U.S. officials were still digesting the ominous fact of Soviet nuclear progress when Premier Nikita Khrushchev drove home the point with an atom-rattling, bomb-brandishing speech before a Moscow convention of the Communist-dominated World Federation of Trade Unions.
Charging the West with preparing for war, Khrushchev cried: "We would be slobbering idiots if we did not carry out the nuclear tests." As a result of its test program, said Khrushchev, the Soviet Union had perfected 50-and 100-megaton bombs—and some that were even bigger. What was more, Khrushchev boasted that Russia could readily convert the rockets that orbited its two astronauts to deliver the...
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