Sputnik And The Cold War Essay

Introduction

In the fall of 1945, with the drop of the atomic bombs “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” respectively on the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Second World War came to an end. In the German capital, the Berlin Wall was soon erected in 1964 and the so-called “Iron Curtain”, dubbed by British prime minister Winston Churchill, divided the world into sectors of Communism and Capitalism. With the fall of one war, there rose another, in which the main belligerents, the United States of America (USA) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), would take the world as their theater to fight ideological battles. The Cold War was also one of the most dreaded wars in history, as there was the incorporation of nuclear technology

As expected, the first Sputnik, a spherical satellite 22 inches in diameter and weighing 184 pounds, was launched on 4 October 1957 by the USSR (Divine, xiii). In response, the “father of the hydrogen bomb”, Hungarian-American physicist Edward Teller claimed that the United States had “lost a battle more important and greater than Pearl Harbor.” (Walker, 114). The Soviet news agency Tass claimed that Sputnik orbited Earth once every hour and thirty-five minutes (Jorden). Sputnik was soon orbiting Earth from 560 miles above (Jorden), sending beeping signals back to the

Kennedy was elected as president, winning over his opponent Richard M. Nixon by a narrow margin. In August, the United States launched Echo 1, the first satellite to be able to both receive and pick up signals in real time; one day later, the Soviets launched two canines, Belka and Strelka, into space in Sputnik 5 with a safe return. With this successful space mission including living organisms, the possibility of space exploration with humans was demonstrated to be possible. By January 1961, the Americans had closely followed by sending the first primate, a chimpanzee named Ham, into outer space. The mission ended in failure as there were issues with the space capsule, causing it to shoot too high and shake too much. Wehrner von Braun, German-American aerospace engineer and scientist, was displeased. He wished to test out more rockets before launching humans (Kuhn 33). On 12 April 1961, Yuri Gagarin, Soviet cosmonaut, was launched into space. The American media triumphed over his success, with notably The Huntsville Times reporting the news with the headlines “Praise is Heaped on Major Gagarin” on the center of its front page (“Yuri Gagarin: First Man in