This author Sergei Khrushchev gives us a glimpse into the events surrounding the "secret" U-2 flights that the U.S. was conducting. In the 1950's the Cold War was going strong between the United States and the Soviet Union. This led to a lot of tension between the two countries concerning any type of military conflicts. The author in this article who was behind the "Iron Curtain" describes events leading up to and concluding in the destruction of one of America's top-secret spy planes. It began with a meeting at a 1955 meeting in Geneva amongst the four powers: U.S.S.R., U.S., Great Britain, and France. "The U.S. president Eisenhower presented his Open Skies proposal, which would call for the planes of the opposing blocs to fly over the territories of probable adversaries in order to monitor their nuclear arms." USSR immediately rejected the plan thus casting suspicion on them by the powers. Unbeknownst to everyone USSR had rejected the idea not to hide what they had b!.
ut what they did not have.
The author wants to give the reader a clear perception of what was going on during the Cold War and the events that led to the downing of the U-2 bomber. His main point of this article is to show what exactly the Russians were thinking at this time as opposed to what we know the Americans were thinking. How they had known about the secret flights but could do basically nothing to stop them for a long time. Another deterrent from agreeing to the Open Skies policy was the fact that; "Taken from an altitude of 6 miles, the first showed the overall plan of a city; in the next you could distinguish houses, and in the next you could make out the murky figure of a man reclining on a lounge chair in the courtyard of his home reading a newspaper." This was scary technology for the Russians. Little to Russia's knowledge this did little to slow the Americans plans to fly over their skies and photograph.
