It was the kind of thinking satirized to hilarious effect by Dr. Strangelove, but in the prism of early cold-war thinking it made total sense: the Soviets had launched the first ICBM and the first satellite into outer space, while the American space program floundered with launch failure after failure.  A controversial intelligence reported suggested breathlessly that the Soviets were building up an insurmountable lead in nuclear missiles, causing all sorts of sensationalism when it leaked out to the public. So, guided by the (vastly overstated) figures, Senator John F Kennedy created a policy that would govern American cold war arming for years.On this day, February 29, in 1960, now-candidate Kennedy, for several years already involved in propagating the missile-gap fallacy, decided to make it the centerpiece of his presidential campaign. In a statement on the floor of Congress, he said “[E]vents have demonstrated that our nuclear retaliatory power … cannot prevent the Communists from gradually nibbling at the fringe of the free world’s territory and strength, until our security has been steadily eroded in piecemeal fashion.”

Four years later, the missile gap still at the forefront of political discussion, director Stanley Kubrick created a film highlighting the absurdities in the high-level political policymaking. Taking the missile gap theory to the logical extreme, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb portrayed a military leaders meeting in a deep mineshaft, with one of the attendants worrying that the Soviets had more mineshafts to protect their leaders and top minds. With such a “mineshaft gap” it was possible, he warned, that the Ruskies “might even try an immediate sneak attack so they could take over our mineshaft space.”