Anyone who survived the Cold War probably remembers the fear that, almost without warning, an endless rain of Soviet missiles and bombs could start and end the war. Even if your city hadn’t been hit, the number of nuclear weapons America and Russia would have traded would have ended the war. But there was a problem: the Soviet Union had a tiny fraction of the missiles it needed. The confusion can be attributed to an erroneous report.

In the early 1950s, rumors were growing that the Soviet Union was developing better ballistic missiles, massive weapons that took off, reached high altitude, and then fell on or near a specified target. The first ballistic missiles were used during World War II, and they were unguided and rudimentary weapons.

But the United States and Russia had captured as many German scientists as they could in the closing days of World War II, and the United States and the Soviet Union were each wary of what the other was doing with it. the co-opted scientists. If the Soviet Union focused on finding missiles, it could beat America in space, and it could get a massive missile arsenal that could deliver nuclear warheads by the dozen.

And then the Soviets launched a missile test, sending a ballistic missile 3,000 miles through Siberia and other Soviet territories.

Worried about the possibility of Soviet attacks, the president Dwight D. Eisenhower assembled a panel to try to determine how many nuclear warheads, bombs and ballistic missiles the Soviet Union might have, as well as how to defend against them. Two brilliant scientists led the research on the number of ballistic missiles.

Intercontinental ballistic missiles are a very inefficient way to deliver warheads, but they are also difficult to fight and you don’t have to risk the lives of your own troops to attack your enemy.

(National Museum of the US Air Force)

Herb York was part of the scientific director of the Livermore Laboratory, a nuclear research laboratory. And Jerome Weisner was scientific adviser to the president. They were both capable men, but they had to do their research with very little information.

They calculated the factory floor space that the Soviet Union had, then tried to calculate how many rockets they could build per year. But they didn’t know how much of the floor space at this factory was actually devoted to rocket production, whether sufficient amounts of material were being devoted to the cause, or how effective Soviet manufacturing methods were.

So York and Weisner put together a worst-case issue for the president. Basically, if the Soviets were as efficient as America at producing rockets, devoted most of their available factory space to the effort, and donated enough manpower and materials to the project, they could produce thousands of missiles in just a few years. It was at least one new missile per day, and potentially up to three to five missiles, each capable of destroying an American city.

Now it wasn’t a full stab in the dark. York and Weisner had looked at the output of Soviet factories, and there was a curious gap between America and the Soviet Union over the production of consumer goods and certain war materials. Basically, the Soviet factories were either drastically underproduced or produced something hidden from America.

And what America knew about Soviet rearmament after WWII indicated a nation preparing for war. They had quickly developed an arsenal of atomic and then nuclear bombs, produced hundreds of heavy bombers, then developed capable jet engines and rebuilt their air force for the age of jets, while producing thousands of radar systems, armored vehicles and tanks.

So if you thought the Soviet Union had a lot of unused factory space and wanted to create massive missile capability, you would probably assume it was going to produce in the thousands, just like it did with radar. and other capabilities.

Explosions like this, but in American cities. It is a problem.

(US Navy)

And the York and Weisner issues were included in the document Nuclear Age Deterrence Survival, better known as the Gaither Report in November 1957. It was supposed to be secret, but it quickly leaked, and the American people suddenly learned that the Soviets might already have hundreds of missiles with thousands on their way.

Oh, and Sputnik had just launched, so it was clear to the public that Soviet missile technology was ahead of the Americans. Eisenhower tried to downplay the report and may have comforted some people, but many others saw it as a sign that he was hiding American weakness.

And so the idea of ​​a “missile hole”, That the United States was far behind the Soviet Union in terms of technology and number of missiles. This triggered a short-lived panic followed by years of anxiety. He also stressed the importance of two other aspects of the Gaither report: deterrence through the US nuclear arsenal and survival through shelters and, later, civil defense.

America would dramatically increase its missile development and other aspects of its nuclear arsenal, seeking to bridge the gap between the Eisenhowers and the Kennedy administrations. But, under Kennedy, the United States would learn from improved satellite and aerial imagery that the missile gap was in fact going the other way.

The American arsenal was massively larger than that of the Soviets. At the time of the Gaither report, the Soviet Union had only four of the most capable intercontinental ballistic missiles.

And, instead of building thousands in 1960, they built a hundred more in the first years after 1957.