I have recently started re-reading (after many years) Arthur C. Clarke's "Profiles of the Future" (2nd edition revised in 1973). I find it amusing, fascinating and eye-opening to see how a future "profiled" in 1973 has panned out 40+ years later.
At the end of the first chapter (called Hazards of Prophesy: Failure of Nerve) Clarke wrote about his take on one of the reasons why he thought the Soviets got the initial jump on the USA in Space.
"When Dr (Vannevar) Bush spoke to the Senate Committee in December of the same year (1945), the only important secret about the atomic bomb was that it weighed five tons. Anyone could then work out in his head , as Lord Cherwelll had done, that a rocket to deliver it across intercontinental ranges would have to weigh about 200 tons - as against the mere fourteen tons of the them awe-inspiring V2.
The outcome was the greatest Failure of Nerve in all history, which changed the future of the world - indeed, of many worlds. Faced with the same facts and the same calculations, American and Russian technology took two separate roads. The Pentagon - accountable to the taxpayer - virtually abandoned long-range rockets for almost half a decade, until the development of thermonuclear bombs made it possible to build warheads almost five times lighter, yet fifty times more powerful than the amusing firecracker that was dropped on Hiroshima.
The Russians had no such inhibitions. Faced with the need for a 200 ton rocket, they went right ahead and built it. By the time it was perfected, it was no longer required for military purposes, for Soviet physicists had by-passed the Unites States' billion-dollar tritium bomb cul-de-sac and gone straight to the far cheaper lithium bomb. Having backed the wrong horse in rocketry, the Russians then entered it for a far more important event - and won the race to space."
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