Let me share with you a vision of the future which offers hope. It is that we embark on a program to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive. Let us turn to the very strengths in technology that spawned our great industrial base and that have given us the quality of life we enjoy today.
Probably a little-known fact from the history of our post-war air force is the fact that between 1945 and 1989 our pilots claimed not only several victories of various types of aircraft during service at the State Air Defense, but also in several cases became a real target of live fire of foreign aircraft.
All these events are all the more spicy because an Allied aircraft from the Warsaw Pact had always hit our aircraft and not an "imperialist" adversary on the other side of the Iron Curtain, as might be expected. In the following text, we will be convinced that this was mostly due to either a mistake by the ground-controlled interception station, a pilot error, or the interplay of both of these factors and other related circumstances together.
The first satellite was launched by the Soviets on the night of October 4, 1957. The Americans had little to do with it. Based on intelligence information since February 1954, they expected Moscow to complete development of an intercontinental missile in the second half of the 1950s. The CIA's Central Intelligence Agency warned President Eisenhower on August 18, 1957, a few days before TASS announced the successful test of the first long-range missile, that the Russians were indeed preparing such a weapon......
The first Soviet jet flying boat. Because the Soviet Union did not have aircraft carriers and did not own long-range bombers, some tasks had to be performed by flying boats. Their tasks were to include attacking enemy naval alliances, but the road to such an aircraft was long and the concept became obsolete before it went into production.
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