PENETRATING THE IRON CURTAIN:

RESOLVING

THE

MISSILE

GAP

WITH

TECHNOLOGY

CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

JOHN F. KENNEDY PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

JOAN BIRD & JOHN BIRD

EDITORS

C

C

C

P

1

PENETRATING THE IRON CURTAIN:

RESOLVING

THE

MISSILE

GAP

WITH

TECHNOLOGY

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Partners . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Agenda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Symposium Speakers and Editors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Penetrating the Iron Curtain: Resolving the . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Missile Gap with Technology, an Overview

by John Bird and Joan Bird

Closing the Missile Gap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

by Leonard F. Parkinson and Logan H. Potter

“The Missile Gap,” Chapter 10 from: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

The Wizards of Armageddon 

by Fred Kaplan

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

DVD Contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

All the documents and commentary selected for this study 

are contained on the DVD enclosed in the envelope attached 

to the back cover of this document.
2

The Historical Collections Division (HCD) of CIA’s Information Management Services 

is responsible for executing the Agency’s Historical Review Program. This program 

seeks to identify and declassify collections of documents that detail the Agency’s 

analysis and activities relating to historically significant topics and events. HCD’s 

goals include increasing the usability and accessibility of historical collections. HCD 

also develops release events and partnerships to highlight each collection and make 

it available to the broadest audience possible. 

The mission of HCD is to: 

•	 Promote an accurate, objective understanding of the information and 

intelligence that has helped shape major US foreign policy decisions.

•	 Broaden access to lessons-learned, presenting historical material that gives 

greater understanding to the scope and context of past actions.

•	 Improve current decision-making and analysis by facilitating reflection on the 

impacts and effects arising from past foreign policy decisions.

•	 Showcase CIA’s contributions to national security and provide the American 

public with valuable insight into the workings of its government.

•	 Demonstrate the CIA’s commitment to the Open Government Initiative and its 

three core values: Transparency, Participation, and Collaboration.

PARTNERS

CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
3

The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum is dedicated to the memory 

of our nation’s thirty-fifth president and to all those who through the art of politics 

seek a new and better world. Thomas J. Putnam serves as the Director of the John F. 

Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. 

Our purpose is to advance the study and understanding of President Kennedy’s life 

and career and the times in which he lived; and to promote a greater appreciation 

of America’s political and cultural heritage, the process of governing and the 

importance of public service.

We accomplish our mission by: 

•	 preserving and making accessible the records of President Kennedy and his 

times; 

•	 promoting open discourse on critical issues of our own time; and 

•	 educating and encouraging citizens to contribute, through public and community 

service, to shaping our nation’s future. 

As an organization dedicated to public service, we affirm that our understanding of 

“public” is truly inclusive -- that people of all backgrounds, ages, and viewpoints 

are made to feel welcome, and that the Library actively makes its resources, 

programs and services accessible, especially to those who remain under-served. We 

are committed to creating full access and opportunity in the areas of recruitment, 

employment, promotion, and work assignments. 

We serve the public as we would wish to be served: With a sense of pride, with 

professionalism, with courtesy, and with a commitment to excellence. 

Realizing that communicating openly, honestly, and with integrity is vital to fulfilling 

our mission, we readily share knowledge with constituents and co-workers, and 

recognize the responsibility of each of us to stay informed. 

As a relatively small institution with a wide-ranging agenda, the Library’s success 

flows directly from the quality of each staff member’s contribution, and from a 

genuine spirit of cooperation and teamwork based on courtesy and mutual respect.

JOHN F. KENNEDY

PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM
4

AGENDA

1:00pm – 1:10pm WELCOME AND OPENING REMARKS

 Mr. Tom Putnam

 Director, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library

1:10pm – 1:15pm THE CIA’S HISTORICAL REVIEW PROGRAM

 Mr. Joe Lambert 

 Director, Information Management Services, CIA

1:15pm – 2:45pm INTELLIGENCE PANELS

 OVERVIEW OF THE MISSILE GAP

 John Bird, Co-author with Joan Bird of this study

 FACING THE MISSILE GAP 

 Edward Proctor

 Drafter of the National Intelligence Estimate, and Chief of CIA’s Guided Missile 

 Task Force during the Missile Gap crisis

 THE PROBLEMS OF INTELLIGENCE ANALYSIS

 Robert Jervis

 Author of Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the 

 Iraq War

3:15pm – 4:45pm US POLICY IMPLICATIONS

 THE US CONTEXT OF THE MISSILE GAP CONTROVERSY

 Fred Kaplan

 Author of Wizards of Armageddon

 THE MISSILE GAP FROM A HISTORIAN’S VANTAGE

 Tim Naftali Author with Aleksandr Fursenko of

 “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro and

 Kennedy 1958-1964

 INTELLIGENCE UNCERTAINTIES FROM THE POLICYMAKERS VANTAGE

 Ted Warner

 Secretary of Defense Representative to New START

4:45pm CLOSING REMARKS AND INTRODUCTION TO THE FORUM

 Tom Putnam

4:50pm – 5:30pm Reception and Individual Discussions with Panel Members

5:30pm – 7:00pm 50th Anniversary: The Missile Gap Controversy

 50 years ago this month, President Kennedy received national security 

 estimates that the gap between the USSR and the USA was a myth. Join 

 historians Timothy Naftali , Fred Kaplan and John Prados for a discussion of 

 this pivotal moment in history.

7:30pm – 9:00pm Reception for Invited Guests

PENETRATING THE IRON CURTAIN: RESOLVING THE MISSILE GAP WITH TECHNOLOGY
5

SYMPOSIUM SPEAKERS AND EDITORS 

John Bird

John Bird, one of the authors of this study, had a 32 year career as an analyst 

of Soviet military issues at CIA. He has a Master of Arts in economics from the 

University of Washington and is a graduate of the National War College. In addition 

to his many assignments within the CIA, he served as Deputy National Intelligence 

Officer for General Purpose forces, as Director of the Strategic Warning Staff 

and as National Intelligence Officer for Warning. He was chief of the Intelligence 

Community’s monitoring authority for all US arms control treaties and agreements. 

He also served as the Intelligence Community’s Senior Intelligence Representative 

to the Conference on Disarmament during the negotiations that resulted in the 

Chemical Weapons Treaty. Since his retirement from CIA in 1994 he has worked 

with the Naval War College designing and assessing war games, and for the Army 

Training and Doctrine Command designing and assessing their Army After Next 

series of war games. In addition he has undertaken projects for the Intelligence 

Community during the last several years.

Robert Jervis

Robert Jervis (Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley, 1968) is the Adlai E. 

Stevenson Professor of International Politics and Deputy Chair of the Political 

Science Department at Columbia University, and has been a member of the faculty 

since 1980. He has also held professorial appointments at the University of California 

at Los Angeles and Harvard University. In 2000-2001, he served as the President of 

the American Political Science Association. Dr. Jervis is the co-editor of the Cornell 

Studies in Security Affairs, a series published by Cornell University Press, and the 

member of numerous editorial review boards for scholarly journals. His publications 

include Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton University 

Press, 1976), The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution (Cornell University Press, 1989), 

Systems Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life (Princeton University Press, 

1997), American Foreign Policy in a New Era (Routledge, 2005), and Why Intelligence 

Fails: Lessons from the Fall of the Shah and Iraqi WMD, Cornell University Press, 

April 2010 and several edited volumes and numerous articles in scholarly journals.

Fred Kaplan

Fred Kaplan is the national-security columnist for the online magazine Slate and a 

senior Schwartz fellow at the New American Foundation. For 20 years, he was a 

staff reporter for the Boston Globe, writing as the paper’s military correspondent 

(1982-91), Moscow Bureau Chief (1992-95), and New York Bureau Chief (1995-2002). 

In 1983, he was a leading member of the team that wrote the Globe’s Pulitzer Prizewinning Sunday magazine on the nuclear arms race.

Kaplan is the author of the prize-winning book about the history of nuclear strategy, 

The Wizards of Armageddon (Simon & Schuster, 1983; reprinted by Stanford 

University Press 1991). Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked 

American Power (Wiley & Sons, 2008), and 1959: The Year Everything Changed

(Wiley & Sons, 2009).

He has written articles about politics, culture, and technology for the New York 

Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Newsweek, 

The Washington Monthly, Nature, Scientific American, The Bulletin of the Atomic 

Scientists, The New York Magazine, Architectural Digest, and other publications.

AGENDA / SYMPOSIUM SPEAKERS AND EDITORS
6

From 1978-80, Kaplan worked as the national-security adviser to Representative Les 

Aspin in the US House of Representatives. He graduated from Oberlin College, and 

has a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Timothy Naftali

Timothy Naftali is the director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, 

a part of the National Archives and Records Administration. Before joining the 

National Archives, Naftali taught history at several universities, including the 

University of Virginia, where he also served as director of the Presidential Recording 

Program at the Miller Center of Public affairs.

Naftali is a prolific writer for both popular and scholarly audiences. His work has 

appeared on Slate.com, The New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, 

and other publications, and he has appeared on National Public Radio, the History 

Channel, and C-Span. He is the author of four books, including Blind Sport: The 

Secret History of American Counterterrorism and, with Aleksander Fursenko, “One 

Hell of A Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964. His second book 

with Fursenko, Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary, 

received the Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature in June 2007. His 

most recent book, George H.W. Bush, appeared in December 2007 as part of The 

American Presidents Series, edited by the late Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Sean 

Wilentz.

Dr. Edward W. Proctor

Dr, Proctor had a 27 year career with the CIA, where he played a key role in 

foreign intelligence analysis. He has a Master of Arts in economics from Brown 

University and a PhD in economics from Harvard University. He began his career at 

CIA as an analyst of Soviet military-economic issues and was described as the US 

government’s senior foreign intelligence analyst. He managed several components in 

the Directorate of Intelligence where he developed integrated analysis of the Soviet 

Union’s strategic weapons program, led the CIA’s Guided Missile Task Force and 

played the key role in the successful determination by the United States of the true 

state of Soviet strategic capabilities, thereby resolving the “missile gap” problem. He 

set the model for rigorous and relevant intelligence analysis. He served on the Board 

of National Estimates. As Director of the Directorate of Intelligence, he brought a 

new level of sophistication to intelligence analysis.

