A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon [Hardcover]

Neil Sheehan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 22, 2009

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The military-industrial complex proves an unlikely arena for plucky individualism in this history of the men who built America's intercontinental ballistic missile program in the 1950s and '60s. Sheehan paints air force Gen. Bernard Schriever and his colorful band of military aides, civilian patrons, defense intellectuals and aerospace entrepreneurs as a guerrilla insurgency fighting Pentagon red tape, and a hostile air force brass, led by Strategic Air Command honcho Curtis LeMay, who advocated megatonnage bomber planes over ICBMs. Sheehan gives a fascinating run-down of the engineering challenges posed by nuclear missiles, but the main action consists of bureaucratic intrigues, procurement innovations and epic briefings that catch the president's ear and open the funding spigots. Like the author's Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning A Bright Shining Lie, this is a saga of underdog visionaries struggling to redirect a misguided military juggernaut, this time successfully: the author credits Schriever's missiles with keeping the peace and jump-starting the space program and satellite industry. Sheehan's focus on personal initiative and human-scale dramas lends an overly romantic cast to his study of cold war policy making and the arms race, but it makes for an engrossing read. 16 pages of b&w photos. (Oct. 6)
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From The New Yorker

As he did unforgettably in “A Bright Shining Lie,” Sheehan here tells the story both of a warrior and of a war, in this case a cold one. The warrior is Bernard Schriever, a pilot who was “the handsomest general in the United States Air Force,” and the organizing force behind the intercontinental-ballistic-missile program. The I.C.B.M., as Schriever put it, was the weapon with the “highest probability of Not being used.” Schriever is a charismatic figure, and the supporting characters are fascinating, too: General Curtis LeMay, who, after one showdown, challenged Schriever to a judo match; the brothers Ed and Ted Hall, one the father of the Minuteman and the other a Russian spy; and John von Neumann, the theorist of mutual assured destruction. The question that Sheehan can’t quite answer is, perhaps, unanswerable: If, following Schriever’s idea, we built bigger and bigger bombs so as to not blow ourselves up, and we find ourselves still here, is it because we were wise or because we were lucky?

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 560 pages
• Publisher: Random House; First Edition edition (September 22, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679422846
• ISBN-13: 978-0679422846
• Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (71 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #576,782 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Neil Sheehan is the author of A Fiery Peace in a Cold War and A Bright Shining Lie, which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1989. He spent three years in Vietnam as a war correspondent for United Press International and The New York Times and won numerous awards for his reporting. In 1971, he obtained the Pentagon Papers, which brought the Times the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for meritorious public service. Sheehan lives in Washington, D.C. He is married to the writer Susan Sheehan.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent for Cold War history buffs, and for those interested in jet planes., September 24, 2009

By 

Tom Brody (Berkeley, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon (Kindle Edition)

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A FIERY PEACE IN A COLD WAR by Neil Sheenah is about 506 pages and printed on off-white paper. The book contains 83 chapters. Therefore, even though most of the paragraphs are big chunky things, generally taking up a half page to an entire page, the 83 chapters divide the subject matter, allowing a manageable reading experience.

The book is about General Bernard Adolph Schriever (1910-2005), who was born in Bremen, Germany, and after immigrating to the United States, played a major role in the U.S. Air Force programs for space and ballistic missile research.

The book describes Mr.Schreiver's German-ancestry parents, and attempt to escape from anti-German sentiment by moving to San Antonio, Texas. We learn that Mr.Schreiver's father Adolph perished at the age of 35. "Adolph had his head down inspecting an engine. Someone accidently flipped the starter. The fly wheel fractured his skull . . ."

We learn of Mr.Schreiver's interest in golf, where he "led the field of 54 in the qualifying round to win a pair of golfing shoes from the Broadway Sporting Goods Store and a silver medal from a San Antonio newspaper." The book's early dwelling on golf is not a trivial fact, as golf enabled Mr.Schreiver to hobnob with military brass, and to acquire valuable career connections.

We read that Mr.Schriever attended Texas A & M which, at that time, was all male and was a military school, and that Mr.Schriever was awarded his wings in June 1933.

The first 20 pages or so of this book are simplistic and they read like a book intended for children between the ages of 8-12. But then there is a transition, and after this point we learn about military strategy, leaders in the military, and about various airplanes (advantage and disadvantages of various planes). Also, the book uses the technique where one chapter tells about the general military situation (as might be found in a typical history book about the era) and then returning to the subject of Mr.Schreiver.

We learn that President Roosevelt, in 1934, cancelled air mail contracts with the Post Office and commercial airlines and instead had the Army Air Corps deliver the mail. But this led to a problem, since Army Air Corps planes were ill-equipped to fly in the fog or at night, leading to 66 crashes. This was the spark that led to the modernization of air force. We learn about Boeing's B-17 Flying Fortress, Consolidated's B-29 Liberator, and about Mr.Schreiver's job of flying a commercial route in Montana with a Lockheed Electra 10. We read about World War II, where Mr.Schreiver was part of General MacArthur's attempt to wrest New Guinea from the Japanese, and we learn about tankers at sea that served as "offshore pumping stations to send the fuel in through lines and fill the tanks at bases in time for planes to gas up and take off." (page 45).

The book plunges into little biographies, now and then, and we learn about Major General Sverdrup who ordered a ship to be filled with cement, for construction on the island of Cebu. But the ship was too heavy and got stuck on a coral reef. After the war, Mr.Sverdrup later started Sverdrup & Parcel, an engineering company in St.Louis. But the story about overloading the ship stuck with him (as a running joke).

