Comrade Sputnik

Conventional wisdom suggests that Sputnik’s launch in 1957 caught the Eisenhower administration and the American intelligence community off-guard. The evidence, according to Scott Curtis, head of reference services at Linda Hall Library, does not support the conventional wisdom. “Military intelligence had predicted the launch and was pretty close about the date range that it would happen,” he says. “Eisenhower wanted them to launch first, and by having a satellite fly across the United States, he was able to declare that space should be a nation-free zone, that countries could send objects into orbit without regard to national territory.” Author Paul Dickson makes plenty of these connections in his book Sputnik: The Shock of the Century. At 6:30 p.m., Dickson will join, via phone, a roundtable discussion of his book at the Linda Hall Library (5109 Cherry, 816-363-4600). Curtis, who leads the discussion, says, “The fact that they could put such a large payload into space attested to the strength of their rocketry — we now knew they’d developed an intercontinental missile, basically. Coupled with their development of the hydrogen bomb, that was alarming to the administration.” Linda Hall Library
Mon., Oct. 15, 6-7:30 p.m., 2007