Part 4: Chapter 12, The Missile Bluff Summary and Analysis

Khrushchev was bluffing the whole time he was talking about the U.S. lagging behind Russia. The Soviet rocket was inefficient since they were using a cluster of smaller engines which gave it a shorter range. This actually inhibited their efforts in the 1960s and put them behind more and more. The Soviet SS-6 was more than ten years behind the American minuteman missile which was already being designed. But the Soviets played the propaganda for all it was worth. The SS-6 had a twenty percent failure rate which meant that at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, there were thirty-five missiles that could be launched successfully. This is not the mass production that they were leading the world to believe.

The U.S. had its own stockpile of missiles. There were...