Missile Gap: "Development of the Soviet Ballistic Missile Threat" 1960 US Air Force Film Report FR-103

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'An Air Intelligence Briefing tracing the development of the Soviet ballistic missile threat from its inception, just after the close of WWII, to 1 January 1960.'

Originally a public domain film from the National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

In the US, during the Cold War, the missile gap was the perceived superiority of the number and power of the USSR's missiles in comparison with its own (a lack of military parity). The gap in the ballistic missile arsenals did not exist except in exaggerated estimates, made by the Gaither Committee in 1957 and in United States Air Force (USAF) figures. Even the contradictory CIA figures for the USSR's weaponry, which showed a clear advantage for the US, were far above the actual count. Like the bomber gap of only a few years earlier, it was soon demonstrated that the gap was entirely fictional.

John F. Kennedy is credited with inventing the term in 1958 as part of the ongoing election campaign in which a primary plank of his rhetoric was that the Eisenhower administration was weak on defense. It was later learned that Kennedy was apprised of the actual situation during the campaign, which has led scholars to question what Kennedy knew and when he knew it. There has been some speculation that he was aware of the illusory nature of the missile gap from the start and that he was using it solely as a political tool, an example of policy by press release...

The Soviet launch of Sputnik 1, on October 4, 1957, highlighted the technological achievements of the Soviets and sparked some worrying questions for the politicians and general public of the US. Although US military and civilian agencies were well aware of Soviet satellite plans, as they were publicly announced as part of the International Geophysical Year, US President Dwight Eisenhower's announcements that the event was unsurprising found little support among a US public that was still struggling with McCarthyism.

Political opponents seized on the event, helped by Eisenhower's ineffectual response... The Soviets capitalized on their strengthened position with false claims of Soviet missile capabilities, claiming on December 4, 1958, "Soviet ICBMs are at present in mass production." Five days later, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev boasted the successful testing of an ICBM with an impressive 8,000-mile (13,000 km) range...

National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) 11-10-57, issued in December 1957, predicted that the Soviets would "probably have a first operational capability with up to 10 prototype ICBMs" at "some time during the period from mid-1958 to mid-1959." The numbers started to inflate.

A similar report gathered only a few months later, NIE 11-5-58, released in August 1958, concluded that the USSR had "the technical and industrial capability... to have an operational capability with 100 ICBMs" some time in 1960 and perhaps 500 ICBMs "some time in 1961, or at the latest in 1962."

Beginning with the collection of photo-intelligence by U-2 overflights of the Soviet Union in 1956, the Eisenhower administration had increasingly-hard evidence that claims of any strategic weapons favoring the Soviets were false. The CIA placed the number of ICBMs to be closer to a dozen...

In a widely syndicated article in 1959, Joseph Alsop even went so far as to describe "classified intelligence" as placing the Soviet missile count as high as 1,500 by 1963, and the US would have only 130 at that time.

It is known today that even the CIA's estimate was too high; the actual number of ICBMs, even including interim-use prototypes, was 4...

In January 1961, McNamara, the new secretary of defense, and Roswell Gilpatric, a new deputy secretary, who strongly believed in the existence of a missile gap, personally examined photographs taken by Corona satellites. Although the Soviet R-7 missile launchers were large and would be easy to spot in Corona photographs, they did not appear in any of them. In February, McNamara stated that there was no evidence of a large-scale Soviet effort to build ICBMs. More satellite overflights continued to find no evidence, and by September 1961, a National Intelligence Estimate concluded that the USSR had no more than 25 ICBMs and would not possess more in the near future.

The missile gap was greatly in the US's favor. Satellite photographs showed the Soviets had 10 operational ICBMs, the US 57...