 24, 1962.
On that day, at an expanded meeting of the Politburo, it was decided to deliver several regiments of R-12 and R-14 medium-range ballistic missiles to Cuba and bring them into combat readiness. Together with them, a fairly impressive contingent of ground forces, air force and air defense was sent to Cuba to provide cover. But let's not dwell on the details, we will focus on the main thing: for the first time in history, the USSR decided to move a strike group of 40 launchers and 60 medium-range combat-ready missiles close to the US borders.
The group had an aggregate nuclear potential of 70 megatons in the first launch.
All this happened in the days when the United States had already deployed 9 Bomarkov bases (up to 400 interceptor missiles) and about 150 batteries of new Nike-Hercules air defense systems. That is, against the background of a rapid increase in the fire capabilities of the SAGE national air defense system.
When US intelligence revealed the deployment in Cuba of Soviet ballistic missiles capable of hitting targets in most of the United States, and from the most unexpected direction (the Americans built air defense with the expectation primarily of strikes from the north, northeast and northwest, but not from the south), the American elite, as well as President J. F. Kennedy, experienced a deep shock. Then they reacted very harshly: they declared a complete naval blockade of Cuba and began preparations for a massive invasion of the island. At the same time, the American Air Force and Navy aviation were preparing to strike at all launch positions and bases of Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba.
At the same time, an ultimatum was delivered to the Soviet leadership: to immediately remove the missiles from Cuba!
Actually, this situation, when the world was on the brink of war between the USA and the USSR, is called the Caribbean (or Cuban) missile crisis.
At the same time, all the literature on the Cuban missile crisis known to me [15] emphasizes that the R-12 and R-14 missiles were sent to Cuba as a Soviet symmetrical response to the deployment by the Americans of their medium-range ballistic missiles "Thor" and "Jupiter" in Turkey., Italy and Great Britain during 1960-1961.
This, quite possibly, is the purest truth, that is, the decision made by the Politburo itself, probably, was perceived as "America's response to the deployment of" Thors "and" Jupiters ".
But the American military and politicians were probably not shocked by the "answer" as such. And the complete asymmetry of such a response in their mind!
Imagine: the SAGE system is being built intensively. You live behind the impenetrable walls of Fortress America. The R-7 rockets that launched Sputnik and Gagarin into orbit are somewhere very far away, and most importantly, there are very few of them.
And all of a sudden, it turns out that the SAGE system, all its radars, computers, rocket batteries are a huge heap of scrap metal. Because the unsightly R-12 rocket, taking off from a patch of dry land between the plantations of Cuban sugar cane, is capable of delivering a warhead with a charge of two megatons to the dam in the lower Mississippi. And after the dam collapses, a giant wave will wash New Orleans into the Gulf of Mexico.
And it is impossible to prevent this.
That is, just yesterday, in your military planning, megaton bombs exploded over Kiev and Moscow, over Tallinn and Odessa.
And today it was suddenly discovered that something similar could explode over Miami.
And all your long-term efforts, all your objective technological, economic, organizational superiority are nothing.
What would a military man immediately want to do in such a situation?
To inflict a massive nuclear strike on all positions of the R-12 and R-14 missiles in Cuba. At the same time, for reliability, hit with atomic warheads not only at the reconnoitered, but also at the supposed points of deployment of Soviet missiles. All ports. In well-known army warehouses.
And since such actions would be tantamount to a declaration of war - to immediately inflict a massive atomic strike on Soviet troops and on Soviet strategic targets in Eastern Europe and the USSR.
That is, to start a full-fledged Third World War with the unlimited use of nuclear weapons. At the same time, it should begin by knocking out the most dangerous and relatively few Soviet missiles in Cuba and R-7 in the Baikonur area, and otherwise hope for the impenetrability of the SAGE air defense system.
Why didn't the Americans really do it?
From my point of view, the available analytical investigations of this circumstance do not give a clear and unambiguous answer to this question, and a simple answer to such a complex question is hardly possible. Personally, I believe that the human qualities of President Kennedy played a key role in preventing war.
And I do not mean at all any anomalous "kindness" or "softness" of this politician, since the specific traits of Kennedy's character are unknown to me. I just want to say that Kennedy's decision to conduct semi-official negotiations with the USSR (instead of inflicting a massive atomic strike) seems to me an essentially irrational fact, and not the result of any comprehensive and detailed analysis (or even more so as a product of some information operation allegedly successfully played out by the special services - as described in the memoirs of some of our scouts).
And how is it customary to evaluate the actions and decisions of N. S. Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis?
In general, negative. Say, Khrushchev took an unreasonable risk. He put the world on the brink of nuclear war.
But today, when already the Soviet censorship, it is possible to assess the purely military aspects of the confrontation in 1962. And, of course, most assessments show that then America could respond with twenty to each of our atomic attacks. Because, thanks to SAGE, it was able to prevent our bombers from reaching its territory, but hundreds of American "strategists" could work across the USSR quite successfully, possibly excluding the area of Moscow and the Moscow region covered by the Berkut system.
