I nominate Nikita Krushchev to be the most important figure in the cold war, literally playing 3d chess with a bloodthirsty imperialistic regime and preventing nuclear war.

Commenting on Kennedy’s government giving the OK to launch the Bay of Pigs attack on Cuba:

“ If you did this as the first step towards the unleashing of war, well then, it is evident that nothing else is left to us but to accept this challenge of yours. If, however, you have not lost your self-control and sensibly conceive what this might lead to, then, Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly of what terrible forces our countries dispose.”

-the man himself

  • SSJ2Marx
    ·
    9 months ago

    They pretty much started the space program from scratch

    Just want to add that Russian rocket experimentation actually predates the Soviet Union by a decade or so. IMO if the Soviets had prioritized them, they could have had V2-sized rockets before the Germans (but not prioritizing them was the right move, considering how useless the V2s ended up being in the grand scheme of things).

    • Kaplya
      ·
      9 months ago

      Not by that much. Quote from Boris Chertok’s Rockets and People, Vol. 1:

      Before 1945, neither we, the Americans, nor the Brits had been able to develop liquid-propellant rocket engines with a thrust greater than 1.5 metric tons … the Germans had successfully developed and mastered a liquid-propellant rocket engine with a thrust of up to 27 metric tons - more than eighteen times greater! What is more, they had produced these engines in large-scale series production by the thousands! And the automatic guidance system! It was one thing to fundamentally and theoretically show that for the given level of technology it was possible to control a missile’s flight and consequently the engine mode in flight at a range of 300 kilometers; it was quite another thing to put this into practice and bring the entire system up to a level suitable for acceptance as an operational armament!

      But you are correct in that not prioritizing them was the right move. The Soviets prioritized on solid fuel rockets and the result was the Katyushas that wreaked havoc on the German army. Focusing on developing V-2 like rockets would have been useless fighting against Nazi Germany.