A recent Soviet view of the discovery

A very interesting account of the radiation belt discovery from the Russian point of view was published in History and Technology in 2000. The paper’s abstract reads:

The most important scientific discovery of the early space era—the 1958 discovery of the radiation belts of the Earth—was made in the context of Cold War rivalry between the USSR and the USA. The paper uses previously unavailable archival records to reconstruct the relative contributions of American and Soviet researchers and their interations [sic: iterations or interactions?] during the process of discovery. The former discovered what is now known

CHAPTER 12 • DISCOVERY OF THE TRAPPED RADIATION

as the inner radiation belt, while the latter observed the outer radiation belt and gradually came to realize the existence of two distinctively different zones of radiation. The uses of science for the purposes of Cold War political propaganda affected the behavior of scientists and led to the misrepresentation of the events in mass media.70

Although I believe that that paper is largely historically accurate, there are some differences in detail and interpretation between its account and the one presented here. Most of those differences appear to relate to the authors’ understandings of the timing and venues of various information releases.