In a Corner piece today, Jonah Goldberg discusses the humanitarian benefits that would have accrued had we forced a regime change in Moscow in 1946. But he states one of what he considers the down sides:

While the space program would have suffered without the Space Race, it seems a sure bet that the net gain of liberated human genius would more than have compensated for that.

While I agree with his post overall, I don’t agree that the “space program would have suffered.” Oh, we certainly wouldn’t have gotten to the moon as quickly, but as I argued at TCSDaily a week and a half ago, that wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

I also think that, even absent the superpower adversary of the USSR, we still would have found surveillance and communications satellites quite useful. And of course, had we removed the Stalin regime, it’s likely that we would have eventually picked up all of the German rocket team, and not just the ones that managed to escape with von Braun as the Soviets advanced. If you were a German who wanted to build rockets, given a choice between living in America, and Russia, even a free Russia, it’s seems most likely that most of them would have wanted to come here.