Edward (Ted) Warner III

Edward (Ted) Warner III is the Secretary of Defense Representative to New START 

and senior advisor to the Undersecretary (Policy) for Arms Control and Strategic 

Stability. He served as a deputy head of the US delegation that successfully 

concluded the New START Treaty with the Russian Federation in April 2010. The 

New START Treaty was ratified by the United States Senate on December 22, 2010.

Warner was Assistant Secretary of defense for Strategy and Requirements from 

May 1993 until November 1997, and Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy 

and Threat Reduction from November 1997 until October 2000. Warner was also 

responsible for Department of Defense policy for countering the proliferation of 

weapons of mass destruction; policy issues associated with US nuclear forces, 

ballistic missile defense, arms control, and cooperative threat reduction; as well as 

defense relations with Russia and the other newly independent states that emerged 

following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

PENETRATING THE IRON CURTAIN: RESOLVING THE MISSILE GAP WITH TECHNOLOGY
7

Warner served in the Air Force for 20 years. His assignments included head of the 

Staff Group, Office of the Air Force Chief of Staff; assistant air attaché at the US 

Embassy, Moscow; analyst of Soviet military affairs with the Central Intelligence 

Agency; and an assistant professor of political science at the US Air Force Academy.

He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1962 with a degree in 

marine engineering. He completed a masters and a doctoral degree in politics at 

Princeton University. 

Joan Bird

Joan Bird, one of the co-editors of this study, had a 29 year career at CIA as a 

senior analyst of Soviet issues, including Soviet space activities, Soviet policies on 

potential space weapons, and arms control of space and defense issues. She is a 

graduate of West Virginia University and spent three years at the Center for Naval 

War Studies of Naval War College developing ways to incorporate intelligence, 

space, communications and information operations in their studies and wargames. 

In addition to 25 years as an analyst, she spent 3 years as a member of the Defense 

and Space negotiating team and a year supporting the US delegation to the UN 

Conference on Disarmament on arms control for space. Since retirement in 1997 

she has worked for the Naval War College working with the players and assessors 

of Information Operations in the Naval War College War Games, and for the Army 

Training and Doctrine Command assessing the information operations play of their 

Army after Next Series of war games. She is a co-author of several historical studies 

for the Historical Collections Division of CIA. 

SYMPOSIUM SPEAKERS AND EDITORS

9

PENETRATING THE IRON CURTAIN: 

RESOLVING THE MISSILE GAP WITH TECHNOLOGY

1

In the mid-1950s the US faced the first real challenge since World War II to its 

strategic superiority over any nation on earth. First it seemed that the Soviet Union 

was challenging us by producing and deploying a large strategic bomber force. 

Then, even as that perception was disproved, it became evident that the Soviets 

were placing their major effort toward developing strategic missiles against which, 

once launched, there was no defense. As the Eisenhower Administration strove to 

formulate policy to address the new circumstances, the Intelligence Community 

provided no clear picture of the scale, rate of production or breadth of deployment of 

Soviet missiles. The perceived missile gap that ensued was based on a comparison 

between US ICBM strength as then programmed, and reasonable, although 

erroneous estimates of prospective Soviet ICBM strength that were generally 

accepted by responsible officials.

The administration increasingly turned to the CIA with assignments to collect, 

produce, and disseminate missile intelligence to policymakers. It was a challenging 

mission that put CIA up against a Soviet Union, a country from which little 

information, clues, secrets, or whispers emanated, and any that did might only be 

intended to deceive. The goal was not only to guess what was behind the curtain, 

but also to find all ways possible to approximate with ever greater certainty. 

These papers provide an enhanced analysis by and for scholars interested in that 

important, historic controversy. On the way to the solution, the process became 

overshadowed and sidelined by competing political, corporate, diplomatic, 

technological, and intelligence goals, providing us today with a fascinating template 

that is not far afield of the complexities facing modem intelligence missions and acts. 

To convey the intelligence controversy, CIA has released a large selection of 

intelligence documents, declassified for the first time, coupled with others which 

were formerly declassified, but are released here again with significant withheld 

text now restored based on new, broader declassification guidelines. Together, 

these documents provide new insight into the reasoning, steps, and sidesteps 

used to determine Soviet missile strength in an atmosphere of growing national 

alarm and pressure. And it happened by CIA’s eventual ability to crack the total Iron 

Curtain darkness and turn it into a thin, transparent veil, converting those early ‘best 

guesses’ into reliable, solid “I can easily show you” numbers and photos. But, for the 

moment, let’s start at the beginning. 

The attempt to collect intelligence on the Soviets began with an initial period of 

poor collection capabilities and consequent limited analysis. With few well-placed 

human sources inside the Soviet Union, it was only with the CIA’s development of, 

what can only be called, timely technological wizardry—the U-2 aircraft and Corona 

Satellite reconnaissance program—that breakthroughs occurred in gaining valuable, 

game-changing intelligence. Coupled with the innovative use of aerial and satellite 

photography and other technical collection programs, the efforts began to produce 

solid, national intelligence.

PENETRATING THE IRON CURTAIN: RESOLVING THE MISSILE GAP WITH TECHNOLOGY

1

 This essay was produced by Joan and John Bird.
10

At the outset of this period, the National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) could best be 

characterized as a collection of possibilities about the Soviet ICBM program lacking 

a firm basis for national security policy-making. By the time the Soviets launched 

the first successful ICBM in August 1957, the urgency triggered an outsized national 

concern over what many saw as an alarming “missile gap.” Better intelligence was 

demanded. The imprecision of the earlier NIEs, and the widely differing views of 

their contributors

2 added to the quandary of policymakers. Nonetheless, national 

intelligence products provided extensive alternative hypotheses—based on 

differing interpretations of the limited information collected—for different rates of 

development and production of Soviet ICBMs. Fortunately, as collection improved, 

the range of estimates narrowed until all but one member organization of the 

Intelligence Community joined in the consensus. 

The apparent success of the Soviet ICBM and satellite (Sputnik) programs in 1957 

spawned major reactions in the United States including the stimulation of new 

science and engineering studies; new college student financial assistance programs; 

and the initial or accelerated funding of about a dozen strategic attack programs 

simultaneously. The Intelligence Community determined that the “missile gap” was 

merely a product of ignorance and that the gap in missile programs actually favored 

the United States, not the USSR. That estimate provided, for the first time in over 

seven years, a basis for a new rationalization of defense procurement programs 

during the period 1962-1963. More importantly, it punctured Khrushchev’s carefully 

nurtured deception of Soviet superiority just as the Berlin Crisis was coming to a head. 

This study and supporting documents include this essay about the intelligence 

problems associated with the missile gap; an historical and originally classified 

essay written by two senior CIA intelligence analysts in the early 1970s; and Chapter 

10 from Wizards of Armageddon by Fred Kaplan, critiquing the whole Missile Gap 

controversy. Most important for historians, this study contains a DVD attached to 

the back cover containing the declassified copies of some 200 intelligence and 

other documents pertaining to the missile gap controversy. There is also a linked 

“Catalogue of Documents” that provides information about who, what, where the 

documents were produced and, in some cases, to whom they were disseminated 

along with a brief description of the contents of each document.

What was the “Missile Gap”?

The “missile gap” was in essence a growing perception in the West, especially in 

the USA, that the Soviet Union was quickly developing an intercontinental range 

ballistic missile (ICBM) capability earlier, in greater numbers, and with far more 

capability than that of the United States. Although there were several ingredients 

in the US perception (actually a misperception), the principal ones were: effective 

Soviet secrecy; limited intelligence collection; biased analysis; Soviet deceptive 

announcements, and the actual Soviet success in testing intercontinental-range 

ballistic missiles. All of them were justified concerns. 

PENETRATING THE IRON CURTAIN: RESOLVING THE MISSILE GAP WITH TECHNOLOGY

2

 CIA participation in the collection and production of intelligence in the 1950s was constrained by 

National Security Council Intelligence Directives (NSCID). In particular see NSCID Number 1 (Revised), 

Duties and Responsibilities, 28 March 1952; NSCID Number 2, Coordination of Collection Activities 

Abroad, 13 January 1948; and NSCID Number 3, Coordination of Intelligence Production, 21 April for 

details about the responsibilities of the CIA and other Intelligence Community entities. These NSCIDs 

limited the role of CIA to economic and scientific collection and analysis, and directed the military 

services to provide military intelligence. The revised version of the NSCID broadened the areas for which 

the CIA could produce intelligence
11

Effective Soviet Secrecy

After World War II, Stalin reinstated in the Soviet Union draconian peacetime 

security measures. Travel in the USSR by foreigners was severely constrained; even 

visiting communists were closely monitored. Westerners faced far greater travel 

restrictions including wholesale proscription against travel in most of the USSR. 

Interaction with Soviet citizens inside the USSR exposed those citizens to harsh 

counterintelligence responses by Soviet secret police organizations, variously named 

the MGB, MVD, and finally the KGB. Despite liberalizing reforms by Khrushchev, 

opportunities for travel in the USSR and interaction with its citizens continued to be 

severely hindered. Under these circumstances, Western intelligence organizations 

were unable to establish and maintain clandestine USSR military sources with 

access to the Soviet missile programs during most of the 1950s.

Limited Intelligence Collection

Despite the tight security imposed by Stalin and his successors, CIA, with the 

participation of the US military, did develop some information about the Soviet 

programs from a number of sources—in the beginning, mainly émigrés—who could 

provide insight into the Soviet development efforts, but those sources provided 

little information about current activity. Analysis of all the bits of information from 

the various human sources eventually succeeded in providing the basis for major 

technical collection efforts against the Soviet missile test center at Kapustin 

Yar, a location north of the Caspian Sea area. For example, the British attempted 

to photograph the Kapustin Yar test center in 1953 but their special Canberra 

reconnaissance aircraft was damaged and almost shot down by Soviet fighters. 