All this is, of course, true. And yet, in order to understand the actions of the then Soviet leadership, we must once again turn to the realities of 1945-1962. What did our generals and politicians see in front of them throughout the entire post-war period? America's continuous, unstoppable expansion. Construction of more and more bases, aircraft carriers, armada of heavy bombers. The deployment of ever new means of delivery of nuclear warheads in ever greater proximity to the borders of the USSR.
Let us repeat: all this happened continuously and unstoppably, on the basis of ever new stages of everyday military development. At the same time, no one was interested in the opinion of the USSR and did not ask us anything.
And the most unpleasant thing is that the USSR could not undertake any truly large-scale, effective countermeasures either in 1950, 1954, or 1956 … And the United States could start a massive atomic bombing any day, any minute.
It was these long-term circumstances that determined the political thinking of Khrushchev and his entourage.
And suddenly - a ray of hope - the flight of the Royal R-7.
Suddenly - the first regiments of missiles, moreover, quite combat-ready medium-range missiles, equipped with powerful nuclear warheads.
Suddenly - the success of the Cuban revolution.
Well, to top it all off, on April 12, 1961, the R-7 launches a spacecraft into orbit with Yuri Gagarin on board.
Expressed in modern import terms, a "window of opportunity" of hitherto unprecedented proportions has opened before the indulgent Soviet leadership. An opportunity arose to demonstrate to the United States the qualitatively increased strength of its state. If you like, it smelled like the birth of the superpower that the Soviet Union turned into in the 1970s-1980s.
Nikita Khrushchev was faced with a choice: to take advantage of the "window of opportunity" that had opened, or to continue sitting with folded hands, waiting for what other act of indirect aggression the United States would take after the deployment of medium-range missiles in Turkey and Western Europe.
NS. Khrushchev made his choice.
The Americans have shown that they are afraid of Soviet ballistic missiles to the point of seizures, since no "Bomarks" will save them from them. In Moscow, this did not go unnoticed, the conclusions were drawn and these conclusions determined the entire Soviet strategic military development.
In general, these conclusions are valid to this day. The USSR and its legal heir, Russia, do not build armada of strategic bombers, but have invested and are investing huge amounts of money in intercontinental ballistic missiles. The United States, for its part, is seeking to recreate the conceptual solutions of the SAGE at a new stage of technological progress, creating a new impenetrable shield of strategic missile defense.
We do not know what the coming day is preparing for us, but we can confidently say that yesterday, at least, was not marked by a global catastrophe in the form of a world nuclear war.
Let us treat the choice of N. S. Khrushchev with respect.
[1] More about the B-36 and B-47 bombers:
Chechin A., Okolelov N. B-47 Stratojet bomber. // "Wings of the Motherland", 2008, No. 2, p. 48-52; "Wings of the Motherland", 2008, No. 3, p. 43-48.
[2] About American attack carrier-based aircraft 1950-1962. described in the articles: Chechin A. The last of the deck piston. // "Model Designer", 1999, №5. Podolny E, Ilyin V. "Revolver" by Heinemann. Deck attack aircraft "Skyhawk". // "Wings of the Motherland", 1995, №3, p. 12-19.
[3] Tu-4: see Rigmant V. Long-range bomber Tu-4. // "Aviakollektsiya", 2008, №2.
[4] Tu-16: see Legendary Tu-16. // "Aviation and Time", 2001, № 1, p. 2.
[5] 3M: see https://www.airwar.ru/enc/bomber/3m.html Also: Podolny E. "Bison" did not go on the warpath … // Wings of the Motherland. - 1996 - No. 1.
[6] Tu-95: see
Also: Rigmant V. The birth of the Tu-95. // Aviation and Cosmonautics. - 2000 - No. 12.
[7] Military Publishing, 1966, 244 p. As far as the author of this article knows, the description of G. D. Krysenko is the most comprehensive source on all components of the SAGE system in Russian.
The monograph is available on the Internet:
[8] Air defense system "Berkut", aka "System S-25": Alperovich K. S. Rockets around Moscow. - Moscow: Military Publishing, 1995.-- 72 p. This book is on the Internet:
[9] SAM "Nike-Ajax" and the project "Nike" as a whole:
Morgan, Mark L., and Berhow, Mark A., Rings of Supersonic Steel. - Hole in the Head Press. - 2002. In Russian:
[10] SAM "Bomark":
In English, the following special edition is a valuable source for Beaumark and SAGE: Cornett, Lloyd H., Jr. and Mildred W. Johnson. A Handbook of Aerospace Defense Organization 1946-1980. - Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado: Office of History, Aerospace Defense Center. - 1980.
[11] American medium-range ballistic missiles "Jupiter" (PGM-19 Jupiter) and "Thor" (PGM-17 Thor) are described in the book:
Gibson, James N. Nuclear Weapons of the United States: An Illustrated History. - Atglen, Pennsylvania: Schiffer Publishing Ltd., 1996.-- 240 p.
Information about these missiles in Russian:
[12] Soviet medium-range ballistic missiles R-5, R-12 and R-14:
Karpenko A. V., Utkin A. F., Popov A. D. Domestic strategic missile systems. - St. Petersburg. - 1999.
[13] American Iowa (BB-61 Iowa; commissioned early 1943) and British Vanguard
