Soviet Union, every mention
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tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone David Rosenthal 47Ben Gilbert 7
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Soviet Union comes up
Google Part I: Origins of Search. How the Best Business in Human History Happened (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 13:28 David Rosenthal Which, of course, then was part of the Soviet Union, and Sergei's family was Jewish, Soviet Union was
- ▶ 14:08 David Rosenthal So it takes them two years to be able to emigrate out of the Soviet Union, but they eventually come to the US.
Renaissance Technologies (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 23:39 David Rosenthal oh, I know what the Soviets are saying.
Porsche (with Doug DeMuro) · Acquired
- ▶ 41:59 David Rosenthal So we talked about a minute ago the Iron Curtain and the Soviets, like, it's so hard for us to remember now, but Germany post-war was ground zero for the Cold War.
- ▶ 42:10 David Rosenthal Like, the battle against the Soviet Union was happening right there, right next door.
Lockheed Martin (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 17:20 David Rosenthal The other problem, to put a pin in for later, and we start to get worried that our ally, the Russians and the Soviets, our relationship with them might not be quite what we think it is, and, uh, we might have to address that in the coming…
- ▶ 31:52 David Rosenthal You know, hey, the mission here is preserving your life and the lives of your loved ones and America from losing World War II and then, you know, having nuclear bombs dropped on it by the Soviet Union.
- ▶ 33:46 Ben Gilbert Yeah, and the war we're coming out of is World War II, but of course the Cold War against the Russians is just starting.
- ▶ 34:24 David Rosenthal So, right after the war, Churchill comes to America and gives his famous Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri, that an Iron Curtain has descended over Europe in the form of the Soviet Union.
- ▶ 34:38 David Rosenthal In August, 1949, the Soviet Union detonates its first nuclear bomb.
- ▶ 34:50 David Rosenthal And not only did they have the bomb, but whether this was real or not, or positioning, people really believe that the Soviets and Khrushchev's intention
- ▶ 35:30 David Rosenthal To deter the Soviet Union from launching a first nuclear strike against us by being able to guarantee and have them know that we guarantee that if they do so, we will destroy them.
- ▶ 37:41 David Rosenthal Okay, so it would be really great if, you know, you could fly a plane over Russia and take pictures and understand all this.
- ▶ 37:52 David Rosenthal But you can't just fly a plane into Russia and do that.
- ▶ 37:55 David Rosenthal The Russians are going to shoot you down if you do it.
- ▶ 38:12 David Rosenthal We send balloons over Russia.
- ▶ 38:18 David Rosenthal Actually returning usable photos of Soviet nuclear installations.
- ▶ 38:34 David Rosenthal Fly over Russia stealthily and undetected by radar, or two, fly high enough or fast enough that they can't shoot it down even if they do.
- ▶ 38:43 Ben Gilbert And so Skunk Works, being the ambitious organization that they are, tries for option one, and we don't frankly know very much about what Russia's capabilities are, so we're pretty sure that we can build some airplane that flies high enough…
- ▶ 39:37 Ben Gilbert The US thought that the Soviets' best interceptor fighter aircraft could get to about 45,000 feet.
- ▶ 41:27 Ben Gilbert We wouldn't reveal the fact that this existed to the Russians, our own people, for years and years and years.
- ▶ 43:40 David Rosenthal They're not gonna roll it on the runway in Burbank and take off and, ah, you know, just head for the Soviet Union.
- ▶ 48:43 David Rosenthal They get it up and running, and in active service as an operational spy plane, pretty much the world's first, at least of this type, within a year, the first Soviet Union overflight happens on July fourth, 1956.
- ▶ 49:07 David Rosenthal Are the Soviets gonna see us?
- ▶ 49:12 David Rosenthal The Soviets tracked it on radar, even at 70,000 feet.
- ▶ 49:18 David Rosenthal Right from it takes off, the whole flight path through Russia, they knew everything that we were doing.
- ▶ 50:28 David Rosenthal In that flight, we get incredible photographic observational evidence, and we would fly so many missions over Russia for the next few years, getting this incredible intelligence.