Other technical collection efforts included radar, intercepted telemetry, and finally, 

the U-2 photography. Through these efforts, the US intelligence organizations were 

able to monitor the Soviet medium- and intermediate-range missile (MRBM and 

IRBM) development process centered in Kapustin Yar. 

The Soviet ICBM test site, however, was in a more remote part of Central Asia. 

Human sources had scant information, but some of the technical collection systems 

in place for the Kapustin Yar effort yielded important evidence at the beginning 

of ICBM testing. Other evidence, which became available, provided the basis 

for searching for a new ICBM launch complex in Kazakhstan and an associated 

instrumented impact area on the Kamchatka Peninsula. New collection efforts 

against activity at this site substantially revealed the characteristics of the first 

Soviet ICBM. A U-2 mission penetrated the Soviet air defenses and successfully 

photographed the Tyura Tarn ICBM test launch area in Kazakhstan in August 1957. In 

1960, the CORONA satellites

3 began providing low resolution, broad area coverage 

of the USSR. By the summer of 1961, new intelligence estimates dramatically 

reduced the projections of Soviet ICBM deployment. Not only was the technical 

penetration of the Soviet missile program successful, but the clandestine service had 

developed an inside source. Colonel Oleg Penkovskiy, with access at the upper levels 

of the Ministry of Defense. In 1961, Penkovskiy reported senior Soviet generals 

believed that the initial Soviet version of an intercontinental range missile was 

unsuccessful and Khrushchev’s boastings about it were mere chest-thumping bluffs. 

By the end of 1962 the veil of total secrecy maintained by the Soviet Union had 

begun to wear.

PENETRATING THE IRON CURTAIN: RESOLVING THE MISSILE GAP WITH TECHNOLOGY

3

 CORONA is the code name for the first covert satellite reconnaissance program. The CORONA satellites 

were first successful on a small scale on the fourteenth attempt in August 1960. Problems with the 

satellites did not end then but gradually usable, albeit very low resolution coverage of the territory of 

USSR was obtained.
12

Soviet Deception

Starting in January 1957

4, Soviet statements in general—and First Secretary of the 

Communist Party of the USSR Khrushchev in particular—clearly distorted the facts 

of Soviet development, creating the false impression that Soviet ICBM development, 

production, and deployment were far more advanced than was true. Yet, the Soviet 

propaganda found a receptive US audience. The chapter from the Wizards of 

Armageddon by Fred Kaplan (reproduced in this study) relates that the US response 

was driven by self-interests that ranged from encouraging support for a greater 

military budget or share thereof, to urging support for a more aggressive foreign 

policy within the Eisenhower administration, to political support for opponents of the 

administration.

Political Pressures Grow In Information Vacuum

The political pressures, which fed upon the facts and the misperceptions of the 

Soviet ICBM program, included the selective leakage of intelligence judgments, 

and the exaggeration and distortion of the Soviet statements by the press and 

politicians. Before satellite photography and the new clandestine information 

were available, the military services clearly [and understandably] took positions 

in the National Estimates reflecting their convictions—public and private—that 

the projections of various Soviet weapons procurement and deployment programs 

would unquestionably impact their share of US defense appropriations. In contrast, 

leaked information to opposition politicians seeking to discredit the Eisenhower 

administration put pressure on the administration to seek every means to discover 

the reality of the situation, resulting in the development of the U-2 for overflights of 

the USSR and finally, the successful satellite reconnaissance program.

US and Soviet foreign policy initiatives added to the problem, with disincentives to 

undertake risky intelligence collection efforts. Opposing the pressure to succeed with 

more and bolder intelligence collection were other administration pleas to use the 

opportunity to achieve some kind of negotiated arms control, and the not unrelated 

vigorous complaints by the Soviets over violations of their territory. These external 

political pressures so influenced President Eisenhower that he actually stopped 

the U-2 overflights for sixteen months at the height of the missile gap controversy. 

However, as internal political pressures grew to unmask the true state of the 

Soviet ICBM program, the President relented and reauthorized overflights. Although 

successful right up to the Soviet downing of Gary Power’s U-2 over Sverdlovsk, U-2-

collected photography did not answer the crucial question about the extent of Soviet 

ICBM deployment. The political controversies and pressures persisted into mid-tolate 1961 when enough successful flights of the new US CORONA photographic 

satellites provided coverage of the USSR sufficient to indicate the Soviets did not 

have many deployed ICBMs—in fact, far fewer than the United States. 

Biased Analysis

Analysis can be biased for a number of reasons: bad data; implicit assumptions, 

and self-interest rank highest. Before the arrival of the comprehensive photographic 

coverage of the USSR by the CORONA satellites, the limited information available 

about production and deployment of Soviet ICBMs was an inadequate basis for 

statistical analysis and, as events proved, even for judgments based on intuition. 4

 See Document 58, FBIS Radio Propaganda Report, Soviet Propaganda Treatment of the USSR’s Strategic 

Rocket Capability, page 6.

PENETRATING THE IRON CURTAIN: RESOLVING THE MISSILE GAP WITH TECHNOLOGY
13

With the military branches and other military entities providing, exclusively, 

intelligence analysis on all aspects of the Soviet forces, including size, operations, 

and capabilities, it does not seem surprising the most egregious exaggerations of 

Soviet military strength emanated from the branch of service likely to benefit by an 

overblown enemy threat. The US Army and US Navy intelligence estimates of Soviet 

ICBM production were very conservative. In the National Intelligence Estimate NIE 

11-8-60, Soviet Capabilities for Long-Range Attack5, they estimated the Soviets 

would have only a few ICBMS by mid-1960 and about 50 by mid-1961. In the same 

estimate, the USAF confidently estimated the Soviets would have 35 by mid-1960 

and about 200 by mid-1961. The CIA estimate fell between the two. However, as 

that NIE and the few following prior to September 1961 indicated, there clearly was 

little evidence to support any of those estimates other than a few flight tests of the 

first Soviet ICBM and some gross estimates of potential ICBM production capacity. 

All the estimates were of a larger force than existed. In the graph below taken from 

NIE l1-8-1960 the USAF estimate is “Program B”; the Army and Navy estimate is 

“Program C”; and the CIA estimate is “Program A.”

During the period up to 1964, the bureaucratic undertone of resistance to allowing 

the CIA to engage in any sort of intelligence on military issues continued. The CIA’s 

rectifying analysis of the bomber and missile gaps, and later of the Soviet ground 

forces, ultimately resulted in modifications of the national intelligence regulations—

the NSCIDs and DCIDs

6—authorizing or requiring various IC actions that broadened 

CIA’s role.

Real World Facts Emerge 

The Gap...

On 26 August 1957, the Soviets announced they successfully tested an ICBM

7. The 

IC intelligence analysts believed it was a launch from the new ICBM and space 

launch center near Tyura Tam in Kazakhstan and that the missile traveled across the 

USSR to an intended impact on the Kamchatka Peninsula near the Pacific coast of 

the USSR. Within two days of the announcement, a U-2 was launched to photograph 

the site. On 4 October 1957, the Soviets successfully launched the first space 5

 See Document 84 for NIE 11-8-1960, Soviet Capabilities for Long-Range Attack.

6

 DCIDs are Director Central Intelligence Directives.

7

 See 26 August 1957 FBIS Soviet and Eastern Europe Dally Report for the TASS report. The “ICBM” was 

known later as the SS-6 or Type A surface-to-surface missile.

PENETRATING THE IRON CURTAIN: RESOLVING THE MISSILE GAP WITH TECHNOLOGY
14

satellite: Sputnik. In the eyes of the world, both feats established a prominent place 

for Soviet space science. In reality, the Soviet ICBM was unwieldy as a weapon for it 

required a massive infrastructure and was deployed only to one operational location. 

Most US intelligence organizations greatly overestimated the extent of production 

and deployment of this missile, and it was these estimates that became the Soviet 

side of the “missile gap” equation. 

At the time, the Soviets also were developing two new models of an ICBM, the SS-7 

and the SS-8

8, that would be tested beginning in the early 1960s and deployed 

in some number by 1963. The early evidence of preparations for their deployment 

tended to blend with the testing of the SS-6, creating, in the eyes of many, the 

basis for estimating an early and widespread deployment of the SS-6 system, a 

deployment that never occurred. During the same period, the United States was 

frantically working on several versions of an ICBM capable of carrying a nuclear 

warhead to targets in the USSR or China. While publicized launch failures and 

pessimism about the future of US efforts became the basis for the US side of the 

“missile gap,” it hid the reality that several missiles then under development were 

successful and deployed. Indeed their deployment outstripped the Soviet’s efforts so 

much that by 1961, and probably as early as 1959, the “gap” was actually in favor of 

the US though not widely recognized as such.

Development of lCBMs and Reconnaissance Programs...

Many wondered how the Soviets had gained such a head start, but the Soviet 

ICBM program was the culmination of a long, deliberate research and development 

program started soon after World War II. It was significantly aided in the early years 

by German rocket scientists and equipment captured at the end of the war. The 

West learned of the program through interviews with returnees and an occasional 

defector. Western intelligence organizations soon set up technical collection systems 

to monitor missile development at the Soviet’s Kapustin Yar test range. The big radar 

set-up by the USAF at Diyarbakir, Turkey was one example. The Soviet program 

evolved through the German V-2 and the Soviet equivalents to longer-range missiles 

capable of traveling 700-1000 nautical miles or more. As these latter missiles were 

being tested, evidence began to suggest a new test range was being developed 

near Novokazalinsk and Dzhusaly in the Kazakh SSR, with an impact area at Klyuchi 

on the Kamchatka Peninsula. On 5 August 1957, a CIA U-2 reconnaissance aircraft 

searching along the Chkalov-Tashkent rail line in the Kzyl-Orda Oblast’ in Kazakhstan 

photographed—in the distance—what was identified as the Tyura Tam missile test 

range head. It was 21 days later when the Soviets announced they had successfully 

launched an ICBM, and two days after that announcement when another U-2 flew 

directly over the site providing definitive photography of all its features

9. 

