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Cold War term used in the United States

In the United States, during the Cold War, the missile gap was the perceived superiority of the number and power of the USSR's missiles in comparison with those of the U. S. (a lack of military parity). The gap in the ballistic missile arsenals did not exist except in exaggerated estimates, made by the Gaither Committee in 1957 and in United States Air Force (USAF) figures. Even the contradictory CIA figures for the USSR's weaponry, which showed a clear advantage for the US, were far above the actual count. Like the bomber gap of only a few years earlier, it was soon demonstrated that the gap was entirely fictional. John F. Kennedy is credited with inventing the term in 1958 as part of the ongoing election campaign in which a primary plank of his rhetoric was that the Eisenhower administration was weak on defense. It was later learned that Kennedy was informed of the actual situation during the campaign, which has led scholars to question what Kennedy knew and when he knew it. There has been some speculation that he was aware of the illusory nature of the missile gap from the start and that he was using it solely as a political tool, an example of policy by press release.

The Soviet launch of Sputnik 1, on October 4, 1957, highlighted the technological achievements of the Soviets and sparked some worrying questions for the politicians and general public of the US. Although US military and civilian agencies were well aware of Soviet satellite plans, as they were publicly announced as part of the International Geophysical Year, US President Dwight Eisenhower's announcements that the event was unsurprising found little support among the American public, which was still struggling with McCarthyism. Political opponents seized on the event, helped by Eisenhower's ineffectual response, as further proof that the US was "fiddling as Rome burned." Senator John F. Kennedy stated "the nation was losing the satellite missile race with the Soviet Union because of complacent miscalculations, penny pinching, budget cutbacks, incredibly confused mismanagement, and wasteful rivalries and jealousies." The Soviets capitalized on their strengthened position with false claims of Soviet missile capabilities, claiming on December 4, 1958, "Soviet ICBMs are at present in mass production." Five days later, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev boasted the successful testing of an ICBM with an impressive 8000 mile (12875 km) range. Coupled with the US's failed launch of the Titan ICBM (Inter Continental Ballistic Missile) that month, a sense of Soviet superiority in missile technology became prevalent.

National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) 11 10 57, issued in December 1957, predicted that the Soviets would "probably have a first operational capability with up to 10 prototype ICBMs" at "some time during the period from mid 1958 to mid 1959." The numbers started to inflate. A similar report gathered only a few months later, NIE 11 5 58, released in August 1958, concluded that the USSR had "the technical and industrial capability to have an operational capability with 100 ICBMs" some time in 1960 and perhaps 500 ICBMs "some time in 1961, or at the latest in 1962." They kept the American public in the dark even though they knew from the start that the Soviets were monitoring the U 2 overflights. On the very day of the first U 2 overflight the Soviet ambassador to Washington protested the high altitude violation of Soviet airspace, a fact denied by Washington and reported on by the press. Curtis LeMay argued that the large stocks of missiles were in the areas not photographed by the U 2s, and arguments broke out over the Soviet factory capability, in an effort to estimate their production rate. In a widely syndicated article in 1959, Joseph Alsop even went so far as to describe "classified intelligence" as placing the Soviet missile count as high as 1,500 by 1963, while the US would have only 130 at that time. It is known today that even the CIA's estimate was too high; the actual number of ICBMs, even including interim use prototypes, was 4. Although U2 intelligence programs provided unprecedented and reassuring evidence that there was a missile gap in favor of the United States, President Eisenhower’s administration was accused of allowing the Soviet Union to accumulate a missile gap against the United States. The false claims behind a Soviet Missile gap began after CIA Director Allen W. Dulles presented new estimates of the Soviet’s nuclear program to the National Security Council on January 7, 1960. The report presented by Dulles showed the Soviet Union did not have a crash program to build ICBMs and that they only had 50 ICBMs operational. Disagreements between the future capabilities of the Soviet Union to produce ICBMs by members of the National Security Council leaked to the public causing the false notion of a missile gap. As members of the National Security Council, representatives of the U. S. Air Force pessimistically estimated that the Soviet Union could possess more than 800 ICBMs by 1963. One week after the National Security Council meeting, Washington Post reporter, John G. Norris, published an article that selectively reported and misinterpreted highly classified information that claimed the National Security Council acknowledged a missile gap with the Soviets and that they would possess over 1000 ICBMs by 1963. Later that month, The New York Times would publish an article that claimed that there was “clear evidence that the Russians [had] superiority in intercontinental ballistic missiles.” The distortions and inconsistencies caused by the inaccurate articles in the media led the public to mistrust the Eisenhower administration. Senator Symington accused the administration of “deliberately manipulating the intelligence estimate to mislead the public.” Journalists, such as Joe Alsop, charged the Eisenhower administration with “gambling the nation’s future” on questionable intelligence. Alsop’s ideas would appeal to John F. Kennedy who incorporated them in his election campaigns that criticized the Eisenhower administration for allowing a missile gap to exist.

A second claim of a missile gap appeared in 1974. Albert Wohlstetter, a professor at the University of Chicago, accused the CIA of systematically underestimating Soviet missile deployment in his 1974 foreign policy article, "Is There a Strategic Arms Race?" Wohlstetter concluded that the US was allowing the USSR to achieve military superiority by not closing a perceived missile gap. Many conservatives then began a concerted attack on the CIA's annual assessment of the Soviet threat. That led to an exercise in competitive analysis, with a group called Team B being created with the production of a highly controversial report. According to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the USA had a six to one advantage in the number of nuclear warheads over the USSR by 1976. A 1979 briefing note on the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of the missile gap concluded that the NIE's record on estimating the Soviet missile force in the 1970s was mixed. The NIE estimates for initial operational capability (IOC) date for MIRVed ICBMs and SLBMs were generally accurate, as were the NIE predictions on the development of Soviet strategic air defenses. However, the NIE predictions also overestimated the scope of infrastructure upgrades in the Soviet system and underestimated the speed of Soviet improvement in accuracy and proliferation of re entry vehicles. NIE results were regarded as improving but still vague and showed broad fluctuations and had little long term validity.

The whole idea of a missile gap was parodied in the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb in which a doomsday device is built by the Soviets because they had read in The New York Times that the US was working along similar lines and wanted to avoid a "Doomsday Gap." As the weapon is set up to go off automatically if the USSR is attacked, which occurs as the movie progresses, the president is informed that all life on the surface will be killed off for a period of years. The only hope for survival is to select important people and place them deep underground in mine shafts until the radiation clears. The generals almost immediately begin to worry about a "mine shaft gap" between the US and Soviets. In reference to the alleged "missile gap" itself, General Turgidson mentions off hand at one point that the United States actually has a five to one rate of missile superiority against the USSR. The Soviet ambassador himself also explains that one of the major reasons that the Soviets began work on the doomsday machine was that they realized that they simply could never match the rate of American military production (let alone outproduce American missile construction). The doomsday machine cost only a small fraction of what the Soviets normally spent on defense in a single year.