I might be mistaken about this, but I thought there was a possibility that Khrushchev and others anticipated that leaders and influential people in the US/USSR and elsewhere in the world would interpret space race victories as a costly signal of strategic space superiority (while simultaneously being less aggressive and less disruptive to diplomacy than developing and testing more directly military-related technology such as Starfish Prime), and separately there was a possibility that this anticipation was a correct prediction about what stakeholders around the world would conclude about the relative power of the US and USSR (including the third world and “allied” countries which often contained hawk and dove factions and regime change etc).
Momentum behind the space race itself had died out by 1975, possibly as part of the trend described in the 2003 paper “The Nuclear Taboo” which argued that a strong norm against nuclear weapon use developed over time; during the Korean War in 1950, American generals were friendly towards the idea of using nuclear weapons to break the stalemate and ultimately decided not to, but were substantially less friendly towards nuclear weapon use by the time the Vietnam War started and since then have only considered it progressively more unthinkable (the early phases of the Ukraine War in 2022, particularly the period leading up to the invasion, might have been an example of backsliding).
I might be mistaken about this, but I thought there was a possibility that Khrushchev and others anticipated that leaders and influential people in the US/USSR and elsewhere in the world would interpret space race victories as a costly signal of strategic space superiority (while simultaneously being less aggressive and less disruptive to diplomacy than developing and testing more directly military-related technology such as Starfish Prime), and separately there was a possibility that this anticipation was a correct prediction about what stakeholders around the world would conclude about the relative power of the US and USSR (including the third world and “allied” countries which often contained hawk and dove factions and regime change etc).
Momentum behind the space race itself had died out by 1975, possibly as part of the trend described in the 2003 paper “The Nuclear Taboo” which argued that a strong norm against nuclear weapon use developed over time; during the Korean War in 1950, American generals were friendly towards the idea of using nuclear weapons to break the stalemate and ultimately decided not to, but were substantially less friendly towards nuclear weapon use by the time the Vietnam War started and since then have only considered it progressively more unthinkable (the early phases of the Ukraine War in 2022, particularly the period leading up to the invasion, might have been an example of backsliding).