The Dawn of Satellite Reconnaissance

The U-2 program successfully provided important photography of the two main 

Soviet missile test centers at Tyura Tam and Kapustin Yar but it did not provide 

photography of most of the potential USSR deployment areas. In recognition of the 

limitations of aerial reconnaissance, both the CIA and the USAF proposed to develop 

reconnaissance satellites to cover the wide expanse of the USSR. The President 

approved the CIA program in February 1958 and, in August 1960, the first fully 

successful satellite in that program yielded more usable photography of the USSR 

than all 24 U-2 flights together. A new era in intelligence collection and analysis was 

dawning. 8

 These ICBMs were also known in the Intelligence Community as type B and type C respectively.

9

 For an exhaustive description of the U-2 program, see Document 164, Central Intelligence Agency and 

Overhead Reconnaissance: the U-2 and OXCART Programs, 1954-1974 by Gregory W. Pedlow and Donald 

E. Welzenbach, History Staff, Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, D.C., 1992.

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Proving a Negative...

Not recognized at the time, the real problem to be solved for US intelligence was 

not to prove a positive, i.e., where were the Soviet ICBMs, but to try to prove 

a negative—that there was no widespread Soviet ICBM deployment. Only full 

coverage of all potential launch sites would suffice as proof. Those intelligence 

organizations postulating a large, widely-dispersed force continued to press their 

views in the December NIE 11-4-6010 even as the increasingly successful satellite 

reconnaissance program was covering large sections of the USSR but finding little 

cause to support a Soviet force in being. This situation changed rapidly as the 

increasingly comprehensive satellite coverage and photo interpretation11 indicated 

the suspected sites were not ICBM sites at all, or were only in an early state of 

construction. Although a clandestine report from Soviet Colonel Oleg Penkovskiy 

indicated in the spring of 1961 that Khrushchev had been carrying out a massive 

deception and only a very small number of ICBMs were operational, it was not until 

later in the summer that the true reduced status of the Soviet ICBM program became 

clear. The change in the National Intelligence Estimates of Soviet ICBM operational 

force levels between the June 1961 estimate and the September edition12 reflected 

the now clearer picture of actual ICBM deployment in the USSR. 

As late as mid-1963, in the Kennedy Administration, the full picture of what happened 

about the missile gap was still being investigated. The documents attached to this 

study from the Kennedy Presidential Library clearly show the President wanted the 

whole episode sorted out in a study or history that he requested of National Security 

Advisor McGeorge “Mac” Bundy in the spring of 1963.

In sum, the efforts of the two nations to produce an ICBM force proceeded in parallel 

with the Soviets making the first, highly public, successful ICBM launch in August 

1957, and the United States deploying the first unit of ICBMs in 1959 followed by a 

steady stream of new US deployments well before meaningful Soviet deployment 

began. Yet this clear outcome only became evident following years of thoughtful 

yet frustrating analysis-in-the-dark, and then was only partially helped by U-2 

photographic coverage, and finally saw a full resolution to the missile gap question 

through HUMINT [Penkovskiy] and USSR-wide satellite reconnaissance. 

The missile gap controversy enjoyed the fortunate good timing of a series of 

technological advancements and human sources that brought weak, successive 

approximations of the earlier NIEs into the realm of reliable, solid evidence suitable 

for sound policymaking. And it demonstrates that intelligence involves considerable 

effort, inventiveness, luck, diplomacy, and a sound leadership to keep the mission 

from becoming snared in all the side issues that often surround matters of alarming 

international competition and internal national anxieties. There are many ‘take 

home lessons’ in the attached documents that display America’s quick and cautious 

response to the unknown and overstated Soviet ICBM threat of 1955-1964.

10See Document 92, NIE 11-4-60, Main Trends in Soviet Capabilities and Policies, 1960-1965, 1 December 

1950.

11These reports produced by the National Photographic Interpretation Center are replicated on the 

attached DVD.

12See Documents 98,98a, 130,131 and 134 for the estimates of this period.

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SCHEMATIC OF THE CORONA SATELLITE

41THE MISSILE GAP

10 THE MISSILE GAP

1

IN THE MONTHS leading up to Sputnik and the Gaither Report, but following the 

transmittal of Albert Wohlstetter’s R-290 report for RAND, Air Force Intelligence was 

predicting the end of deterrence for the United States in a matter of a few years. On 

September 30, 1957, a special Air Force panel delivered a report to General Thomas 

White, Air Force Chief of Staff, noting that the Soviet Union’s major objectives were 

“first, destroy or neutralize U.S. capabilities and nuclear retaliatory forces; and 

second, to deliver an attack on urban, industrial, political and psychological targets 

in the U.S. so as to prevent mobilization of the U.S. weapons potential.” 

Having a substantial ICBM force would give the Soviets the means to fulfill their 

objectives, and the panel predicted that by 1963 a Soviet attack that aimed three 

missiles at each SAC air base and missile site would destroy so much of America’s 

nuclear strength that “the Soviets might well consider that they would be in a 

position to initiate general war with very little risk of retaliatory major destruction to 

their national strengths.” 

On November 12, the intelligence community’s official National Intelligence Estimate 

stated that the Soviets could have 500 operational ICBMs by the end of 1962 or, if 

they built their program on a crash basis, by the end of 1961. Some officers in SAC 

Intelligence figured that the Soviets might have many more than that, perhaps up to 

1,000. Meanwhile, the United States was scheduled to have only twenty-four Atlas 

missiles ready to go by 1960 and only sixty-five by 1961. This estimate was not a 

matter of controversy within the intelligence community; it was a position held by Air 

Force Intelligence and by estimators inside the CIA alike.

Yet there was no hard evidence for these claims of a missile gap. The estimate 

sprang from the demise of worries about a “bomber gap,” which the intelligence 

community had also commonly predicted a few years earlier, but which was now 

commonly agreed to have been a gap that never was and that almost certainly would 

never be. 

By 1954, it was clear that the Soviets had built a prototype design of a bomber with 

potential intercontinental range that the United States dubbed the Bison. After 

surreptitiously observing from afar an April rehearsal for the May Day air show, 

American air attaches in Russia reported seeing at least twelve and maybe twenty 

Bison planes in the air. Intelligence analysts in the U.S. Air Force reasoned that if 

the Russians were putting that many in the air at one time, then they could have 

something like twenty-five to forty Bisons off the production line. 

The real intelligence scare came a year later, on July 13, 1955, the U.S.S.R.’s 

Aviation Day, when the Russians proudly display their air power. American attaches 

reported seeing ten Bisons flying by, then another formation of nine Bisons, then 

still another nine—twenty-eight planes in all. Again, Air Force Intelligence reasoned 

that the Soviets must have about twice that number actually built, which meant that 

the production lines were cranking out many more Bisons than they had previously 

guessed. The intelligence estimates for what the Soviets would have a few years 

hence began to explode. The 1956 National Intelligence Estimate, known as the 

NIE, predicted that the Soviets could have 500 bombers with the range to attack the 

United States four or five years into the future; at one point. Air Force was predicting 

as many as 600 to 800 Bisons. 

1 Wizards of Armageddon by Fred Kaplan. Copyright © 1983 by Fred Kaplan, First published by Simon & 

Schuster, Inc., in 1983
42

The air attaches’ reports did not form the basis of these projections; they merely 

provided what seemed to be concrete evidence supporting a massive array of data 

that was beginning to come in. The plant that produced all the Bisons, called the Fili 

Plant, happened to be in Moscow. Americans naturally were not allowed to enter the 

plant, but they could fairly easily observe activities going on around it. They could 

hear and often even see the planes taking off from the runway; and since they knew 

that the planes flew from the plant to a nearby military air base and never came 

back, they were not faced with the problem of distinguishing takeoffs from landings. 

From captured German reconnaissance photos taken from the air during World War 

II, analysts back in the U.S. could calculate the plant’s size and floor space, as well 

as the most efficient use of that space and, from that, infer some numbers on likely 

production rates. The attaches in Moscow could report the approximate size of any 

expansions or new annexes to the plant. 

Air Force Intelligence also knew of a measure devised by American aircraft 

companies called the “learning curve,” which assumed that over-time, and with 

greater efficiencies gradually built in, production of aircraft would grow at a certain, 

calculable rate. Air Force Intelligence also assumed that the plant had two labor 

shifts, and that sometime in the next couple of years, after the Fili Plant had reached 

the peak of its “learning curve,” the Soviets would have constructed a second plant 

to build still more Bison bombers. 

When all these factors were taken into account, it appeared that the Soviets could 

have built 500 or so intercontinental bombers by the early 1960s. 

Yet there was another assumption that entered into these calculations, something 

less tangible but, in the eyes of intelligence analysts of the day, far more real and 

certain. The Soviet Union’s primary goal was to attack a large number of strategic 

and urban-industrial targets inside the United States. U.S. targeting studies had 

revealed that the Soviets would need something like 500 bombers of intercontinental 

range to accomplish the goals that intelligence had imputed to them. Therefore, any 

evidence that seemed to confirm the assumption about Soviet alms—regardless of 

evidence that might point to other conclusions—was viewed as truth. At that time, 

the Central Intelligence Agency had no charter to do military analysis; that job was 

assigned to the intelligence staffs of the individual services. However, there was 

an oversight board, the Office of National Estimates, ONE, headed by a veteran 

intelligence analyst, Sherman Kent. ONE was responsible for pro ducing the annual 

National Intelligence Estimate, and so had the authority to look into intelligence in 

all fields, including military. While technically independent of the CIA, it was housed 

in the Agency’s headquarters. Still, ONE had to rely almost entirely on Air Force 

Intelligence for analysis and estimates of Soviet long- range missiles and bombers.

