But as you previously touched on, getting into space would facilitate the development of ICBMs, in addition to spy satellites. I think the US Government would care an awful lot and would want to find out why this was not possible, at any cost. So would the Kremlin.
It gets worse: The alternative is that both the US and Russia knew that (for unknown reasons) neither could deliver ICBMs, there is no MAD and the Cold War was just played out according to a script. In short, the White House and the Kremlin were working in partnership for no apparent reason.
Sure, there was MAD, it just didn't revolve around ICBM's. The Russians developed all of those suitcase nukes, remember? Bombers were also outfitted with nukes. The only downside to those technologies were that planes could be shot down and the suitcase nukes weren't very powerful (less than 1kt).
It was important to create the illusion of ICBM's because, as they knew from their encounter with the Nazi's V2 rockets, ballistic missiles were impossible to shoot down or prevent and could contain significant payload. Whoever created the strongest illusion of ICBM's made the most powerful allies. ICBM's were the alpha and omega of super weapons.
The space race was pure military propaganda and and deception. Props were made, tests were staged, and missiles were paraded, all to fabricate the illusion of superiority. See this article for instance:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19981118/ai_n14192997Moscow paraded dummy missiles
MANY OF the huge strategic missiles displayed in Red Square parades during the Soviet era were only dummies, but they scared the West into an expensive response, a Russian magazine reported yesterday.
One such fake, GR-1, an acronym for Global Missile, showed during a parade in 1965, prompted the United States to build an anti- missile defence system worth billions of dollars, said the weekly Vlast (Power). In fact, the Soviets had abandoned the GR-1 project long before the parade.
Another two mobile ballistic missiles shown in the same parade were also fakes, their test launches having been a failure, the magazine said. "Foreign military attaches were scared to death, triggering panic in Nato headquarters," it said. "A huge international uproar followed, and only those who prepared this demonstration knew they were dummies." One of the authors of the Vlast report worked as a missile engineer and said he had worked on a support system for one of the fake missiles to prevent it from bouncing on the stone-paved Red Square in Moscow. The magazine said the Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev first bluffed the West with the legend of powerful Russian missiles, saying the Soviet Union was making them "like sausage". "Such comparison sounded ambiguous for the Soviet people, because the sausage was in deficit, but it duly impressed foreigners," it said. At the time of Krushchev's comment, the Soviets had only four intercontinental ballistic missiles on duty, while the United States had 60. "The myth about the Soviet missile superiority was convenient for both the Soviet leadership and the American military industrial complex, which was getting huge contracts," the magazine said.Another article on the subject:
http://www.cdi.org/russia/may1499.html#6There's also a book about their dummy programs:
