It was during this transitional time that the former Soviet Union gained a reputation for offloading military hardware to the highest bidder. Of course, the fall of the Soviet Union can really be attributed to a number of factors, including the will of its populous, but it's tough to discount the dire financial straights the former superpower found itself in by 1991–the year the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and a new Russian government took its place. In fact, many credit President Ronald Reagan with effectively spending the Soviets into ruin, fielding increasingly capable military platforms and weapons, which forced the Soviets to respond in kind, despite their struggling economy. Russian diesel-electric submarine B-143 Foxtrot Type 641 at the Seafront Maritime Theme Park in Zeebrugge, Belgium.Īrterra/Universal Images Group via Getty ImagesĪmerica's eventual victory in the Space Race can be seen as indicative of America's broad approach to battling the Soviets on technological and financial grounds. Von Braun's work led to the development of the Saturn V rocket–a platform that took America to the moon and still remains the most powerful spacecraft ever constructed.
Those early Soviet wins led directly to the establishment of NASA, and the re-orienting of famed-former Nazi scientist Wernher von Braun away from the Redstone missiles he was tasked with building and toward the heavens. They were exceeding it and showing the world just how effective their governmental model could be.įor the United States and its allies, dead set on preventing the spread of communism around the globe, these technological successes were seen as a clear and present danger to the American way of life. The Soviets weren't just matching the technological might of the world's first nuclear power. This early lead created what some have taken to calling the "Sputnik Crises" in America and its Western allies. The Soviets, championing their communist political and economic model, secured a number of early PR victories over the capitalist US, being the first nation to send a satellite, a dog, and a person into earth's orbit. The Cold War that erupted between the United States and Soviet Union immediately after World War II came to an end prompted a massive build-up of military hardware in both nations.