- ▶ 50:38 David Rosenthal The Soviets never say anything.
- ▶ 51:38 David Rosenthal The goal is for both sides to keep each other in check, and so this, the U-two and these reconnaissance missions, become a major chess piece for us, on our side of the board, to keep the Soviets in check.
- ▶ 52:24 Ben Gilbert Soviet Union's warheads, the Soviet Union's fighter jets, the capabilities that they have with their radar because it's painting our airplanes, so we now know that that exists.
- ▶ 53:04 David Rosenthal The Russians are constantly trying to shoot them down.
- ▶ 53:08 David Rosenthal And then, on May first, 1960, ironically on May Day, we launched the U-II program on July fourth, and it ends, at least over the Soviet Union, on May Day, 1960, the Soviets finally have developed a missile that can reach 70,000 feet with…
- ▶ 53:52 David Rosenthal But we know now that the motivation for Russia not to talk about it now is gone.
- ▶ 54:44 David Rosenthal If you know anything about U.S. history, you probably know his name, and you probably know that he miraculously did survive and was captured and interrogated and probably tortured by the Russians, and that this was the revealing of the…
- ▶ 55:43 David Rosenthal But it does mean that the U-II program, at least over Russia, is done.
- ▶ 55:49 David Rosenthal We don't fly any more U-II's over Russia.
- ▶ 56:01 Ben Gilbert The U-II becomes quite useful for other locations around the globe, but not over the USSR itself.
- ▶ 56:12 David Rosenthal We now have no way to take photos of military sites in Russia, because we can't fly planes over there anymore.
- ▶ 56:37 David Rosenthal Thanks to another super secretive Lockheed division that figured out another way for us to take pictures of the Soviet Union.
- ▶ 1:20:51 David Rosenthal So, what we were really afraid of, we thought the Soviets would pursue a first strike policy if they felt they were able to.
- ▶ 1:22:08 David Rosenthal And this, among many, many reasons, is why when the Soviet Union launches Sputnik into space in October, 1957, even though Sputnik itself was far from having nuclear ICBM capabilities,
- ▶ 1:22:23 David Rosenthal The Soviets getting to space first was truly terrifying.
- ▶ 1:26:52 David Rosenthal It was, if you think back to the kind of the chess game, it was in the government's best interest for the Soviets to know that we had these.
- ▶ 1:28:32 David Rosenthal We'd said that when Gary Powers and the U-two was shot down in May, 1960, that supposedly this was the end of U.S. observational capabilities in the Soviet Union, and that it was for about three months, but nobody do it.
- ▶ 1:30:28 David Rosenthal And even, you know, Sputnik on the Russian side, Sputnik was a research festival.
- ▶ 1:34:31 David Rosenthal Produced greater photo coverage of the Soviet Union than all of the previous U-II flights combined.
- ▶ 1:34:53 David Rosenthal No need to worry about the Soviets knowing what was going on.
- ▶ 1:37:50 David Rosenthal Because obviously, what would the biggest disaster be would be if somebody else or the Russians got their hands on this and were like, holy crap, somebody's taking photos from space of us.
- ▶ 1:40:34 David Rosenthal Can we see the Soviet Union from space?
- ▶ 1:55:00 David Rosenthal They knew that this day was coming when the Russians would be able to shoot it down.
- ▶ 2:02:00 David Rosenthal And they source a large amount of the titanium that goes into the Blackbirds, the A-Twelfs and then the Blackbirds, out of the Soviet Union.
- ▶ 2:09:12 Ben Gilbert It has played roles in surveillance in Vietnam, Korea, Arab-Israel conflict in the seventies, obviously the USSR.
- ▶ 3:09:04 David Rosenthal Probably for both the Soviet Union and the US, although I'm less equipped to talk about the Soviet Union, the fact of that competition led to tremendous advances for society.
- ▶ 3:24:14 David Rosenthal One, I think that was maybe in part from observing what was happening in the Soviet Union, where the military and military spending overran the whole rest of the economy.