"Dr. Garwin led a team of experts who foresaw a more advanced type of spacecraft that would replace film with microelectronics and radio transmitters. Fresh images would flash to Earth. The team also called for powerful new telescopes. In effect, the spy craft were to be precursors to the Hubble Space Telescope, but aimed at the Earth.
Even by the usual standards of federal secrecy, the satellite project was extremely hush-hush. In July 1971, Dr. Garwin had drafts of the final report delivered by a special class of courier to members of his team. They were required to read them, return them and keep no copies.
The next month, Dr. Garwin and a colleague briefed Kissinger, who backed the new electrooptical approach. Remarkably, the innovation was decades ahead of the shift in consumer cameras from film to digital.
That September, President Nixon approved a plan to develop the new spy satellite, which became the archetype for all that followed. For East-West relations, the technology was seen as raising predictability and lessening surprise, thus lowering tensions between the superpowers.
The next year, Nixon met in Moscow with the Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev to sign an accord that, for the first time, limited their nuclear arsenals."
