"The Rainbow Bombs" is interesting for its own sake but there's additional astro geek goodness since it gives glimpses of the development of the Atlas rocket booster which later played so bigly in NASA.
NASA came about at the order of Eisenhower and he's also the one who gave the earlier order for the high-power rocket boosters since he wanted an ICBM for national defense. That yielded the earliest Atlas booster.
Truman also gets some twisted credit due to Project Paperclip which was the US version of the Russian plan to grab as many German rocket scientists and rocket bits as possible to match their programs in each country. Wernher von Braun was one of them and he became one of the Great Gods of American Space Travel.
Use of the Atlas booster continued with NASA for the early unmanned launches but they went to the big beast, the Saturn V, for the heavy-lift operations with astronauts onboard. (WIKI: Saturn V)
Some of you histogeeks may not so much enjoy this topic but you see the logic of the sub-chase. "The Rainbow Bombs" gives us an excellent accounting of how the rocket-propelled space bombs came into existence but it gives us the subtext of the story of how the American space program developed at all.
For my own connection, I came into adult existence at about the same time as ICBMs and thermonuclear war became the rage. It started in '62 when I was still not even a teen but that grew through the Sixties into total blazing madness. By the time I hit the Army in '70, the world had gone completely insane.
In the last segment of "The Rainbow Bombs," there's review of Anti-Ballistic Missile systems and the observation none of them tested since Reagan got into the idea have worked. The inference I take from that which was not stated is the Russian ABM systems around Moscow probably will not work either. We know they won't work anyway since the dominant nuke plan from the start has been to overwhelm with numbers in the thinking you may stop some of them but you won't stop all and the remaining will be enough to stop you for centuries or, most likely, forever.
NASA came about at the order of Eisenhower and he's also the one who gave the earlier order for the high-power rocket boosters since he wanted an ICBM for national defense. That yielded the earliest Atlas booster.
Truman also gets some twisted credit due to Project Paperclip which was the US version of the Russian plan to grab as many German rocket scientists and rocket bits as possible to match their programs in each country. Wernher von Braun was one of them and he became one of the Great Gods of American Space Travel.
Use of the Atlas booster continued with NASA for the early unmanned launches but they went to the big beast, the Saturn V, for the heavy-lift operations with astronauts onboard. (WIKI: Saturn V)
Some of you histogeeks may not so much enjoy this topic but you see the logic of the sub-chase. "The Rainbow Bombs" gives us an excellent accounting of how the rocket-propelled space bombs came into existence but it gives us the subtext of the story of how the American space program developed at all.
For my own connection, I came into adult existence at about the same time as ICBMs and thermonuclear war became the rage. It started in '62 when I was still not even a teen but that grew through the Sixties into total blazing madness. By the time I hit the Army in '70, the world had gone completely insane.
In the last segment of "The Rainbow Bombs," there's review of Anti-Ballistic Missile systems and the observation none of them tested since Reagan got into the idea have worked. The inference I take from that which was not stated is the Russian ABM systems around Moscow probably will not work either. We know they won't work anyway since the dominant nuke plan from the start has been to overwhelm with numbers in the thinking you may stop some of them but you won't stop all and the remaining will be enough to stop you for centuries or, most likely, forever.
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