Our old friend David Sussman continues to do great work at Whiskey Politics.
If you are an aviation or cold war history buff this is a must listen podcast. Enjoy.
http://whiskeypolitics.net/francis-gary-powers/
http://whiskeypolitics.net/francis-gary-powers/
Is this the U-2 pilot’s son or the U-2 pilot?
His son.
Brent, you have to link manually in the OP but it does it automatically in a comment.
http://whiskeypolitics.net/francis-gary-powers/
Why were I there two links?
Oops. Why were there two links?
What is fascinating about the Cold War is that there was no attempt or even thought of winning. It wasn’t until Reagan that there was even mention of beating the Soviet Union.
Angelo Codevilla draws the line of such bad thinking all the way to Wilson and the Progressives. Way back at the turn of the century there was a loss of vision and an associated blindness to what the national interest was. The end result was that we made the USSR an invulnerable entity, at least in our minds, an immutable object with whom we could, at best, keep the status quo. No serious thought was given to the concept of actually winning.
The end result was the rise of a whole community of “experts” who supposedly knew all the intricacies of nukes and who could not “explain” such complexities to the average person because it was beyond their comprehension. Along with them came the rise of the “intelligence community”, which to this day form an untouchable collection of personnel.
Gary Powers was one of those personalities of the time, famous for having his U-2 aircraft shot down from under him. Somehow this created some kind of crisis, yet the Russians were well aware we were overflying them. They only got lucky in taking Powers down, and they tried mightily to take down the Blackbird, the SR-71 to no avail. Indeed, I have often wanted to kick myself for not getting the poster I saw at Beale. It showed an SR and the caption – “1200 shots, no hits!”
Strangely the U-2 is still operational, although I have to wonder if there isn’t a serious replacement for the SR. Satellites have their limits, so something needs to be launched that has some loiter capability. The problem is that the data collection is not real time.
Powers’ call for a Cold War museum only ought to be considered if we can understand the basic flaw of the Cold War, expunge it from our foreign policy, and come up with a serious plan for our peace.
People in the early days of the cold war had all seen devastation and were far more focused on avoiding mutual annihilation than ‘winning’.
Reagan came along at a time when winning by economic power was feasible as we had learned to dodge the WW3 bullet over thirty years.
I would suggest that that was the problem – no one thought about winning so the game was described as “unwinnable”. We came to accept that our only alternative was MAD. It would have been nice to have been offered some alternatives.