Who was Gary Powers and how did he escalate the Cold War?

Answer 1

Francis Gary Powers was a CIA U-2 pilot. A U-2 can fly at 80,000 feet; higher than the Soviet surface-to-air missiles we knew about could go, so the U-2 pilots thought they could operate in total safety. What they DIDN'T know, was the Soviets had been hard at work on a new surface-to-air missile system they called the S-75 Dvina (NATO calls it the SA-2 Guideline) that could shoot down a U-2.

On May 1, 1960, Francis Gary Powers overflew the Soviet Union. May 1 was a major holiday in the Soviet Union, and a lot of their air defenders were off duty then. One battery of SA-2s WAS on duty, and shot down the U-2. (They also shot down one of the fighters attempting to intercept the U-2.) The Soviets captured Powers, recovered the aircraft, developed the film it had shot and used it in a giant Propaganda campaign.

One of the things that happened in the aftermath of this incident was the US promised to never fly U-2s over the Soviet Union again. We didn't overfly them because by that time we had invented a spy satellite series that photographed enemy targets on a special film; the satellite was designed to fly over a certain part of the earth at a specific time every day and eject the film it had shot, and a specially made airplane would catch the canister of film and take it back to the US to be developed. We also invented the SR-71, which was designed in part to be able to outrun an SA-2 missile. (Y'know, spying on the Soviets really was fun.)