Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"In 1953, Russia also tested an H-bomb, a mere nine months after the American test. Moreover, the Soviet government had devoted considerable resources to exploiting German wartime technology on rocketry. By 1955 the USSR was mass-producing a medium-range ballistic missile (the SS-3); by 1957 it had fired an intercontinental ballistic missile over a range of five thousand miles, using the same rocket engine which shot Sputnik, the earth’s first artificial satellite, into orbit in October of the same year. Shocked by these Russian advances, and by the implication that both U.S. cities and U.S. bomber forces might be vulnerable to a sudden Soviet strike, Washington committed massive resources to its own intercontinental ballistic missiles . . ." [Kennedy: Great Powers, p. 388] "Today a ring of geo-synchronous weather satellites produces constantly updated images of the globe. . . . For the first time a complete picture of the Earth's complex interaction of atmosphere, landmasses and seas is emerging." [DK Timelines, p. 457]