However, there was a division of the CIA in charge of economic intelligence, headed 

by a young analyst named Ed Proctor, who managed to grab one slice of military 

intelligence: trying to calculate how much money the Soviets were spending on 

their armed forces. This task allowed Proctor and his staff to obtain as much data 

as they wanted on Soviet bombers, which allowed them to get heavily involved with 

the whole question of bomber production and production rates. In short, through 

a cleverly roundabout route, the CIA’s economic division got into the business 

of analyzing all the technical and arcane issues that lay at the very heart of the 

Strategic Forces section of the NIE—formally the exclusive province of the military 

services, especially the Air Force. 

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From their studies of other economic sectors of the U.S.S.R., the analysts in Proctor’s 

shop knew practically everything there was to know about Soviet factory markings—

things like how serial numbers on manufactured goods can reveal what year and 

month a particular item was produced. In this sense, airplanes were just like any 

other manufactured goods, and the serial number, so to speak, was the tail number 

on each plane, which the CIA could detect on a few of the many photographs taken 

with long-range lenses by the American air attaches observing the goings-on at the 

Fili Plant in Moscow. 

Not long after they began amassing this sort of data. Proctor and his team began to 

conclude that the Air Force estimate—the official National Intelligence Estimate—

could not be right. One of the assumptions behind that estimate was that the Bison 

bombers were produced in batches of ten. The assumption was integral to all the 

other assumptions and, thus, to the overall estimate. Ten was the logical number, 

given the Air Force estimates of the Fili Plant’s floor space, of the plant’s “learning 

curve,” of the number of labor shifts working on production. And ten was the 

absolutely necessary number, given the more basic assumption that the Soviets 

wanted to be able to attack a whole variety of American targets as soon as possible. 

If the number were significantly less than ten, then all the other assumptions were 

wrong, including the basic one concerning Soviet aims and intentions. 

And yet the CIA was coming to believe that the Soviets were producing the Bisons 

in batches of only five. The analysts would see Bisons marked with tail numbers 

ending with 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 or 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 or 30, 31, 32, 33, 34—but not a 

single plane ending with 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 or 25, 26, 27, 28, 29.... Moreover, there 

was another set of numbers on the plane indicating when it was manufactured. As 

it turned out, about as much time elapsed between the plane with numbers ending 

in, say, 22 and 24 as between planes ending in 24 and 31. In other words, there 

probably would not have been enough time to produce 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 and 30 in 

the interim.

Thus, if no airplanes with higher end numbers existed, then that clearly meant they 

were being produced in batches of five, not ten; and that clearly meant that the 

estimate was all wrong, that the Soviets were producing only about half as many 

Bison bombers as the NIE projected, and that meant that all the other assumptions 

behind the NIE—from the efficiency of a Soviet aircraft plant to the objectives of the 

Kremlin—were also wrong. 

By 1957, not only was Proctor’s shop convinced that the NIE was wrong, but so were 

a number of analysts on the staff of the Office of National Estimates. 

Allen Dulles was in a spot. As manager of the entire intelligence community, he was 

reluctant to abandon the estimate of the Air Force, the source of all the data that 

the community was receiving on Soviet bomber production. He was also reluctant 

to accept immediately the critique made by Proctor’s shop. That division might know 

a. lot about economics and factory markings, but could he really believe that the 

men who worked there knew as much about airplanes as the Air Force did? They 

had never even looked much at airplanes before they got involved in this exercise. 

Furthermore, if the NIEs that the Agency had been supporting the past few years 

were based on totally faulty data and assumptions, how would they come up with a 

new estimate—who could produce one—and what would that say, politically, about 

the wisdom of the CIA? 

THE MISSILE GAP
44

So, a fight broke out between Air Force Intelligence and the CIA. The Air Force had 

stakes beyond merely protecting its reputation as a reliable intelligence agency: 

a large Soviet strategic air force meant guaranteed support for a large American 

strategic air force, which meant more prestige and a greater share of the defense 

budget than for the Army and the Navy. Not surprisingly, in this internal clash, Army 

Intelligence sided with the CIA’s economic division. 

The Air Force response to the CIA critique sounded entirely reasonable. The Air 

Force, its intelligence officers pointed out, made a logical estimate. It accorded with 

everybody’s perception of Soviet intentions; it accorded with their estimates of the 

Fili Plant’s floor space, with the July 1955 air display over Moscow and with their 

judgment that the Soviets produced ten planes per batch. All that the CIA analysts 

had was the absence of any data that proved conclusively the estimate of ten per 

batch. The Air Force didn’t think that the sample size was large enough to conclude 

that the Soviets produced only five per batch, at least not in the face of all the other 

conflicting information. 

The CIA economic division’s response was equally logical, but in precisely the 

opposite direction. The five-per-batch number that they had come up with was 

absolutely solid, they said, and the confidence levels were very high. This meant that 

the Fili Plant was not producing to what the Air Force thought was full capacity, that 

the plant did not work in two shifts, that its learning curve had not yet peaked, that 

the Soviets were not planning to build a second Bison plant. The air show of July 

1955 was a bit tougher to challenge, but all the other bits of data suggested either 

that it had been a fluke or that the Soviets must have been flying every single bomber 

in their inventory, not, as the Air Force had assumed, half of them

2

. 

The dispute reached a bitter stalemate—when along came Khrushchev’s belligerent 

bragging about the U.S.S.R.’s terrifying ICBM program and then, on October 4, the 

launching of Sputnik. That settled the great dispute over the bomber gap. The CIA’s 

economic analysts won. The big bomber projections were dropped from the NIE. But 

they were dropped only because Sputnik allowed all of the broad assumptions about 

Soviet behavior and intentions to be preserved. The intelligence community could 

still argue that the Soviets wanted a big nuclear force aimed at the United States, 

but that they had now decided to build one in the form of ICBMs, not bombers. The 

NIE could still be judged fundamentally sound in its assessment of the nature and 

magnitude of the Soviet threat. And the U.S. Air Force could still use the estimates 

as its rationale for a gigantic fleet of long-range bombers and missiles of its own. 

A new consensus was reached. And the consensus Included not just Air Force 

Intelligence officers but also CIA analysts. Very few, even among the CIA skeptics, 

had ever altered their assumptions about the nature of the Soviet threat. They 

had been a bit puzzled by their own discoveries. But they viewed themselves as 

independent analysts, not attached or beholden to any military service—unlike 

their adversaries in Air Force Intelligence, who were under constant pressure to 

make their estimates of Soviet forces consistent with the budgetary desires of the 

Air Force proper. And they were eager to get into the strategic-estimates game, 

where all the big action and excitement lay. Challenging the predominant strategic 

estimators, the officers of Air Force Intelligence, and doing so with solid evidence 

and creative but logical analysis, was the best way to go about getting there. But 

when it came to thinking about Soviet aims and intentions, there was no question 

in 1957, even among the skeptical economists in the CIA, that the Reds were out to 

clobber America. 

2 Years later, some intelligence analysts would speculate that the same planes might have been flying 

around the display area twice, but the theory has never been confirmed.

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And so, as the bomber gap ended, the missile gap began. 

The members of the Gaither Committee, the analysts at the RAND Corporation, the 

Democrats in Congress who criticized Eisenhower’s defense programs, had no way of 

knowing that the missile-gap intelligence estimates virtually appeared out of thin air, 

supplanting the bomber-gap estimates as the latter proved illusory. 

The first NIE ascribing a huge missile arsenal to the Soviet Union was released in 

November 1957, and projected that the Russians would have 500 ICBMs by the 

end of 1962 or. If they embarked on a crash program, the end of 1961. There was 

no solid evidence for this estimate. All the earlier intelligence assumptions had led 

to the conclusion that the Soviets could have 500 intercontinental bombers by that 

date. When that projection proved false, Air Force Intelligence essentially changed 

“bombers” to “ICBMs,” but retained the original number 500. 

By 1958, mainly with the aid of photographs taken from U-2 reconnaissance 

airplanes, which had begun flying spy missions over Russia in 1956, the Air Force 

had enough data to estimate the floor space of factories producing missiles. As 

with the bomber-gap estimates, they could figure the most efficient use of that floor 

space, assume a “learning curve” in the production, go on to assume that additional 

production plants would be utilized once the “learning curve” peaked, and infer from 

all this some figures on production rate. 

From these extrapolations, the Air Force essentially confirmed the NIE of the previous 

year. The NIE of 1959 also concluded that if the Soviets decided to start a general 

nuclear war, their first move would be to destroy the Western nuclear forces in order 

to minimize or prevent retaliation. Since .the 100 ICBMs that the Soviets could have 

by 1959 or 1960 would be enough to demolish almost all of SAC’s air bases, the 

situation seemed very grim.

However, by mid-1958, something seemed to appear not quite right with this 

estimate, and the early skeptics came once again from the inner corridors of the 

CIA—this time from the science and technology division headed by Herbert (Pete) 

Scoville, Jr., and his specialist on missiles, Sidney Graybeal. Just as the CIA’s 

economic division got involved with the NIEs during the bomber-gap period because 

of its experience in examining factory markings, the CIA science and technology 

office became involved during this period in the late 1950s because it knew about 

missies.

No American had ever laid eyes on an actual Soviet missile, but these CIA scientists 

came up with some ingenious methods for essentially reconstructing one. The 

method involved monitoring Soviet missile test flights—originally with radar 

technology, later with acoustic, telemetric, optical, and infrared sensors. From the 

data intercepted, Scoville, Graybeal and their staff could infer rough estimates of 

a missile’s size, weight, fuel loading, inner workings, accuracy and (based on its 

weight) explosive power. 

In the course of monitoring these tests, however, the CIA scientists began to notice 

that the rate of Soviet ICBM testing had slowed down considerably. The Soviets 

were still testing plenty of short-range missiles; by the summer of 1958, they had 

tested a dozen medium- and intermediate-range missiles; but they had fired only six 

intercontinental-range missiles, and they had not fired any for quite a while. Still, the 

CIA stuck to its original estimate. Again, it was the dilemma of negative evidence: 

how long do you wait for something to happen before you conclude that it isn’t going 

to happen? It was too early to draw conclusions. 

