Now we also know that the intent of Sputnik was precisely to demonstrate this threat, not to start an era of space exploration, though that was a common dream of some Soviet scientists as well as Americans. According to a recent AP report, the Sputnik launch was "a spur-of-the-moment gamble driven by the dream of one scientist, whose team scrounged a rocket, slapped together a satellite and persuaded a dubious Kremlin to open the space age."

"As described by the former scientists, the world's first orbiter was born out of a very different Soviet program: the frantic development of a rocket capable of striking the United States with a hydrogen bomb. Because there was no telling how heavy the warhead would be, its R-7 ballistic missile was built with thrust to spare — "much more powerful than anything the Americans had," Georgy Grechko, a rocket engineer and cosmonaut, told AP. The towering R-7's high thrust and payload capacity, unmatched at the time, just happened to make it the perfect vehicle to launch an object into orbit — something never done before. Without the looming nuclear threat, Russian scientists say, Sputnik would probably have gotten off the ground much later."

"The key reason behind the emergence of Sputnik was the Cold War atmosphere and our race against the Americans," Chertok said. "The military missile was the main thing we were thinking of at the moment."

Sputnik was an important moment, but it didn’t begin the Cold War or Cold War paranoia (like the early 1950s Blacklist) or the subterranean fear of nuclear war (we’d been watching those radiation monster movies most of the decade.) It did threaten to make space another battlefield.