Political Quotes

“I rise today to recognize the 60th anniversary of the National Reconnaissance Office, NRO. Born in September 1961, the present day National Reconnaissance Office was formed by agreement between the Secretary of Defense and the Director of Central Intelligence during the height of the Cold War. In the first decade of the Cold War, American ingenuity and engineering had enabled significant advances to meet the demand for better reconnaissance as new, high-altitude aircraft like the U-2 and its high-speed successors, the A-12 and SR-71, were developed. However, even this new technology had its limitations. This became acutely clear with the shoot-down of CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers' U-2 in 1960. Thankfully, American aerospace engineers were also maturing new rocket and sensor technologies that enabled the United States to meet the increasing national security challenge of how to analyze Soviet forces to avert a nuclear war. Carrying over from the Eisenhower to Kennedy administrations, a group of remarkable Americans brought the foresight of combining a number of government satellite efforts into a single U.S. intelligence organization that would become the modem NRO. These optical experts, chemists, physicists, engineers, military officers, mathematicians, and photography entrepreneurs recognized the value of a national policy of peacetime strategic reconnaissance in addressing the Soviet threat as well as future, unforeseen, national security challenges.…”