Khrushchev was bluffing the whole time he was talking about the U.S. lagging behind Russia. The Soviet rocket was inefficient since they were using a cluster of smaller engines which gave it a shorter range. This actually inhibited their efforts in the 1960s and put them behind more and more. The Soviet SS-6 was more than ten years behind the American minuteman missile which was already being designed. But the Soviets played the propaganda for all it was worth. The SS-6 had a twenty percent failure rate which meant that at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, there were thirty-five missiles that could be launched successfully. This is not the mass production that they were leading the world to believe.
The U.S. had its own stockpile.....
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