The missile gap was in fact a fiction based on exaggerated estimates of the United States Air Force. Nevertheless, the exaggeration fit nicely with Kennedy's political platform of accusing the Republicans of being penny pinching misers and were worried about the budget in times of a grave Soviet danger. Kennedy's scaremongering election tactics were actually bolstered by a Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's claims that Soviet factories were turning out intercontinental ballistic missiles like sausages. When Premier Khrushchev was asked by his son if that claim was true, Khrushchev admitted that it was not. He went on to say that it doesn't matter if it is really true, it only matters that the Americans think it's true. The psychological mind games between the two countries had already begun. …show more content…
In the late fifties and early sixties, Khrushchev had enough trouble trying to keep the Soviet satellite states in line while at the same time keeping NATO in check with a barrage of lies and bluffs. Khrushchev had at times floated the proposal of a "peaceful coexistence" between the communist and capitalist ideologies. This was seen as heresy by the People's Republic of China, who flavored a much more belligerent and muscular stand against the imperial capitalist. Brose describers Khrushchev's dilemma thusly, " As of 1962, the Pentagon possessed over 20,000 nuclear devices and had a 15 to 1 lead in warheads".... , even so" China openly criticized Moscow's apparent unwillingness to challenge the "paper tiger" in the