THE MISSILE GAP
46

Still, officers in Air Force Intelligence thought that the CIA was vastly 

underestimating the Soviet ICBM test program, and began to worry that if the CIA 

were allowed to dominate on this issue, the estimate on Soviet missile production 

might eventually change—thus endangering the massive missile program that the 

Air Force was advocating. Word began to get around that the Soviets were doing 

a lot more testing than the CIA was reporting; that this information was being 

systematically suppressed and kept away from Allen Dulles; that in fact Soviet 

missile production was also a lot more vigorous than the NIEs suggested.

Finally, the word trickled down to Stuart Symington, the Democratic Senator from 

Missouri. Symington was the ideal man to take on the job of pushing the Air Force’s 

case. A senior member of the Armed Services Committee, former Secretary of the Air 

Force in the Truman Administration, sharp critic of Eisenhower’s defense policies, the 

most vocal advocate of the Gaither Report’s public release, the most spirited warning 

siren on the missile gap and clearly laying the groundwork for his ambitions in the 

upcoming 1960 Presidential election, Symington was a man who was eager to jump 

on board any claim or statistic bemoaning America’s military weakness or decrying 

Russia’s military strength. 

Symington heard about the reports of underestimating in the CIA from Colonel 

Thomas Lanphier, a man well plugged into the Air Force gossip network, having 

ridden for more than a decade on his fame as the war hero who directed the air 

ambush that trapped and shot down Japanese war leader Admiral Yamamoto during 

World War II. Lanphier had also been Symington’s executive assistant when he was 

Secretary of the Air Force; he was president of the Air Force Association shortly after 

that, and he was now assistant to the president of Convair, manufacturer of the Atlas 

ICBM. Lanphier had his own stakes in beating down the CIA, since a large Soviet 

ICBM program made it more likely that his own company would be awarded a large 

ICBM production contract. 

Symington, meanwhile, saw in Lanphier’s report the makings of a terrific scandal 

that would work to his own political favor. Symington requested a personal briefing 

from Allen Dulles at CIA headquarters in late July 1958. The data that Dulles gave 

him on Soviet missile testing differed so considerably from Lanphier’s data that 

Symington requested another session with Dulles on August 6, this time bringing 

Lanphier with him. Dulles brought in Howard Stoertz, the Soviet specialist on the 

ONE staff, to comment and take notes. Lanphier’s basic message to Dulles was that 

he, the Director of Central Intelligence, was being misled by his own people on the 

number of ICBM tests the Soviet Union was conducting, that the real number was 

much higher than six. Stoertz and Dulles both said they had never heard anything 

like this before, but would investigate the matter. A new interagency intelligence 

committee had recently been established under the supervision of Air Force Colonel 

Earl McFarland, called the Guided Missiles Intelligence Committee, or “Gimmick,” 

for short. Dulles had McFarland look into Lanphier’s claims. Over the next couple 

of weeks, GMIC hunted but found nothing. One reasonable hypothesis it came up 

with was that Lanphier’s sources in Air Force Intelligence were counting a lot of 

intermediate- and medium-range missile tests, in addition to ICBM tests. The U.S. 

had a radar in Turkey that looked out across the Black Sea toward the Caspian Sea. 

Both Soviet missile test ranges—one of which tested ICBMs, the other IRBMs and 

MRBMs—were within view of this radar. 

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In any event, another meeting was held with Dulles, Symington and Lanphier in midAugust. McFarland was also present and reported there was nothing to substantiate 

Colonel Lanphier’s report; that, as Dulles had told him on August 6, the Soviets had 

fired only six ICBMs, four of which were believed to have landed in the target area. 

To Lanphier, it didn’t add up. If the Soviets were going to deploy 100 ICBMs by 1959 

or 1960, much less 500 by 1961 or 1962, then they had to have fired more than 

six test missiles by August of 1958. There were lead times involved. In Convair’s 

experience, a missile had to be tested at least twenty times before it could be 

declared operationally ready and reliable; then there was the additional time it 

would take to transport the missiles to their bases, set up launching sites, commandcontrol centers and so forth. If the testing data were correct, then the National 

Intelligence Estimate must be wrong. 

Over the next several months, Dulles and his staff reached the conclusion, hesitantly 

but inexorably, that the estimate must indeed be wrong. There simply were not very 

many more Soviet ICBM tests being conducted. It was the dilemma of negative 

evidence again, but they had waited a long time now and the evidence was still 

negative. Yet, as in the bomber-gap period, the estimate they had was all there was. 

If the CIA and the ONE denied its validity, where would they find the data for a 

new one? 

Moreover, over the past year, much more had been learned about the technology 

of missiles. The scientific analysts realized, to a much greater degree than before, 

how complicated it was to set up an operational missile site. Before, they had just 

considered the task to be one of building and deploying missiles; now they realized 

that the support equipment—the launchers, the communications system and the 

like—was much bulkier, more complex, more time-consuming to set up. They 

realized that even if the Soviets had a lot of missiles, they might not have so many of 

them on launchers, ready to be fired in the event of war. 

Then there were the U-2 photographs that were coming back. The U-2 was a 

super-secret program. Outside the intelligence community, only slightly more than 

a handful of Pentagon, White House and State Department officials knew of its 

existence. Certainly nobody in Congress was aware of it. The plane flew at 80,000 

feet, was “armed” with a very long range lens camera with remarkably good 

resolution (developed by Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid), and had been making 

spy sorties across the Russian border since 1956. 

The interagency Guided Missiles Intelligence Committee had developed criteria 

on where to look for ICBMs: for example, it figured they would have to sit not very 

far off the tracks of the Soviet Union’s huge railroad systems, the only network 

that could move the missiles around. But, even with the U-2, there were some 

uncertainties. The plane had not yet been flown over all the area around the tracks. 

More particularly, it had not yet reached Plesetsk, in northern Russia, where the 

Soviets had been test firing (and perhaps getting ready to deploy) their ICBMs. 

The end of the year was approaching; the negative evidence was still negative. The 

NIE for that year was delayed, deliberately, the analysts racking their brains, going 

over the data again and again, looking for something that might be interpreted as a 

positive sign of more ICBM testing, some ICBM deployment. But there was nothing. 

THE MISSILE GAP
48

Finally, on February 9, 1960, two months late, the NIE was released. It was a 

hodgepodge. It offered no consensus, and the bottoms of the pages were filled with 

dissenting footnotes signed by the intelligence agencies of the various services. 

The date by which the Soviets could have 500 ICBMs was pushed back to mid-1963, 

perhaps even further back than that. They would have only 50 ICBMs by mid-1960, 

only 35 of them on launchers. By mld-1961, they would have between 175 and 270 

missiles, 140 to 200 of them on launchers. By mid-1962, they would have 325 to 400, 

with 250 to 350 on launchers. By mid-1963, 450 to 650, with 350 to 450—still fewer 

than 500—on launchers. 

The differences in the numbers reflected the differences between the CIA, which 

picked the lower numbers, and the Air Force, which estimated the higher numbers. 

And in the footnotes were the Army and Navy intelligence services’ dissents, 

which—using the same data available to the CIA and Air Force Intelligence—arrived 

at still lower numbers. The Soviets, they said, would have only 50 missiles by mid1961, only 125 by mld-1962 and 200 by mid-1963. 

At this point, very few in the CIA or the Air Force were willing to take these 

extraordinarily low estimates seriously. For one thing, the politics of the situation 

seemed clear: the Army and the Navy competed against the Air Force for scarce 

budgetary resources; if the Soviets had only a few ICBMs in the works, that would 

deny the Air Force its chief rationale for building several thousand ICBMs and would, 

thus, leave more for the non-nuclear forces of the Army and the Navy. 

Second, Navy Intelligence was automatically suspect. Keith Brewer, head of ONI, 

the Office of Naval Intelligence, had not believed the Soviets had set off an atomic 

bomb, and for many years after the fact. The Navy was always estimating, since that 

time, that the Soviets had only about one-fifth the fissionable material that the rest 

of the intelligence community was estimating. Brewer had worked at the Oak Ridge 

nuclear laboratory in Tennessee during the war, and simply could not believe that any 

other nation, especially the Soviet Union, had the collective brains and know-how to 

do what he and his associates had done. 

There was a third reason why the Army-Navy numbers were rejected, and this was 

most critical. With the Air Force numbers, the Soviets could still damage or destroy 

most of the American SAC bases by mid-1961. The CIA numbers were only slightly 

less pessimistic, pushing the danger date back to late 1961. Whatever the fine 

differences, SAC still seemed dangerously vulnerable. 

By this time, for all their earlier objections, top Air Force officers had come to accept 

the assumptions about SAC vulnerability laid out by the Wohlstetter-Hoffman R-290 

report from RAND and by the Gaither Report. In the few years since, Air Force 

Chief of Staff General Tommy White and the new SAC Commander, General Tommy 

Power (LeMay left SAC around the time of the Gaither Committee and came to 

the Pentagon to become Vice Chief of Staff), had put in motion several programs 

on dispersal of bases and airborne alert of the bombers themselves, all with the 

purpose of reducing their vulnerability to attack. 

Yet the Air Force was compelled to take these steps only after realizing it would be 

in its Interest to do so. If the policy-makers were assuming that a certain percentage 

of the planes would get destroyed on the ground, that meant still more bombers 

for the Air Force—to allow for the attrition and still be able to fulfill the “military 

requirements.” And if SAC bombers were up in the air flying around all the time, 

that yielded two bonuses: higher morale for the pilots, who loved to fly, and a better 

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49

chance of getting “modernized” bombers sooner, since already-deployed ones will 

be worn out much sooner. In short, some of the R-290 and Gaither recommendations 

provided perfect intellectual rationales for a more steadily funded and larger 

Strategic Air Command. 

Significantly, the only portion of the R-290/Gaither program that the Air Force 

consistently and successfully resisted was the notion of putting the bombers inside 

underground hardened shelters. Officers argued that it would be too expensive, 

maybe $10 billion or more, and that it might not protect, ultimately, the bomber 

against radiation effects. But the real reason had more to do with Air Force interests. 

