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= Foreign relations of the Soviet Union =

India
The relationship between the Soviet Union and India was a significant part of the Cold War. Both political and scientific in nature, this cooperation lasted for nearly 40 years. Over this span of nearly four decades, Soviet-Indian relations maintained through three pairs of leaders—Jawaharlal Nehru and Nikita Khrushchev, Indira Gandhi and Leonid Brezhnev, and Rajiv Gandhi and Mikhail Gorbachev. This Indo-Soviet relationship can be seen being stemmed from India's distrust and general unsatisfactory feeling towards Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration's insistence that Third World countries could not remain neutral during the Cold War and with American hesitation to consult with their governments on issues permanent to these countries.

Space
Scientific cooperation between the Soviet Union and India began with the formal establishment of an Indo-Soviet Joint Committee of Scientists, which held its first meeting in January 1968.

The Soviet Union was a major contributor to India's space effort. Most notably, Soviet technical assistance in design and launching was paramount to the success of Indian satellites Aryabhata, Bhaskara-I and Bhaskara-II. When considering India's reputation for poverty and food insecurity at the time, outsiders began to wonder if India belonged to such a prestigious group of nations, or if it was only given the opportunity by the Soviet Union.

Work on A'ryabhata began following an agreement between ISRO and the USSR Academy of Sciences in May 1972. On April 19, 1975, less than one year after India's first first successful nuclear bomb test on May 18, 1974, the Soviet Union helped launch India's first satellite Aryabhata from Kapustin Yar, a Russian rocket launch and development site in Astrakhan Oblast using a Kosmos-3M launch vehicle. It was built by the Indian Space Research Organisation, but the Soviets provided technical assistance and components such as solar cells, batteries, thermal paints, and tape recorders to aid in its proposed 6 month solar and atmospheric studies. Though the satellite was expected to perform solar and atmospheric studies for 6 months, the experiments had to be closed down after 5 days due to a power supply problem.

On June 7,1979, Bhaskara-I was launched from Kapustin Yar aboard the C-1 Intercosmos Launch Vehicle.

On November 20, 1981, Bhaskara-II was launched, providing nearly two thousand photos for ocean and land surface data.

In April 1985, the Indian National Science Academy and the Soviet Academy of Sciences signed an agreement for joint research in applied mathematics and technology such as computer electronics, biotechnology, and silicon technology. On March 21, 1987, following Rajiv Gandhi's visit to the Soviet Union, a protocol for cooperation in science and technology were signed, leading to new initiatives in laser technology, alternative energy sources, and electron accelerators.

The United States of America
Through even the toughest and most stagnant parts of the Cold War, diplomatic relations were still kept and even sought after between the United States and the Soviet Union. Whether for peace-making reasons or for negotiations, these agreements played an vital role in the Cold War.

Space
Between the years 1957 and 1958, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower sought cooperative U.S.-Soviet space initiatives through a series of letters directed at Soviet leadership. These Soviet recipients included Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Prime Minister Nikolai Bulganin. In these letters, Eisenhower suggested a protocol for peaceful space use. However, Khrushchev rejected the offer, feeling that his country was ahead of the United States in space-related technology after the successful launch of Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957. In response, Khrushchev presented a precondition for any future space agreements. Khrushchev demanded that the United States would first need to remove it's nuclear-launch capabilities in Turkey. This signaled a future trend of space agreements as a means for nuclear disarmament.

Despite the continued space competition between the United States and U.S.S.R., Khrushchev wrote a letter to U.S. president John F. Kennedy detailing the possibility of future space cooperation between the two sworn rivals after American john Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth on February 20, 1962. These discussions between the Soviet union and the United States led to cooperation in three areas: weather data and future meteorology-related launches, the mapping of the geomagnetic field of the Earth, and the relay of communication.