History Brief: the U-2 Incident

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Music used with the permission of Liam Seagrave

This video gives a brief description of the U-2 spy plane incident during the Cold War in 1960.

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Transcript:

In the late 1950s, it seemed as if the Cold War was beginning to thaw out some. President Dwight Eisenhower and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had a good relationship with each other, and the two nations seemed to be cooperating.

Unfortunately, the peace would not last. In 1960, an American U-2 plane was shot down over Soviet air space. So, what kind of plane was the U-2? What did the United States use it for?

In the mid-1950s, the US Government saw the need for a new type of aircraft; a spy plane capable of flying high above the Soviet Union for the purposes of photographing bases and installations in order to monitor Soviet military strength.

Lockheed, one of the United States’ top manufacturers of aircraft, was contracted to build the planes. The end result of their efforts was the “Utility Plane 2”, or the “U-2” for short. The plane was capable of flying at altitudes up to fourteen miles high and could stay in the air up to eleven hours. High-powered cameras on the aircraft could photograph a golf ball placed on a putting green 14 miles below.

The pilots who flew the U-2 were required to wear a pressurized suit during flights because of the altitude and could not drink any liquids for several hours prior to each flight (the flights usually lasted seven to eight hours).

The U-2 made its first flight in 1957 and worked precisely as it was built to. As a result of the flights, the United States discovered that the Soviet military was not nearly as large or powerful as they were making the rest of the world believe.

But, in April of 1960, a U-2 piloted by Gary Powers was making a routine flight over the Soviet Union when the plane was struck by a Soviet missile. Powers parachuted safely to the ground, but was captured by the Soviet military. The incident provided proof of what the Soviets had been claiming for some time. The United States had been spying on the USSR.

With this discovery, the American-Soviet relationship was shattered. Because of the U-2 incident, the Cold War divide deepened even further, and it would be another 25 years before the tension softened again and any real progress would be made between the two nations.