The 'Sputnik Moment' upended the global order once, but won't do so again

The Soviet Union, which launched Sputnik on October 4, 1957, was seen as a geopolitical rival to the United States, but this was still during the early years of the Cold War, and tensions had not yet reached the levels they would during the 1960 U-2 Spy Plane Incident or the 1962 Cuban Missle Crisis.

In fact, those incidents are inextricably tied to Sputnik and the American reaction to seeing the Soviet Union launch a satellite into orbit when Americans still couldn't keep their rockets from blowing up on the launch pads — and that's when the US government had even bothered to try launching any at all.

Though the Sputnik launch inspired the name, a Sputnik moment isn't tied to just one nation's response to a Cold War humiliation. It does succinctly describe a moment of national reckoning.

And, as the world transitions away from the unipolar order that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the term has come back into vogue as leaders, journalists, and think tank fellows debate whether some new bit of technological progress in China, Russia, or elsewhere heralds the second coming of a Sputnik reaction.

What is a Sputnik Moment?

A lot of people have claimed a lot of things to be "Sputnik moments," especially in the United States, but there's a reason the term never seems to fit the moment.

To see why, it helps to look back at the original Sputnik moment and get a sense of what made it resonate so differently than news of a Chinese or Russian hypersonic missile, no matter how hysterical some commentators might try to make it all sound.

The Cold War was well underway in the mid-1950s, but Americans were still coasting off the high of victory in World War II. With the former imperial powers of Europe greatly reduced and shrinking daily, America was able to assume a position of global leadership pretty much by default.

Tens of millions of Europeans and Russians died during the war, mostly civilians, as opposed to around half a million total American casualties. Ancient European and Japanese cities had been reduced to rubble and the industrial heartlands of nearly every major power in the war, on both sides, were gutted.

Meanwhile, not a single bomb fell on an American factory during the war, and the kind of industrial leverage this provided the US meant that America got to call the shots.

The one stick in the craw was the Soviet Union. For all intents and purposes, American ascendancy made sense to Americans. America benefiting from hegemony in the post-war period was the natural consequence of the success of capitalist democracy.

The cognitive dissonance of a strong Communist regime in the USSR standing opposite the US over a divided Europe (with large parts of it under the control of the Soviet Union, including part of Berlin, Prague, and other major European capitals) would have been very difficult to square with the image America had of itself in the post-war period.

When the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in 1949, America's atomic supremacy came to a screeching end, and naturally, plenty of Americans would have been understandably rattled. It's no coincidence that this was a period of incredible paranoia and the height of the McCarthy-era Red Scare.

Soon after US President Harry Truman announced the successful Soviet atomic test to Americans, German-born physicist Klaus Fuchs, who helped build America's atomic bomb, was arrested for passing nuclear materials to the Soviets.

When America tested the first hydrogen bomb on Elugelab in 1952, America's hydrogen bomb advantage was likewise short-lived. The Soviet Union tested its first hydrogen bomb just over three years later.

Given the paranoia about Communists in the US government passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets, it is very clear that the general consensus was that the Soviets were stealing from the Americans, and so its technological progress wasn't the legitimate work of its own scientists and engineers.

In effect, the Soviets were stealing America's intellectual property, and if America could just root out the communists who were passing everything over to the USSR, the Soviets would soon fall behind, where they naturally belonged.

This is what made the launch of Sputnik so devastating to the American psyche. The Soviets had beaten the Americans into space, and you could not write it off as Russians stealing American technology. America did not have this technology, so there was nothing to steal.

To make matters worse, Sputnik could theoretically have carried a nuclear payload rather than a harmless radio transmitter, and if so, then it could reach you whether you were in Nebraska, New York, or Arizona. (The first ICBM was successfully flight-tested in August 1957 by the Soviets.) America's historic buffer of two oceans on each side was no barrier to an aggressive, space-based Soviet Union.

Worse still, keen-eyed Americans could see Sputnik overhead on a clear night. You could listen to Sputnik transmitting radio signals on the ham radio in your living room. It couldn't be denied, the communist Soviet Union had technologically surpassed the United States.

It was the shock that comes from seeing a rival not only succeed, but that you never saw the upset coming. This being caught off guard by the competence of your rival or enemy lies at the core of a Sputnik moment. It is the recognition that you have been caught out in the open, vulnerable, and woefully behind a striving rival.

