WASHINGTON (States News Service) Previously classified information reveals Cold War Russias space discoveries were more advanced than American officials and newspapers disclosed at the time, according to Russian historian Ivan Zavidonov.
Zavidonovs research, focused on the Sputnik series of satellites from the late 1950s, also underlines how science was treated as Cold War propaganda by the Western media.
Zavidonov's appearance presents the nearly perfect picture of a Soviet Cold War academic, with thick-rimmed glasses and a black wooden cane. Speaking through an interpreter, he gave an interview to space.com after his lecture at the Air and Space Museum Thursday.
Zavidonov explained how he unearthed a transcript of a 1959 meeting of U.S. and Russian scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences archives over a year ago.
Although the transcript has been open to the public for years, the value of Zavidonovs research lies in its comparison of the conference to the medias faulty reports of discoveries at the time.
From 1957 to 1959, Soviet and American scientists uncovered conflicting data from their research into Earth's radiation belts -- but it was not a matter of one country's scientists being wrong and the others being right, as the propaganda of the day would have had people believe.
The Sputnik I and II missions examined the outer radiation belt, because Soviet satellites could go into a higher orbit than the American Explorer series. The Explorer was confined to examining the inner radiation belt, which the Soviets couldnt observe because stations in the Soviet Union couldnt pick up the satellites signals from the Southern Hemisphere.
"They observed different things," Zavidonov said in English. At the 1959 rendezvous, scientist James Van Allen, for whom Earths radiation belts are now named, and the Soviet scientist Sergei Vernov acknowledged that neither one of them was wrong. They were simply looking in different places. Nevertheless, this information was not publicized, in part because the U.S. and Soviet governments suppressed parts of the two scientists findings.
"Big parts of research were very classified," Zavidonovs interpreter said.
It has been long known that U.S. authorities kept a lid on the possibility that the radiation belt Van Allen had discovered was the result of a Soviet atomic nuclear explosion. Although these suspicions were wrong, the U.S. began testing nuclear explosions in space in late 1958.
"The American media took [the Van Allen discovery] as a response to Sputnik," the historians interpreter said, putting the story on the front page as an example of an American "comeback" in the space race competition. A month later, the same newspapers skimmed over his Moscow meeting with Vernov, where the scientists acknowledged each others' findings.
Zavidonov emphasizes that the media in both countries downplayed the resolution of scientific differences between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. during the Cold War.
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