In most people's minds Sputnik is more important for the political and military responses it occasioned than for the actual event itself. Although the launch was of little strategic importance, its full symbolic effect on the Cold War is almost unrivaled, eclipsed only by the moon landing a decade later and, of course, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. However, along with these official responses, the launch and its symbolism unleashed vast and often unheralded effects on the domestic front due to the society-wide crisis mentality it engendered. It changed the very mind-set with which Americans viewed communism and the Cold War. In more concrete terms, it also allowed for the reorganization and reevaluation of the American educational system and established an alliance between government and university research. Perhaps even more importantly, it fractured, or at least exposed the cracks of, the Cold War consensus and perceived complacency of the 1950s. Sputnik not only offered a political opportunity for the Democratic Party but allowed for a serious and critical nationwide discussion of American postwar culture for the first time, publicizing the basic critiques that would gain enormous currency a decade later in the late 1960s.
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