The US government hurried to respond with its own satellite launch the following month, in December 1957.

Although the United States had announced plans in 1955 to put a scientific satellite in orbit for by 1957, the three main candidates for launch vehicle - a version of the SSM-A-14 Redstone, the Air Force's SM-65 Atlas and a three-stage rocket based on the RTV-N-12a Viking. This last was the one eventually chosen to proceed first.

Called the Vanguard launch system, it proved to be something of a humiliating disaster for the government.

The first two launches, designed primarily to test the telemetry and separation systems, were successful, but after the launch of Sputnik, it was decided that the third launch would carry a small experimental satellite. Although billed as a "test launch," it was very much seen as "America's answer to Sputnik."

The rocket's thruster ignited, lifted the rocket about four feet in the air before suddenly losing thrust, and touched back down to the launchpad. There, its fuel tanks ruptured and blew up the rocket on the launchpad, severely damaging the pad in the process. The Vanguard TV-3 satellite, America's answer to Sputnik 1 and 2, was thrown clear of the blast and landed on the ground nearby, still transmitting its radio signal.

A large group of international journalists had been assembled to report on the launch, and they dutifully splashed America's failure across the front pages of every newspaper in the country and beyond, calling it "Kaputnik." The loss of international prestige was humiliating.

It was an undeniable wake-up call for the American people, but especially for the American government. Where the US military used to have to haggle with congress for money for research and development of new weapons or technologies, now it saw its budgets growing many times over. It wasn't exactly a blank check, but that's only because the US Congress has to appropriate an actual dollar figure. But the message was the same nonetheless. No more Kaputniks, no matter the cost.

The ballooning military budget and the creation of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), in 1958 helped drive the development of semiconductor technology needed for the military's Minuteman ballistic missile program and the space race of the following decade, culminating in the Apollo moon landings in 1969.

These investments eventually paved the foundation for Silicon Valley and the tech giants that followed, cushioned as they were by seemingly unlimited government contracts with no hard stipulation that every investment had to pay off down the road.

The US government wasn't willing to leave anything to chance. It was one of the most transformational shifts in government policy outside of military mobilization, but in a lot of ways, America's Sputnik moment eclipses even that.

The first — and, really, the only — Sputnik moment was such a triggering event that it transformed an entire society and the way the American government approached foreign and domestic affairs today.

So what about China? Are we due for another Sputnik moment soon?

America's Sputnik moment gets evoked a lot when commentators talk about China, and it's understandable. There are some parallels, after all.

America, fresh from "winning" the Cold War, enjoyed a period of global hegemony unlike anything else, only to see a rising and confident China gaining speed in the rearview mirror.

There are similar criticisms of American complacency, not unlike those lobbed at President Dwight D. Eisenhower, on whose watch the Soviets were able to launch Sputnik.

So too are the complaints from industry and government officials that China isn't respecting America's intellectual property when it comes to digital and semiconductor technologies.

More recently, China debuted a new hypersonic missile that some have tried to paint as a new Sputnik moment (though it clearly isn't), along with similar complaints that China is using American technology to gain a military advantage.

But there is also a very important difference between the Soviet Union in 1957 and China in 2022. The economic ties between the US and China are incredibly tight, so much so that neither country can cut them off without inflicting considerable damage to itself.

That wasn't the case with the insular Soviet Union, and more recent attempts to launch a "trade war" with China have been more political show than policy.

It's also unlikely that China will suddenly start fabricating 0.1nm processors behind our backs or make some kind of Quantum computing breakthrough that allows President Xi to read every American's encrypted messages at will. Something like that would get us close to a Sputnik moment, but even then, it still might not rise to that level.

The fundamental reason why not is that, while there is certainly room for escalation and possibly even conflict, there is nothing happening or even imaginable on the horizon on the scale that was threatened during the Cold War. In 1957, two ideological opposites with no real ties to one another and no lines of communication had thousands of bombs and warheads aimed at the other on a hair trigger while the rest of the world looked on in horror.

Without the backdrop of world-ending annihilation, there simply can't be any comparison to whatever someone claims is the new "Sputnik moment". A new hypersonic missile doesn't even close.

Honestly, such a moment might not be possible anymore, because we don't live in that world anymore. Bad things will still happen, even terrible things, but they will be called something else and they'll have different names. A Sputnik moment won't be one of them. That's a moment that, thankfully, has already passed us by.