With hardening, the dispersal and airborne-alert programs, so advantageous to the 

Air Force budget, might be cut back. To spend money on offense, not defense, was 

practically dogma in Air Force circles. 

SAC was even more eager to use intelligence estimates as a method of advancing 

its own interests. The forceful leaders of SAC’s own intelligence agency at the time 

were Generals James Walsh and George Keegan. Keegan was the more fiery of the 

two. He received his first training in intelligence as a member of a small advisory 

group to the Air Force Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence in the early 1950s. 

Keegan’s boss was Professor Stefan Possony, an extremely right-wing Russophobic 

Sovietologist with a particular penchant for conspiratorial views of history. This 

advisory group’s mission was to brainstorm on what kinds of horrifying things the 

Russians might be doing, and then to find the evidence. 

Keegan had learned his job well, and was a full believer in the technique. He was a 

forceful speaker, a master showman, a superb briefer. Around the late 1950s, as even 

Air Force Intelligence was giving way on high Soviet ICBM estimates, SAC kept a 

full steam blowing. Keegan and Walsh had briefings, charts, diagrams, photographs 

proving that the Russians were already fielding ICBMs but that they were hiding 

them—in barn silos, medieval monasteries, mysterious-looking buildings out in the 

middle of nowhere. 

With so many Soviet missiles that you could never know precisely how many there 

were or where they were located, arguments for an enormous SAC force could 

proceed indefinitely. The military requirements worked both ways: the large number 

of Soviet ICBMs meant a large number of targets to hit, which required a large 

number of SAC bombers and missiles; likewise, with so many Soviet missiles that 

might attack SAC, America needed hundreds and hundreds more to allow for heavy 

attrition. The Air Force proper finally agreed officially with the view that the Soviets 

were probably engaging in deceptive practices in their ICBM program. But not even 

Air Force Intelligence was willing to go as far as Keegan. 

Still, with SAC or Air Force or even CIA intelligence estimates on the size of the nearfuture Soviet ICBM arsenal taken as the truth, the fundamental assumptions about 

the nature and magnitude of the Soviet threat could still be retained as legitimate. 

On the other hand, if the Army and Navy numbers were treated seriously, the Soviets 

would appear to pose essentially no great threat to SAC. They would not have 

enough missiles to do so until mid-1963; and by that time, the Navy would have 

several new Polaris submarines, nuclear-powered, each carrying sixteen nucleartipped missiles, based underwater and virtually invulnerable to attack. Moreover, 

thanks in part to such studies as R-290 and the Gaither Report, the Air Force would 

have started to field its new Minuteman ICBMs in dispersed and hardened shelters. 

THE MISSILE GAP
50

The Army-Navy numbers, in other words, said there was no great danger to SAC, and 

no missile gap. 

Throughout this period, nobody in the Senate knew the origins of the missile gap, 

knew that it sprang from the failure of the bomber gap to materialize. Nobody knew 

of the wide disagreements among the intelligence agencies as to the number of 

ICBMs the Soviets might have in place by the early 1960s. Nobody knew about the 

U-2 flights. Symington and most of the other Democrats, many of whom took their 

cues on this point from him, heard only about the Air Force Intelligence estimates, 

which (next to those of SAC Intelligence) were most pessimistic of all. Thus, when 

they heard Allen Dulles or Defense Secretary Neil McElroy or his successor as of 

December 1959, Thomas Gates, or even President Eisenhower say that there would 

be no missile gap, the Democrats and other critics of the Administration felt that 

these officials must be knaves or fools, that they were deluded or misled, that they 

were endangering the nation merely by their presence in high office. 

But Eisenhower did know the background of the bomber gap and the missile 

gap. When charges of the missile gap began to circulate widely among political 

opponents in 1958, he assigned his staff secretary, Brigadier General Andrew 

Goodpaster, to find out whatever happened to the mysteriously vanished bomber 

gap. Goodpaster went through all the old NIEs, talked with intelligence officers, and 

learned how the NIEs had assumed that another Bison plant would be built, how 

they relied on a host of assumptions concerning production rates that turned out to 

be false. When he reported his findings to Eisenhower, the President felt secure in 

resisting all the fuss about a new gap. And when, in 1959 and 1960, the CIA started 

to back off somewhat, when the year of maximum danger started to recede into the 

distant future, Eisenhower felt his judgment vindicated. 

On August 29, 1958, after he had met twice with Allen Dulles, Symington met with 

Eisenhower and gave him a letter, telling him that the intelligence community was 

wrong, that he was being misled. Eisenhower told Symington that whoever his 

sources were in Air Force Intelligence, they could not possibly know everything that 

those in the upper levels of the agency knew. Eisenhower never told Symington or 

anyone else in Congress about the U-2 or the Turkish radar site, but that was what 

he was talking about. 

The missile gap also dominated the discussions of the day at the RAND Corporation. 

But there it was a more sophisticated conceptualization than the simple bean-count 

comparisons tossed around by Symington and his followers. The strategists of RAND 

preferred to call it a “deterrence gap.” The issue was not so much that the Russians 

had more missiles as it was that SAC was so vulnerable that even the low side of 

the official intelligence estimates indicated that the Soviets would have enough 

missiles to knock out America’s power to strike back—in Bernard Brodie’s by-now 

ancient phrase, “to retaliate in kind”—after an aggressive first-strike. That being so, 

the nation’s and thus the free world’s ability to deter Soviet aggression was on the 

verge of being shattered.

Still, this more sophisticated view was the product of quantitative analysis, and 

the numbers came from the National Intelligence Estimates that foresaw an 

impending missile gap. And like the Stuart Symingtons of the world, most of the 

RAND strategists knew much less about those estimates than they thought they 

did. CIA policy on the distribution of the annual NIEs had changed after 1958: 

henceforth, no contracting firms—and that included RAND—were to receive copies. 

By coincidence, the 1958 NIE represented the peak year of the missile gap. It was 

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51

not until 1959 that the estimated numbers of future Soviet missiles began to go 

down and the Army and the Navy began to add their footnotes. But almost none of 

the RAND analysts knew anything about this. They received intelligence estimates 

only from the Air Force Chief of Staff, and did not know that, from 1959 on, the Air 

Force numbers were considerably higher than those of the rest of the intelligence 

community. If RAND got any dissenting data at all, it came from SAC Intelligence, 

whose officers thought that the Air Force estimates were on the low side. 

In quantitative studies, there is a technique known as “sensitivity analysis”: the 

idea is that in a world of uncertainties, an analyst should test the validity of his 

conclusions by altering the key assumptions; if within a reasonable range of 

assumptions the conclusions remain roughly the same, then they could reasonably 

be considered correct. Having read only intelligence estimates estimating 500 

Soviet ICBMs by the early 1960s, the RAND strategists thought they were being 

more than reasonable to do sensitivity analysis assuming that the Soviets attacked 

the U.S. with only 150 or even 250 ICBMs. They had no way of knowing that some 

intelligence agencies were predicting only 50. 

At the height of the missile-gap period, Albert Wohlstetter decided to go public. It 

was an unusual thing to do among the RAND strategists. With few exceptions, they 

had stuck to the more restricted world of top-secret studies and high-level briefings. 

First, there was the matter of security: not much could be said without broaching 

regulations on classified materials. Second, there was the elitist notion, pervasive 

at RAND, that influencing military officers and Pentagon officials was what really 

counted, that airing views to the general public served little purpose and might, in 

fact, be seen as stepping out of bounds or displaying disloyalty to RAND’s sponsor, 

the U.S. Air Force. Third, at least in Wohlstetter’s case, there was the condescension 

toward “the essay tradition,” toward popular articles that lacked or failed to reflect 

the rigors of systems analysis.

Still, in May 1958, Rowan Gaither, Phil Mosley, a professor at Columbia who also sat 

on RAND’s board, and Jim Perkins, a former adviser to the Gaither Committee, asked 

Wohlstetter to give a talk on SAC vulnerability to the prestigious Council on Foreign 

Relations in New York. Naturally, Wohlstetter accepted. Among the attendants was 

Hamilton Armstrong, editor of the Council’s influential quarterly, Foreign Affairs. 

Armstrong was impressed with the talk and asked Wohlstetter to write it up for 

the journal. 

The article appeared in the January 1959 issue, and was titled “The Delicate Balance 

of Terror.” It was essentially a distillation of the two major works that Wohlstetter 

had directed at RAND, the overseas-base study and R-290. Yet unlike those analyses, 

“The Delicate Balance of Terror” was aimed at the “outsiders” taking part in the 

defense debate, the civilian “defense-intellectual” community in Washington and 

at Harvard and MIT, the denizens of the foreign-policy establishment who read and 

wrote for magazines like Foreign Affairs and who influenced the tenor and substance 

of the general discussion of all such issues. 

It had been a nearly universal assumption among this outside community, even 

among those who vigorously disagreed about much else, that America’s ability to 

retaliate after a Soviet first strike was pretty well assured. Wohlstetter’s article 

challenged that assumption. Without quantifying the argument, as he had in the 

classified report, he made the basic point that SAC was terribly vulnerable, that the 

U.S. might not be able to retaliate with enough power to deter Soviet aggression. 

The public debate, he wrote, was misleading on this score, tending to confuse 

THE MISSILE GAP
52

deterrence “with matching or exceeding the enemy’s ability to strike first,” when the 

critical element was to build a nuclear force that could survive a Soviet first-strike 

and proceed to carry out a devastating second-strike. 

That thesis had been around ever since Bernard Brodie wrote The Absolute Weapon 

in 1946, but it was news to most readers when Wohlstetter wrote that the “notion 

that a carefully planned surprise attack can be checkmated almost effortlessly, that, 

in short, we may resume our deep pre-Sputnik sleep, is wrong....” Correcting the 

problem of vulnerability and maintaining the delicate balance of terror will involve 

measures that “are hard, do involve sacrifice ... and, above all... entail a new image 

of ourselves in a world of persistent danger.” He concluded, “It is by no means 

certain that we shall meet the task.” 

