What 1957 teaches us about 2017

North Korea’s detonation of a suspected thermonuclear bomb and launch of inter-continental ballistic missiles could be America’s Sputnik event of the 21st century.

When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, on Oct. 4, 1957, it frightened many Americans. They realized the Soviets were not technologically backward, and the action suggested to the American national security community the Soviets might be able to hit a U.S. city with a thermonuclear bomb.

The two technological coups by communist rivals, 60 years apart, help place Kim Jong Un in historical perspective.

As Sputnik slipped into low-Earth orbit, President Dwight D. Eisenhower remained privately confident that the United States had taken steps to meet the nuclear threat that Sputnik portended. He had accelerated America’s ballistic missile programs and intelligence-gathering capabilities, and he knew the Soviets needed to overcome other technological challenges before they could deliver a nuclear weapon to a U.S. target.

The real surprise in Sputnik for the U.S. national security community was not that the Soviets had such powerful rockets, but that they had adequate guidance technologies to insert a payload into orbit. That guidance system could direct a warhead to a U.S. target.

Eisenhower’s most serious misjudgment was to underestimate the public alarm Sputnik incited in the free world. That alarm, amplified in Congress, forced Eisenhower to create the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Defense Education Act — all to reassure Americans that the United States would not allow the Soviet Union to technologically outpace us.

Advances in North Korean missile and weapons technology in 2017 have caused similar alarm among Americans, and perhaps even within the American national security establishment. The North Koreans have launched multiple missiles this year capable of reaching the United States. And this summer they conducted at least one underground test of a weapon whose remotely detected signatures are consistent with a small thermonuclear bomb.

As was true with Sputnik, these actions by themselves do not prove that North Korea now can deliver a nuclear warhead to a U.S. target. But they seem to show the North Korean nuclear program is maturing quickly.

As Americans relive the shock of realizing that a hostile, backward country might soon be willing and able to send nuclear weapons to the United States, it is appropriate to consider some of the differences in these cases. The U.S. president in 1957 was a retired five-star general who had overseen the Normandy invasion, the Army and Allied forces in Europe. The U.S. president in 2017, Donald Trump, has none of that experience.

The Soviet Union posed a real existential threat to the United States; North Korea does not partly because it can’t deliver its weapons to all of the United States and has a limited number of secure launch sites.

When Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev promised the West “we will bury you,” Eisenhower refused to be baited. The American response to the Soviet threat was a prolonged and successful war of deterrence, just as Eisenhower predicted.

Trump and his advisers might revisit the panic of Sputnik I and the example of Eisenhower to help them see past this moment. Perhaps Jim Mattis, John Kelly and H.R. McMaster — all current or retired military generals now in the Trump administration — can do for the president what Eisenhower was able to do for himself.

Alex Roland, a professor emeritus of history at Duke University, is a former NASA historian.