Spy Satellite - Benefits

Benefits

During the 1950s a Soviet hoax had led to American fears of a bomber gap. After the United States gained satellite photography its intelligence agencies were able to, for example, in 1968 state with certainty that "No new ICBM complexes have been established in the USSR during the past year." President Lyndon B. Johnson told a gathering in 1967:

I wouldn't want to be quoted on this ... We've spent $35 or $40 billion on the space program. And if nothing else had come out of it except the knowledge that we gained from space photography, it would be worth ten times what the whole program has cost. Because tonight we know how many missiles the enemy has and, it turned out, our guesses were way off. We were doing things we didn't need to do. We were building things we didn't need to build. We were harboring fears we didn't need to harbor.

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