The article created a huge sensation among the defense intellectuals along the 

Washington-New York-Cambridge corridor. Its language was somber, its logic 

compelling, its tone and argument confirming the general feeling among the foreignpolicy establishment that Eisenhower was bungling the job miserably and putting the 

nation at great risk.

More critically, at a time when many feared that the Russians were surpassing 

the United States, Wohlstetter’s article helped create an intellectual framework in 

which this fear could be stated respectably. The danger was not the “international 

Communist conspiracy” or anything of an embarrassingly ideological or, for that 

matter, political nature. Rather, it was this almost mechanical concept of a very 

delicately balanced set of scales that once tipped even slightly off balance, threw 

the entire order of international relations out of kilter, placed the West in supreme 

danger, wiped out the deterrent power of America’s nuclear weapons and slid the 

world toward the precipice of a calamitously destructive war that the Soviet Union 

would almost certainly win. 

Wohlstetter had diligently sought to avoid any connection between his article 

and the missile-gap thesis. Indeed, he explicitly stated in the piece that numerical 

comparisons between Russian and American missile arsenals were beside the 

point, that it was how much strength we had after a Soviet first-strike that counted. 

But his views were actually much closer to those of the missile-gap doomsayers 

than he cared to acknowledge. They were subtler and more sophisticated, but the 

assumptions in both were identical. They were based on the highly pessimistic 

intelligence estimates that lay at the heart of the missile gap. And they contained 

the same assumptions about Russian intentions, the same judgment that the Soviets 

would very likely threaten to attack the United States once they had, on paper, the 

technical ability to do so. 

Wohlstetter’s contribution to the period was an escalation of the intellectual plane 

on which the missile gap could be blithely assumed and seriously discussed. The 

very phrase “missile gap” was coming to symbolize everything complacent, stultified, 

unforward-looking about the Eisenhower Administration. For those who sensed that 

merely comparing missile numbers might be a popularly potent but intellectually 

inadequate critique of Eisenhower’s defense programs, “The Delicate Balance of 

Terror” provided a new platform for attack. Among the critics who would inevitably 

have great influence in the next Democratic Administration, the RAND technique of 

how to assess the strategic balance and how to deter nuclear war—developed and 

calculated in detailed studies over nearly the past decade—triumphed. 

Over that same decade, another thread of ideas was being spun at the RAND 

Corporation—ideas about not only how to deter nuclear war, but also how to 

fight one.

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53

Chapter 10: THE MISSILE GAP Endnotes

155 “first, destroy or”: “Estimate of Sino-Soviet Bloc Capabilities World- Wide,’59-

63 and Assessment of Dimensions of Soviet ICBM Threat to Security of U.S.,” p.2, 

Thomas White Papers, Box 6, McConnell Report f older, LoC* 

155 “the Soviets might”: Ibid., p. 8.*

155 November 12 NIE: Summarized in memo, Lawrence McQuade to Paul Nitze, “But 

Where Did the Missile Gap Go?” May31; 1963, p.7, National Security File, Box298, 

Missile Gap, Feb.-May 1963, JFKL.

155 number of Atlas missiles: Letter, Sen. Stuart Symington to Eisenhower, Aug.29, 

1958, White House office file, Office of Staff Secretary, Subject Series, Alpha 

Subseries, Box24, Symington Letter [8-12/58] folder, DDEL. 

156 1955 air-show overcount: Lawrence Freedman, U.S. Intelligence and the Soviet 

Strategic Threat (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1977), p.66. The rest of the section 

on the bomber gap comes, unless otherwise specified, from interviews.

161 November 1957 NIE: Memo, McQuade to Nitze, loc cit. 

161 NIE on Soviet first move: Ibid., p.9.

161 100 ICBMs by 1959: Ibid., pp.7-8.

163 Symington-Lanphier-Dulles meetings: Howard Stoertz, Jr., Memo for Record, 

“Discussion of Soviet and U.S. Long Range Ballistic Missile Programs,” Aug. 18, 

1958, White House Office file, Office of Staff Secretary, Subject Series, Alpha 

Subseries, Box24, Symington Letter folder, DDEL;* letter, Stuart Symington to 

Eisenhower, Aug. 29, 1958, loc cit.

165 February9, 1960 NIE: Memo, McQuade to Nitze, loc cit.; memo, G.W. Rathjens, 

“Proposed Ban on Missile Testing,” p.4, White House Office file, Office of Assistant f 

or Science and Technology, Box1, Disarmament, Missiles [5/ 58-3/60 ].DDEL.

165-66 Army-Navy estimates: Memo, McQuade to Nitze, loc cit., pp. 11-12; and 

interviews.

166 Air Force reduces vulnerability: Memo to Assistant C/S, Installations, “Protective 

Construction,” Nov.13, 1956, Nathan Twining Papers. Box 104, Air Force Council C/S 

Decisions, Vol.III, Tab 39/48a, LoC;* and the following from Thomas White Papers:* 

letter, Thomas Power to White, Oct. 21, 1957, Box 41, 1957 Top Secret General 

folder; memo, Curtis LeMay to White. “SAC Airborne Alert Plan,” Dec. 23, 1958, Box 

14, Air Force Council folder; memo on 1959 Annual Commanders Conference, Jan. 

17, 1959. Box 29, 1959 Top Secret General folder; Decision Memo, “SAC Airborne 

Alert Plan,” Mar 31, 1959, Box 25, Air Force Council Decisions 1959, Tab 6; memo, 

Curtis LeMay to White, “Vulnerability of SAC Bombers in Early1960,” Feb.18, 1959, 

Box 25, Air Force Council folder; memo, Thomas Power to JCS, “Establishment of an 

Airborne Alert,” June 23, 1960, Box 34, SAC folder.

THE MISSILE GAP
54

167 Air Force against hardening: Memo, Gen. Thomas White to C/ S, “Protective 

Construction Criteria,” Oct. 31, 1956, Nathan Twining Papers, *Box 82, 1956 Air 

Force Council folder; memo, Curtis LeMay to C/S, “Vulnerability of SAC Bombers in 

Early1960,” loc.cit.;* and interviews.

168 Air Force on deception: After meetings held Feb. 24-27, 1959, the Air Force 

Council noted, “Soviet security measures will permit the development of forces 

under concealment, capable of neutralizing the effect of our programmed deterrent 

force.” Memo for C/S, ”The Threat.” May 9, 1959, Thomas White Papers, Box 29, 

1959 Top Secret General folder;* and interviews.

169 Symington and Eisenhower; Andrew Goodpaster, Memo of Conference with 

President, Aug. 29, 1958, and Letter, Symington to Eisenhower, Aug. 29, 1958, White 

House Office File, Office of Staff Secretary, Subject Series, Alpha Subseries, Box 24, 

Symington Letter folder D DEL.*

169 “deterrence gap.” E.g., Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton Univ. 

Press. 1960), pp. 201, 474.

171 “with matching “: Wohlstetter, “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” Foreign Affairs, 

Jan. 1959, pp.212-13 .

171”notion that a “: Ibid., p. 234.

171 “are hard”: Ibid., p. 234.

PENETRATING THE IRON CURTAIN: RESOLVING THE MISSILE GAP WITH TECHNOLOGY
55ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The CIA Historical Collections Division gratefully acknowledges the following for 

their courtesy and assistance in providing material for this collection:

Fred Kaplan for use of Chapter 10, “The Missile Gap,” from his book, 

The Wizards of Armageddon.

The staff and Archivists of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and 

Museum, for their assistance and support in locating and providing Presidential 

Papers, newsreel coverage and photographs for this report.

The staff and Archivists of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library 

and Museum, for their assistance and support in locating and providing newsreel 

coverage and photographs for this report.

The staff and Archivists of the National Archives and Records Administration

for their assistance and support in locating and providing newsreel coverage for 

this report.
56

DVD CONTENTS

The Central Intelligence Agency’s Information Management Services reviewed, 

redacted, and released 189 documents for this study. Almost all were previously 

classified, some declassified and released earlier, some with some text restored 

from earlier redactions and some released for the first time. The accompanying 

DVD contains the 189 documents totaling more than 4,200 pages of material. All 

documents are also available on the CIA website at www.cia.gov. The material is 

organized into the following categories:

DECLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS FOLDER CONTAINS:

Catalogue of documents for the Missile Gap document Collection—generally 

arranged chronologically and featuring CIA Intelligence Reports, National 

Intelligence Estimates, CIA Clandestine Services Information Reports, Photographic 

Intelligence Reports and official memoranda relating to the missile gap. There is also 

appended a list of frequently used acronyms, codewords and abbreviations;

Document List generally arranged chronologically;

The Released Documents, Accessible Directly or from the Catalogue or List.

The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library provided formerly classified documents from 

its collection related to the missile gap for this event:

Catalogue of the Official Papers of the Kennedy Administration on the Missile Gap;

Document List of Official Papers of the Kennedy Administration on the Missile Gap;

The Released Documents.

The DVD also contains some topical newsreel coverage and photographs of 

President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev at the Vienna Summit, June 1961.

The DVD includes information on how to view the materials and will work on most 

computers. The documents are in PDF format.

All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed in this booklet are those of 

the editors. They do not necessarily reflect official positions or views of the Central 

Intelligence Agency or any other US government entity, past or present. Nothing 

in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying US government 

endorsement of an article’s factual statements and interpretations.

PENETRATING THE IRON CURTAIN: RESOLVING THE MISSILE GAP WITH TECHNOLOGY
57
58

The Historical Review Program, part of the CIA Information Management Services, 

identifies, collects, and produces historically relevant collections of declassified 

documents.

These collections, centered on a theme or event, are joined with supporting analysis, 

essays, video, audio, and photographs, and showcased in a booklet plus DVD, and 

made available to historians, scholars, and the public.

All of our Historical Collections are available on the CIA Library Publication page 

located at

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/historical-collection-publications/ or 

contact us at 

HistoricalCollections@UCIA.gov.

100-105679-10

CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA