From Neil Sheehan, author of the Pulitzer Prize--winning classic A Bright Shining Lie, comes this long-awaited, magnificent epic. Here is the never-before-told story of the nuclear arms race that changed history-and of the visionary American Air Force officer Bernard Schriever, who led the high-stakes effort. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War is a masterly work about Schriever's quests to prevent the Soviet Union from acquiring nuclear superiority, to penetrate and exploit space for America, and to build the first weapons meant ...
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From Neil Sheehan, author of the Pulitzer Prize--winning classic A Bright Shining Lie, comes this long-awaited, magnificent epic. Here is the never-before-told story of the nuclear arms race that changed history-and of the visionary American Air Force officer Bernard Schriever, who led the high-stakes effort. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War is a masterly work about Schriever's quests to prevent the Soviet Union from acquiring nuclear superiority, to penetrate and exploit space for America, and to build the first weapons meant to deter an atomic holocaust rather than to be fired in anger. Sheehan melds biography and history, politics and science, to create a sweeping narrative that transports the reader back and forth from individual drama to world stage. The narrative takes us from Schriever's boyhood in Texas as a six-year-old immigrant from Germany in 1917 through his apprenticeship in the open-cockpit biplanes of the Army Air Corps in the 1930s and his participation in battles against the Japanese in the South Pacific during the Second World War. On his return, he finds a new postwar bipolar universe dominated by the antagonism between the United States and the Soviet Union. Inspired by his technological vision, Schriever sets out in 1954 to create the one class of weapons that can enforce peace with the Russians-intercontinental ballistic missiles that are unstoppable and can destroy the Soviet Union in thirty minutes. In the course of his crusade, he encounters allies and enemies among some of the most intriguing figures of the century: John von Neumann, the Hungarian-born mathematician and mathematical physicist, who was second in genius only to Einstein; Colonel Edward Hall, who created the ultimate ICBM in the Minuteman missile, and his brother, Theodore Hall, who spied for the Russians at Los Alamos and hastened their acquisition of the atomic bomb; Curtis LeMay, the bomber general who tried to exile Schriever and who lost his grip on reality, amassing enough nuclear weapons in his Strategic Air Command to destroy the entire Northern Hemisphere; and Hitler's former rocket maker, Wernher von Braun, who along with a colorful, riding-crop-wielding Army general named John Medaris tried to steal the ICBM program. The most powerful men on earth are also put into astonishing relief: Joseph Stalin, the cruel, paranoid Soviet dictator who spurred his own scientists to build him the atomic bomb with threats of death; Dwight Eisenhower, who backed the ICBM program just in time to save it from the bureaucrats; Nikita Khrushchev, who brought the world to the edge of nuclear catastrophe during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and John Kennedy, who saved it. Schriever and his comrades endured the heartbreak of watching missiles explode on the launching pads at Cape Canaveral and savored the triumph of seeing them soar into space. In the end, they accomplished more than achieving a fiery peace in a cold war. Their missiles became the vehicles that opened space for America. From the Hardcover edition.
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This book fits into a couple of different categories. The subtitle ?Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon? leads one in the direction of a biography and it is, in part. However, it is not a single biography as it contains ?mini? biographies of several individuals of men connected to the development of the ICBM (both in the US and in the then USSR) and that were connected, directly or indirectly, to General Schriever?s programs and life. These are men one seldom hears of but were crucial to the development of the ICBM: Theodore von Kármán, John von Neumann, Trevor Gardner, Simon Ramo, Dean Wooldridge, Sergei Korolev, and a host of others. ?A Fiery Peace in a Cold War? is also part military history; Sheehan provides a synopsis of World War II and a bit on the German rocket program. A study on the difficulties of getting new technology accepted and new programs initiated and supported is also gleaned from this work. Part of this difficulty arises from dealing with old school, traditional leaders (for some of which Sheehan provides biographic information) and the other from inter-service rivalry. [Both of which still create problems.] Just before the epilogue (which includes a lengthy description of Schriever?s funeral) several pages are devoted to the Cuban Missile Crisis which is the last of several other diplomatic episodes diplomatic episodes discussed in this work.
What ties the book together is the relationship of individuals to the late Gen. Bernard Schriever, a disciple of Henry ?Hap? Arnold, the only individual to hold five-star rank in two services, and the development of the ICBM. Schriever developed a vision and had a knack for choosing the right people for the positions needing to be filled and the work to be done. He would not back down from defending what he thought was right, standing up to senior officers and politicians regardless of the possible damage to his career. Fortunately, he also had supporters in high places that would back him up. He, in turn, had his own group of subordinates that were like him ? bold, clever, and willing to take the initiative and who he backed up.
The book is not strictly chronological and Sheehan sometimes goes back a few years in his discussions yet he generally keeps within the decade or so that the majority of the book covers. There are 82 ?chapters? divided into seven books and an epilogue and. What one might term a contradiction occurs when comparing a statement in Chapter 15 when Sheehan posits that a mis-reading of Stalin led to the Cold War. However, later, in Chapter 18, he mentions that Andrei Sakharov (father of USSR?s H-bomb) noted in his memoirs he was certain Stalin would not have reciprocated any American restraint in creating the hydrogen bomb. Perhaps as a result of his book on Vietnam, Sheehan, in Chapter 45, in essence says America?s anti-communist theology got in the way of perceiving reality and led to the disastrous consequences of Vietnam War. Though I can agree with Sheehan?s view on America?s anti-communist theology I have difficulty believing Stalin was mis-read.
Having just read the 1986 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History ? ?The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age? by Walter A. McDougall, I am surprised Sheehan did not mention the discussions of international law relating to the question of surveillance from space. Once Sputnik was up, the Soviets could not complain about satellites flying over their territory.
While many of us are familiar with the ?heroes? of space flight, e.g. Neil Armstrong, Yuri Gagarin and Sally Ride, few people know of those who made space flight possible. Individuals like Gen. Schriever, Theodore von Kármán, John von Neumann, Trevor Gardner, Simon Ramo, Dean Wooldridge, Ed Hall, and Sergei Korolev and his team of Soviet scientists, who provided the means by which the astronauts could go into space. This work makes us aware of those individuals and those programs while providing an informative introduction to Cold War history and the development of the ICBM.
?Fiery Peace in a Cold War? is an easily read narrative history, rather than footnotes or endnotes Sheehan has a section titled Source Notes revealing he did a lot of interviews for this work, primary sources, and lists their names with a majority described as USAF (Ret.) Sheehan has also included a rather lengthy bibliography (which includes McDougall?s work).
Available in bookstores on 22 September 2009.
