Word: airfield
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...terrifying moment in the Viet Nam War: an exploding SAM missile scoring a kill on a U.S. Phantom reconnaissance jet that has burst into flames. Another shot resembles a sort of hacksaw that turns out, on closer inspection, to be an assortment of bombers at a top-secret airfield in the Soviet Union. There are also high-altitude views of submarines nestling alongside their mother ships on the coast of the Barents Sea; a lunar-like landscape that is a Soviet hydrogen-bomb test site; a graceful triangular pattern deep in central Asia that marks the Tyuratam launch site...
...result, the U-2 was free to make discoveries that strongly influenced U.S. strategic policy for several years. The 1956 picture of M-4 Bison jet bombers lined up at one airfield showed virtually the entire Soviet production of the craft; only a few were found at the other fields, ferreted out by the U-2s. That convinced the Pentagon that the feared bomber gap was fictional. Three years later, the overhead view of the Tyuratam site (where all Soviet missiles were then tested) gave the U.S. some needed reassurance. Determining that the rocket booster aperture at the base...
...trying to "out-macho each other" by urging ever tougher action by the U.S. Said he: "I'm not going to play that game of 'I'll mine one harbor,' then the other guy says, 'I'll mine one harbor and bomb one airfield...