In one of the chapters that steps back to give the big picture, we learn about the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos. Mostly, we learn about employees at Los Alamos and at other U.S. government research facilities who were Russian spies (e.g., Ted Hall, David Greenglass, Klaus Fuchs, George Koval). We learn the irony that Ted Hall's brother was Ed Hall (Lieutenant Colonel Edward Hall) who was the U.S. Air Force's leading engineer for the American ICBM. Any person who has "an issue" with security checks will change his or her mind after reading this chapter.

The author is to be commended for sticking to the topic, and for not digressing into tempting subjects from the era, such as celebrities (other history books sometimes digress into these topics). Instead of names of celebrities, the book is peppered with names of planes and missiles, e.g., B-17 (p. 131), B-52 (p. 171), MX-774 (p. 212), C-47 transport (p. 271), XSM Experimental StraTegic Missile (p. 317), XSM-68 missile (p. 322), C-124 Globemaster (p. 309), SAC B36 (p. 335), R-12 Soviet ballistic missile (p. 377), FKR cruise missile (p. 441). The author appears knowledgeable, and one is under the impression that he had a chair next to aeronautics engineers, watching them adjust their Pickett slide rules (do you remember slide rules?), and asking questions and taking notes. FIVE STARS.

I also recommend THE INVENTION THAT CHANGED THE WORLD by Robert Buderi, which concerns radar, and its development in the 1930s, use during World War II, and further development in the Cold War years.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bio of General Shriver & the development of the AF's missile programs, December 27, 2009

By 

J. Rudy "Major, USAF" (Fairfax, VA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon (Hardcover)

General Bernard Schriever is well-known within the Air Force as the `Father of the Air Force Space and Missile Program'. Neil Sheehan has delivered a comprehensive masterpiece highlighting the lasting impacts `Bennie' Shriever had on America's youngest, yet most technologically oriented military service.

As expected, this book covers the Air Force rocketry and missile programs that were led by General Shriever's Western Development Division. "Dr. Space: The Life of Wernher von Braun" provides an interesting perspective on many of the Army's similar efforts. Sheehan's work is far better in providing the strategic context for how the weapons were deployed, as Ward's book is limited to a biography of von Braun and does not discuss the system deployments at all.

Sheehan uses his journalistic writing abilities to make Shriever's accomplishments accessible for most readers. Personally, I prefer authors who provide a contextual background to understand a person's contributions, so Sheehan's writing style was a good fit for my tastes. He does have a journalistic bias and sometimes trades off complete factual accuracy in order to provide simplified explanations of historic events and technically advanced concepts.

This book covers far more than the AF missile & rocketry programs by including topics such as the expansion of the AF Scientific Advisory Board. It was in his role here that Shriever crossed paths with General Curtis Lemay over such topics as to what kind of refueling system (probe & drogue versus boom) the Air Force should standardize across the fleet. Sheehan's perspective on General Lemay may distress some readers, since he criticizes this Air Force icon. As an Air Force officer, I found the criticisms to be accurate - sometimes the truth hurts. I hope this book finds its way onto the Chief of Staff's reading list. It is well-written and offers a perspective one of the seldom spoken-of roles of America's Air Force.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb on all levels: personally, historically, technically, October 3, 2009

By 

35-year Technology Consumer "8-tracks to 802.11" (Mid Atlantic, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon (Hardcover)

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Neil Sheehan's biography of Bernard Schriever gets it right on every level. He captures Schriever's path from pre-World War I Germany to the Texas hill country and into World War II as a young pilot. Schriever's talent for managing large programs and understanding complex technology would eventually make him the driving force behind the USA's successes in developing and fielding strategic missile systems.

Sheehan captures all of the elements needed for this story. This includes the historical context of World War II (and especially the brainpower behind Germany's V-2 program that would eventually disperse to both the United States and Soviet Union), the technological and political challenges of the Cold War (with superb insights into how Schriever's Soviet counterparts were going about their business). Inter-service rivalries between the Air Force and Army over ownership of missiles and rockets? Sheehan nails it. Intra-Air Force rivalries between Schriever's missileers and Curtis LeMay's long range bombers? Sheehan lays it all out. The military and political kabuki dances of big budget programs and untested technologies? Sheehan illuminates them wonderfully (especially during the high stakes decision briefings for flag officers, cabinet members or the President).

Schriever emerges as a military leader whose ability to lead talented subordinates possessing specific skills while standing up to his superiors for the tools he needs to succeed keep his programs marching towards to success. While never in command of large numbers of troops, he effectively managed large (and sometimes tenuously held) budgets and complex programs, got the most out of talented technicians, and successfully navigated the rocks and shoals of defense funding.

For better or worse, the work done by both Schriever and the Soviets he raced against --and even if ultimately designed to deliver weapons of unspeakable fury-- paved the way for technologies we rely on today: weather satellites, space-based images in Google Earth, GPS navigation and geostationary communications satellites. Anybody familiar with the vast infrastructure at the Cold War will be struck by the humble beginnings of Cape Canaveral, Vandenburg Air Force Base (then Camp Cooke) and Diyarbakur, Turkey and the primitive technology that drove early missile and satellite control systems. Sheehan explains the technology clearly and correctly.

This book does not hide the warts of its main characters, and their flaws are discussed as frankly as their strengths in narrating their lives. The closing descriptions of Schriever's post Air Force life, second marriage and 2005 funeral services and eventual burial at Arlington near his mentor, Hap Arnold are quite moving.

If the Cold War influenced your life you'll want to read this book. If you don't think the Cold War influenced your life: read this book, and learn about one person's profound influence on technology designed to kill; then reflect on how we were able to take the best of these breakthroughs and apply them in non-lethal ways.