This interest in information was also partly due to the political situation of the Cold War Era symbolised by the 1957 'Sputnik Shock'. The Sputnik satellite was only a challenge to the scientific and technological selfesteem of the 'West'. The incident also revealed a particular information management problem: since the US government had been unable to read the Sputnik signals, it spent US$20 million on an emergency project to decipher the signals. It then turned out that the Soviet Union had published the code, also in English, well before the launch of Sputnik, and that this code had been publicly available from journals in US libraries.
