Lockheed’s D-21 Tagboard Supersonic Spy Drone
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
I need to track down some good books on this guy, he sounds interesting.
"That damned Swede can actually see air."
He spent some space talking about the U-2 and that material is the kind of thing I had in mind when talking about how the book gives an impression of Kelly Johnson. For example, prior to reading the book I didn't know that while the CIA people expected downed pilots to kill themselves, Kelly Johnson thought that was nuts, was sympathetic to Francis Gary Powers, and gave him a job as a test pilot when he returned from captivity.
I think the book is well written and accomplishes a lot with small anecdotes like that one. It was a lucky find for me. I pulled it off a bookshelf in an airport convenience store because it was the only book that didn't look insanely boring.
It's good for a peek into his life, his early years, stuff like that. Definitely does give you some sense of what sort of person would make a comment like the above.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_(satellite)
Makes you wonder what they're testing at Groom Lake these days, which ISN'T public.
https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/pictures-boeing-u...
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower
Because, you aren't going to have any of those fine things if the Communists succeed with their plans.
Did the US chronically overstate the Soviet threat, inflating the defence budget well beyond what was necessary? One could make a good case that it did.
From the start the Soviet Union was on the defensive. Stalin reigned in the Red Army in the final months of the Second World War from taking West Germany, for fear of inflaming the US and UK. He refused to support the communists (mostly ex-resistance fighters) in the Greek Civil War for the same reason. Nor did he lend support to the Chinese Revolution.
The US was the far greater power from the beginning of the Cold War. The Soviet Union had only industrialised in the last generation and was wrecked by the Nazi invasion. While it showed impressive growth into the 1960s, under Brezhnev it began to stagnate.
Various US operations (e.g. Vietnam) and defence programmes (e.g. the Strategic Defence Initiative) were not only unnecessary, but detrimental to the US. Both of these examples were based on exaggerations of the Soviet threat: Vietnam on domino theory; SDI on the phantom 'missile gap'.
Even in 1945 they've tried to annex part of Persia and wrestle Bosfor Straight control from Turkey.
In fact there is an obvious parallel between the USSR's attempt to gain access to the Turkish Straits and the United State's repeated interventions to build and control the Panama Canal. The only difference is that while the United States was able to dominate its sphere of influence, the Soviet Union's attempt to intimidate Turkey failed. Instead of gaining access to a vital strategic waterway, it led to the Truman Doctrine. Don't forget that one of the pivotal events of the Cold War - the Cuban missile crisis - was based on the same asymmetry. The United States had Jupiter missiles in Italy and Turkey, but would not accept Soviet missiles in Cuba, a country that it had tried and failed to invade.
Before the end of the Second World War the United States had set its sights on something far more ambitious than a regional sphere of interest: global primacy. The Soviet Union never had the capability to do that, or considered it a realistic goal. It was bunkered in a traditional land empire.
When I say that the Soviet Union was on the 'defensive', I mean that in the context of its bipolar confrontation with the United States, not that it never engaged in aggression. Obviously it did, often brutally.
There is no direct confrontation standing at the origin of the conflict. Hence it being a 'Cold' War. It emerged from an accumulation of strategic moves over time. Each power worked to advance its interests, while watching other powers (namely Germany, Japan, and the British Empire) fade. At some point, they recognised that they were in direct geopolitical competition. When they did, it was clear that the Soviet Union was the lesser power. Its actions reflected that reality.
If you did want to identify an 'originary' moment to the conflict - which again, I think is an unhelpful way of approaching the subject - then it would have to be the US intervention in the Russian Civil War against the Bolsheviks.
You could simultaneously detonate every functional nuclear weapon on earth inside of the borders of Texas and still not manage to kill everyone in the state. The notion that global nuclear war would end all of civilization, has always been a good form of propaganda aimed at preventing nations from doing something so stupid. The earth is really, really big.
What they've been spending money out there for the last 30 years is a really good question. The USAF has a big "black budget". We're not seeing, 20 years later, impressive results from it comparable to the SR-71.
There's the F-35, which is a demonstration of the power of money. A VTOL stealth air superiority fighter/bomber. $100 million each. With enough money, you can build a real Transformer.[1]
Titan II ICBMs?
But imagine the US freakout if the Soviet Union had built something comparable in capability to the SR71 and overflown CONUS during the cold war.
So much about the Cold War era makes more sense if you keep in mind that a big part of the US strategy was to turn it into a cash-burning contest in which the Soviets would go broke first. The waste was the point!
This was almost 50 years ago. I feel so cheated!
The Chinese Aviation Museum in Beijing has a D-21 in somewhat less airworthy condition.