Word: sputniked
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...Communists were exploiting their brand-new Sputnik to achieve their old Middle Eastern objectives. "People of the whole world are pointing to the satellite," crowed Nikita. "They are saying that the U.S. has been beaten...
...assured by week's end that a missile speedup was inevitable (see below), moved to meet Khrushchev's crude power play with a readiness to use power, if necessary. How to preserve that power and that diplomatic capability five to ten years hence, in the face of Sputnik's warning, was the heart of the sober second thought in Washington last week...
...lota." At week's start, the President called a three-hour White House meeting of scientific and military advisers. They brought him up to date on Sputnik, with particular attention to the spectacular and ominous rocket-thrust required to push so heavy a satellite into outer space...
...Dwight Eisenhower had ever faced. The President had backed both the defense budget and the missile program, but the loudest noise in the defense area in recent weeks had been made by Charlie Wilson genially hacking away at military expenditures that he had let get out of hand. Militarily, Sputnik, plus Khrushchev's bold rocket-rattling, gave a bald warning about the grim missile race to come. Beyond all this, the President was bound to bear the brunt of a special American reaction: the U.S. takes deep pride in its technical skills and technological prowess, in its ability...
Last week, with post-Sputnik hindsight, Director I. M. Levitt of Philadelphia's Fels Planetarium called that 1955 decision an "astonishing piece of stupidity." Levitt's argument, echoed by Army missilemen: the Army's Jupiter intermediate ballistic missile, well along in 1955, could and should have been adapted for launching a satellite (a modified Jupiter has reached an altitude of 650 miles, higher than Sputnik's orbit). But when it was made, the National Security Council decision seemed sensible enough. The U.S. had committed itself to pass on to the rest of the world, including Russia...