The U2 Crisis and the Paris Summit
A Summit Within Reach
By the late 1950s the bipolar standoff of the early Cold War had eased a little. Stalin was four years dead, Khrushchev had visited the United States in September 1959 and held warm Camp David talks with President Eisenhower, and a four-power summit was set for Paris in May 1960. The agenda was substantial: a possible nuclear test ban, the future of Berlin, and steps toward what was then being called ‘peaceful coexistence’. For a few months it looked as if the Thaw might harden into something more permanent.
The Paris Peace Summit was scheduled for 16 May 1960. The four leaders due to attend were Eisenhower (USA), Khrushchev (USSR), Macmillan (Britain) and de Gaulle (France). Its agenda included a nuclear test ban and the future of Berlin.
The Spy Plane Programme
Behind the diplomacy ran a secret war of reconnaissance. Since 1956 the United States had used the U2 spy plane to fly over Soviet territory, photographing missile sites, airfields and nuclear facilities at altitudes around 70,000 feet. The Soviets knew the flights were happening but lacked the missiles to reach them. The CIA assured Eisenhower that any U2 brought down would self-destruct and that no pilot would survive. The flights were so politically sensitive that Eisenhower personally approved each one.
On 1 May 1960 — just over two weeks before the summit — pilot Francis Gary Powers took off from Peshawar, Pakistan, on a mission to photograph Soviet ICBM bases at Plesetsk and Tyuratam. Over Sverdlovsk, deep inside the USSR, a Soviet S-75 Dvina surface-to-air missile exploded near his plane. Powers parachuted out alive. The wreckage and his survival kit were largely intact. Khrushchev held the news for days while letting the Eisenhower administration walk into a public lie.
The Trap Springs
On 5 May Khrushchev announced to the Supreme Soviet that an American spy plane had been shot down. NASA, on cue, issued a cover story about a lost weather research aircraft. Two days later Khrushchev produced the second half of the story: the pilot was alive, in Soviet custody, and had confessed. Photographs of the wreckage and Powers’s identity papers were released. The Eisenhower administration was caught in a public deception. The President took personal responsibility, but he refused to apologise — arguing that overflights were a necessary defence against the threat of surprise attack.
On 16 May 1960 the four leaders met in Paris. Khrushchev opened with a long denunciation of American ‘banditry in the air’ and demanded an apology, a halt to overflights and the punishment of those responsible. Eisenhower had already agreed to suspend the U2 flights but refused to apologise publicly. Khrushchev walked out, withdrew his invitation for Eisenhower to visit Moscow, and returned home. The summit collapsed before it had begun. Macmillan, who had invested heavily in the Thaw, was devastated by the collapse.
In August Powers was tried in Moscow, sentenced to ten years and held until February 1962, when he was exchanged on the Glienicke Bridge in Berlin for the Soviet spy Rudolf Abel.
Why It Mattered
A common student error is to treat the U2 affair as a small embarrassment. Its significance only becomes clear when you consider what it cost. The Thaw stalled. The test-ban negotiations collapsed for three years; a partial test-ban treaty was not signed until 1963. Khrushchev faced internal pressure from Soviet hardliners who already thought he was too soft on the West, and the affair pushed him toward a tougher stance. That harder line led directly to the renewed Berlin crisis of 1961, in which Khrushchev pressed Kennedy and ultimately authorised the building of the Berlin Wall.
On the American side, the affair confirmed the urgency of switching to satellite reconnaissance. The Corona programme, launched later in 1960, soon began returning film capsules from orbit — safer politically because no pilot could be captured. On the Soviet side, the affair confirmed the value of air-defence missiles against Western reconnaissance, and pushed Soviet planners toward heavier integrated air-defence networks for the rest of the Cold War. The U2 itself was not retired: lower-altitude versions and modified airframes continued in service for decades, but the political risk of overflying the Soviet Union directly was now too high. The CIA shifted resources into the SR-71 Blackbird programme, designed to outrun rather than out-climb interception, and into the satellite programmes that would dominate Cold War intelligence from the mid-1960s.
For students preparing exam answers on the U2 affair, the most useful framing is to treat it as a hinge between phases of the Cold War. Before May 1960, despite Hungary 1956 and the Berlin ultimatum, there had been a real if uneven trend toward dialogue at the top: Camp David, the planned summit, the test-ban negotiations. After May 1960, every initiative had to be rebuilt against the memory of the lie. The new effort would not begin until after the Cuban Missile Crisis — and even then, only because both leaders had stared down the alternative.
The U2 was shot down on 1 May 1960; the summit was due on 16 May; Khrushchev walked out within hours of opening, ending the Thaw. The hardening of Soviet policy that followed contributed to the Berlin Wall in 1961.