| US Military Dictionary: missile gap |
An assumed inferiority in the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads available to the United States as compared to the number available to the Soviet Union at the end of the 1950s. The issue of a “missile gap” was raised by President John F. Kennedy as a political ploy during the presidential election of 1960, but was subsequently shown never to have existed.
See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.
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| US History Encyclopedia: Missile Gap |
Missile Gap, the presumed strategic disparity between the Soviet Union and the United States believed to have been created by the USSR's technological achievements in the late 1950s.
Beginning in late 1957, media observers claimed that the Soviet Union's successful test of an intercontinental ballistic missile and the launch of the Sputnik space satellites had created a "missile gap." The missile gap became an important political issue, with critics charging that President Dwight D. Eisenhower had allowed the Soviets to gain a dangerous military advantage over the United States by refusing to spend enough money on missile programs. Building on these claims, John F. Kennedy won the presidential election of 1960 by calling for bold action to restore American prestige that had been tarnished in the wake of the missile gap.
Despite dire warnings that the missile gap would pose a threat to citizens in the United States and to U.S. interests abroad, the missile gap was a myth. Eisenhower had explained that there was no gap, but many doubted the president's claims. Concerns over the missile gap did not recede until after October 1961, when members of the Kennedy administration declared that the United States possessed overwhelming military strength.
Bibliography
Divine, Robert A. The Sputnik Challenge: Eisenhower's Response to the Soviet Satellite. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
McDougall, Walter A. The Heavens and the Earth. New York: Basic Books, 1985.
Roman, Peter J. Eisenhower and the Missile Gap. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997.
| Wikipedia: Missile gap |
The missile gap was the term used in the United States for the perceived disparity between the number and power of the weapons in the U.S.S.R. and U.S. ballistic missile arsenals during the Cold War. The gap only existed in exaggerated estimates made by the Gaither Committee in 1957 and United States Air Force (USAF). In the early 1960s, the CIA provided figures that were much lower and gave the US a clear advantage. Like the bomber gap of only a few years earlier, it is believed that the "gap" was known to be illusionary from the start, and was being used solely as a political tool, another example of policy by press release.
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The Soviet launch of Sputnik 1 on 4 October 1957 highlighted the technological achievements of the Soviets and sparked some worrying questions for the politicians and general public of the USA. John F. Kennedy stated "the nation was losing the satellite-missile race with the Soviet Union because of ... complacent miscalculations, penny-pinching, budget cutbacks, incredibly confused mismanagement, and wasteful rivalries and jealousies."[1] The Soviet lead was due mostly to the US having suitably forward basing in Europe and Turkey, allowing them to concentrate on much shorter-range, smaller IRBMs. The Soviets, lacking suitable overseas bases, were forced to move directly to the much larger and technically daunting ICBM, which made them more suitable for space launches.
Later evidence has emerged that one consequence of Kennedy pushing the false idea that America was behind the Soviets in a missile gap was that Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and senior Soviet military figures began to believe that Kennedy was a dangerous extremist who, with the American military, was seeking to plant the idea of a Soviet first-strike capability to justify a pre-emptive American attack.[citation needed] This belief about Kennedy as a militarist was reinforced in Soviet minds by the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 and led to the Soviets placing nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962. (Kennedy was informed the missile gap was "a fiction" in January 1961.)[2]
Warnings and calls to address imbalances between the fighting capabilities of two forces were not new, a "bomber gap" had exercised political concerns a few years previously. What was different about the missile gap was the fear that a distant country could strike without warning from far away with little damage to themselves. Concerns about missile gaps and similar fears, such as nuclear proliferation, continue, with most recently the aggressive missile testing between India and Pakistan.
The whole idea of a missile gap was parodied in the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb in which a Doomsday device is built by the Soviets because they had read in The New York Times that the U.S. was working along similar lines and wanted to avoid a "Doomsday Gap". Also in the movie, the President of the United States is warned by his generals against allowing a "mine shaft gap" to develop when the idea of moving people of the world into safety in mine shafts is being decided upon.
Missile Gap is also the title of a science fiction book by Charles Stross, which depicts an alternate resolution to the missile gap situation and subsequent Cuban Missile Crisis.
A second claim of a missile gap appeared in 1974. Albert Wohlstetter, a professor at the University of Chicago, accused the CIA of systematically underestimating Soviet missile deployment, in his 1974 foreign policy article entitled "Is There a Strategic Arms Race?" Wohlstetter concluded that the United States was allowing the Soviet Union to achieve military superiority by not closing a perceived missile gap. Many conservatives then began a concerted attack on the CIA's annual assessment of the Soviet threat.[3]
This led to an exercise in competitive analysis, with a group called Team B being created with the production of a highly controversial report.
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
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