Did the US give Russia a friendly phonecall before firing each of the space shots of the 1960’s? I mean…so it would not be (potentially) misconstrued as being an act of war during the thick of the Cold War? - Jinx
Countries have always had to do that and still do today. Those nuclear warning systems are alive and well and there have been some nervous incidents when countries have launched rockets and missiles without proper communication (none of them involved the U.S. as far as I know).
Only once . . . for twenty minutes.
There is a saying about something being “as spontaneous as a space launch,” i.e., not spontaneous at all. The space shots were well-covered by the media weeks if not months beforehand. The launches were shown on live television on all three networks, and covered by the world media (including Russian journalists).
What about smaller launches, for testing or launching mundane satellites?
The Norwegians gave Russia a bit of a scare back in 1991 with an innocuous (to Norway) rocket launch.
Just to clarify, that was in response to Walloon’s post. Was there a phone call for every test launch. Surely some of them would be done with a certain amount of secrecy, to protect the location of a sub or other facility?
Payloads were not loaded in plain view. Neigther sideattacked rockets at the other’s launch pads. Everything launched was tracked to make sure the nuke button could be pressed in an instant. Speculation that a launch carrying something benign, also carried equipment of military nature, was flung about. If one side thought of someway to accomplish something, other’s could too.
“Countries” in the plural? “Always”?
My understanding is that for many/most/all of the early Soviet flights, everything was kept very secret until after the flight had landed safely. IOW, the USSR most certainly did not give the USA any “friendly phonecalls” those flights.
Why those shots were not misconstrued as being an attack is an excellent question, which I’d like to see some discussion about…
In theory, at least, the launching country could tell the US “It’s just a satellite” when the rocket was really carrying a nuke. But as mentioned above, it’d be monitored just the same.
I believe that prior notification to each other of launches by the US and the Soviet Union dated back to the Accidents Measures Agreement of 1971, specifically Article 4. That was subsequently superceded by the Ballistic Missile Launch Notification Agreement of 1988.
Offhand, I suspect that it’s because (even amidst worries about “missile gaps”) it was realised in the 1960s that neither side yet had enough ICBM capability to launch a devastating knockout attack. There thus wasn’t the much more hairtrigger “use it or lose it” fear that developed later. In the 1960s a stray launch that got through would still leave you with more than enough weapons to retaliate by reacting at relative leisure. By the 1980s that had developed into scenarios where a few initial launches might be used to try and blind you with EMP, closely followed by thousands of missiles coming over the horizon at you.
Even in the sixties both sides could fairly quickly tell whether a launch was a ballistic missile or a space shot. The BMEWS radar stations were looking out over the North Pole - the direction of threat - and could pick up ballistic targets during the mid-course phase.
The track of a ballistic missile is very different from a rocket lofting a satellite into orbit. As the name sames, a ballistic missile travels in a high (1200km apogee), ballistic arc with an end point you can calculate. Most satellites (at least in those days) went into low earth orbit (say 200km up). Of course, the problem arises when the Soviets started developing FOBS - the Fractional Orbit Bombardment System - designed to to go into a north to south, low earth orbit, cross the South Pole and then de-orbit as it approached North America from the south where there were no early warning radars. 