There was a also great deal of fear. Many Americans thought that Soviet capabilities had outstripped our own. There was anxious talk of the Bomber Gap and the Missile Gap. Some of you may remember the days when people built bomb shelters and stocked them with cans of Spam. At that time, if you can imagine it, the fear of Moscow was far greater than the fear of cholesterol.
Decisions based on fear and imagination are generally bad ones.
Our leaders needed real, concrete information on Soviet military capabilities. Without that, they had no way to build weapons that could deter a Soviet attack. They had no way to decide whether or not a threat justified the use of our own nuclear weapons. To base a decision like that on fear would be disastrous. But hard information about the Soviet Union was hard to come by.