Negative Effects Of The Space Race

“The atomic bomb…led us up those lost few steps to the mountain pass, and beyond there is a different country.” -Robert Oppenheimer. The atomic bomb affected the world in many ways, but a significant amount of effects were bad. The development of the atomic bomb was bad because it increased international tensions, sparked an arms race which would continue for decades to come, and it showed that the United States government kept secrets from its own people. The project to develop the atomic bomb, and the latter itself were two very revealing matters. The project showed that the government needed to hide their secrets better, and the bomb itself showed just how powerful weapons had the potential to become, and how this technology could spark

When the United States realized that the Soviet Union had successfully launched Sputnik into space, the United States started to develop the technology which made the moon landing possible. On July 20, Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon’s surface, and the U.S. had beaten the Soviets to the moon. However, satellites created during the space race could be used as high powered spying devices for both the United States and the Soviet Union, and they could be used in other militaristic ways such as shooting a Soviet nuclear missile out of high altitude, which was proposed by President Reagan in the Strategic Defense Initiative. The space race was not an entirely good

Ordinary Americans began to question whether the government was concealing important events from them. Examples of this include the Roswell incident, in which a rancher named Mac Brazel found something unusual in his sheep pasture: an entanglement of metallic sticks held together by tape; chunks of plastic and foil reflectors; and scraps of a heavy, glossy, paper-like material. Unable to identify the strange objects, Brazel called Roswell’s sheriff. The sheriff then called officials at the nearby Roswell Army Air Force base. Soldiers fanned out across Brazel’s field, gathering the mysterious debris and whisking it away in armored trucks. Some people still believe that this was a UFO, because of the number of secrets the U.S. government had been hiding from its people recently. Another example of this is the Stealth Fighter Plane crash of 1986. The Air Force declared the crash site "a national security area" out of bounds to the press and to the public. This just brought the idea to the mind of many Americans that the U.S. government was hiding something new and never before revealed, and would not let the secret slip to the American public. Military officials neglected to identify the type of aircraft, the base from which it took off, its destination or even its