A nation must think before it acts.
FPRI’s Walter McDougall Cited in The News & Observer on Sputnik
North Korea’s demonstrations this year of (perhaps) a thermonuclear bomb and an intercontinental ballistic missile could be America’s Sputnik event of the 21st century.
When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite of Earth, on Oct. 4, 1957, it frightened many Americans. They suddenly realized that the Soviets were not the technologically backward people they had imagined, and it suggested to the American national security community that the Soviets might be able to hit a U.S. city with a thermonuclear bomb.
Comparing the similarities and differences between these two technological coups by communist adversaries, 60 years apart, helps place Kim Jong Un in a useful historical perspective.