The Weapons and Tactics

Space exploration: The Space Age dawned on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 into orbit around the earth. Sputnik 1 was the first artificial satellite around earth. (Sputnik is a Russian word meaning "traveler.") Until this point, it had been assumed that the first satellite would be American, not Russian. As Sputnik ushered in the beginning of the space age, many Americans reacted with astonishment. President Eisenhower tried to downplay the situation, even though he had been warned as early as 1955 that "severe psychological shock" would result if the Soviet Union won the race to orbit.

While Americans tried to make sense of the situation, the Soviet Union followed up on its initial success with the launch of Sputnik 2 on November 3, 1957. Inside Sputnik 2 was a pressurized compartment containing a dog named Laika, who was the first passenger to orbit earth.


NASA was designed to operate separately from the Department of Defense and was also required by its 1958 charter to make its research available to the American public. Through the years, NASA developed its own rockets, spacecraft, and communications networks.

Even after the United States got its first spacecraft into orbit, the lead remained with the Soviets. In 1959, the Soviet space program began its attempts to reach the moon. The first five attempts, and perhaps a sixth, were failures. However, the first to succeed was the Luna 9 which left earth on January 31, 1966, and dropped its round capsule on the lunar surface three days later.

The Apollo 11 mission was the first lunar landing. Nearly a million people jammed Cape Kennedy roads for a view of the July 16, 1969 launch. The Eagle was the lunar landing module aboard which were Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin. On July 20, 1969 Neil Armstrong took the first step on the moon and said, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

ICBM Testing: InterContinental Balistic MIssles were a new range of weaponary that both the United States and The Soviet Union were developing during the Cold War. In the United States, the MX (missle experimental) program was developed in the early 70's. Before then, the U.S. Military believed that the Soviets were dramatically improving on the accuracy and number of missle systems. They thought that the Soviets could attack, even destroy, the concrete missile silos in which U.S. ICBM's were being held.

The US felt that they needed a way to deploy the missles that would be invulnerable to Soviet attack. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter began a full-scale development of the MX but could not resolve the issue of deployment. President Reagen saw how this plan would be very expensive and so he went with a plan of placing the missles deep underground, making them invulnerable to Soviet attack.

The Cambridge Spies: The hardest and most bitterly fought confrontation between the Soviet Union and the western democracies during the 50 years of the Cold War was on the espionage front. In this arena the KGB, the 'sword and the shield' of the USSR, pitted its wits against its principal adversaries - the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States (CIA) and the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).

The aim of each was to steal the secrets of the other side, to try to peer inside the mind of the enemy, to fathom his intentions, and to neutralise them before they could be executed. In the early 1930s, the democratic world appeared to be in trouble. The Great Depression had caused widespread unemployment. Fascism was on the march in Germany and Italy. To many young students at Cambridge University, privileged though they were, this was worrying and unacceptable.


The four most remarkable spies of the Cold War, four larger-than-life Englishmen: HAR (Kim) Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt, all of whom betrayed their country to spy for Moscow.


They believed that the democracies would prove too weak to stand up to Hitler and Mussolini, and they knew that many people in Britain did indeed admire these leaders. They also thought that only the Soviet Union would be powerful enough to defeat Fascism. So, when they were approached by a recruiter from Moscow, the four young men agreed to serve the KGB.


The KGB had regarded the SIS (British secret service) as the most sophisticated and ingenious of all the capitalist intelligence services, capable of all sorts of duplicity and convoluted conspiracies.


The KGB files show that a powerful section of the KGB believed that this was the case. Officers argued that it had been all too easy for the Cambridge ring.


Moscow's spymasters argued that they could not be sure they were not having disinformation deliberately fed to them, with the intention of misleading the KGB. And all the while the KGB wasted the agents' valuable time by trying to trip them up, trying to prove that their loyalty really lay with Britain.


Smallpox and Biological Warfare: The weaponisation of smallpox was perfected by the Soviets during the Cold War - and how this biological weapon may still threaten the lives of millions.During World War II, the US and UK considered weaponizing smallpox, but with smallpox vaccines readily available, decided smallpox would be ineffective as a weapon.


During the Cold War, in 1974, the Soviet Union initiated Biopreparat, a civilian pharmaceutical company, as a front for the Soviet biological weapons program. Vladimir Pasechnik, a Soviet microbiologist who defected in 1989, provided information on the Soviet development of India 67 or India 1, a particularly virulent strain of smallpox, as a biological weapon. Scientists used embryonic chicken eggs to cultivate large amounts of smallpox virus. In addition, Dr. Ken Alibek (formerly Kanatjan Alikbekov), the former First Deputy Director of Biopreparat, reported the Soviet development of chimera viruses by inserting genetic material from other viruses into smallpox.