Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(31)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

It's hard to judge this book on its own merits.

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, Neil Sheehan's new book about American ballistic missile pioneer Bennie Schreiver, is evocative of past triumphs--both in rocketry and book-length journalism. The development of the Air Force's long-range nuclear missiles during the Cold War has long been obscured by secrecy and bluff and political posturing; still, as a book topic, it seems designed to follow up on Richard Rhodes' highly acclaimed works on the Manhattan project and the subsequent development of the hydrogen bomb. And the structure, wherein Sheehan shines a light on the life and career of a heretofore-unknown subject in order to bring out new shapes and shadows in a familiar historical terrain, calls to mind Sheehan's own magisterial work about Vietnam, "A Bright Shining Lie."

It's difficult to oversell that book, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; one of my journalism professors at Columbia, a member of the Pulitzer committee, called it "one of those rare books that enhances the Pulitzers, rather than the other way around." But that book's massive shadow seems to diminish this well-researched and well-written but comparatively pedestrian work.

Sheehan's subject in "A Bright Shining Lie" was a fascinating Army officer and civilian advisor named John Paul Vann whose distinguished military efforts and dark personal life mirrored the well-meaning public rhetoric and duplicitous behind-the-scenes behavior that characterized America's efforts in the Vietnam War. Bennie Schriever, by comparison, is somewhat flat and uninteresting as a subject for biography. His story has a certain God-mom-apple-pie American simplicity to it; he emigrated to the U.S. from Germany at a young age, worked hard and played a lot of golf, and gained the organizational and bureaucratic skills necessary to get the U.S. Intercontinental Ballistic Missile program going and help the U.S. win the Cold War. Yet there's little sense of Schriever's personal failings; Sheehan mentions family tensions and a divorce almost in passing, and the book ends up feeling more like hagiography than biography.

Consequently, Sheehan ends up looking for conflict not within the man, but between him and a familiar cast of characters--the Neanderthal-minded SAC generals Curtis LeMay and Tommy Powers, who were so famously eager to bomb America's enemies back to the Stone Age. And so, while detailing the various troubles and triumphs Schreiver faced in getting the Air Force's Atlas, Titan and Thor missiles off the launch pad, Sheehan also describes the difficulties he had in arguing against LeMay and an institutional mindset that valued "operators," the bombers they operated, and preventative war far more than it valued the untested deterrent powers of silo-based nuclear missiles.

All of this bureaucratic infighting occurs, of course, against the backdrop of the larger Cold War. Here, Sheehan provides some very insightful history, but when it comes to analysis, he often sacrifices ideological coherency for hindsight-based have-it-both-ways criticism; in his estimation, for instance, the United States was both wrong to stand behind South Vietnam in 1963 and wrong not to stand behind South Korea in 1949. (Many of the references foreshadowing Vietnam felt forced, almost as if Sheehan got worried about writing a puff piece about a Cold Warrior and wanted to buff up his already-shiny Vietnam-dove-street-cred rather than make useful commentary; I felt like pulling a Big Lebowski on him, grabbing him by the shoulders and yelling, "Everything isn't about Vietnam, Walter!")

Still, like rockets, all books must have their proper arc, and Sheehan finds his by guiding his narrative to the most dramatic moment of the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Popular history has it that the crisis was a near-triumph of the nuclear-knuckle-draggers, and Sheehan very much focuses on that aspect of it, showing how LeMay and other top Air Force brass pushed for massive airstrikes against Cuba once Khruschev's ploy of stationing missiles there was discovered, and how this probably would have set off World War III. (While still chilling, this is hardly new material; Errol Morris covered the same territory far more interestingly in his documentary "The Fog of War," for instance.) However, like many popular historians, he fails to mention that the crisis was also a logical culmination of the nuclear doctrines espoused by civilians within the Kennedy administration, many of whom bought into the theory of "escalation dominance," whereby the United States would try to perpetually one-up its Soviet adversaries by being willing to use slightly more force than them in any conflict or area of contention. Sheehan could have just as easily blamed the crisis on Robert McNamara as on Curtis LeMay; moreover, he could have just as easily blamed it on his own main character, whose success in developing deployable ICBMs while similar Soviet efforts were blowing up on the launch pads was surely a factor in the Soviet Union's panicked decision to put short-range nuclear missiles in Cuba.

Despite the efforts to hammer history and biography into a familiar ideological mold--one that's been battered by its use on previous, better books on the subject--and despite Sheehan's somewhat annoying tendency here to substitute hypothesis and conjecture when it makes for better imagery than documented fact, this is a decent book, and a relatively enjoyable read. Unlike Schriever's and Sheehan's most famous creations, though, it falls a bit short.

Neil Sheehan made an important contribution to history in 1971 as a New York Times reporter when he obtained The Pentagon Papers from Daniel Ellsberg. The resulting reports earned his paper a Pulitzer Prize after Sheehan revealed previously unknown facts about how President Johnson had deliberately expanded the Vietnam War. In 1989 Sheehan was personally awarded a Pulitzer for his book on the Vietnam War - "A Bright Shining Lie" that focused around Lt. Col. Paul Vann and his involvement in that struggle. Sheehan's current book, "A Fiery Peace in a Cold War," also focuses around an individual, the Air Force's Bernard Schriever, to tell how the U.S. went from a shaky high-cost defense built around bombers to much more formidable missile-based system.

Sheehan's book opens with the Air Force's chief, General "Hap" Arnold, meeting young Col. 'Bernie" Schriever in preparation for the general's retirement . Arnold stressed that it was the civilian scientists, not military engineers, who had made the key technological innovations during WWII. WWI, he said, had been won by brawn, WWII by logistics, and WWIII would be won by brains. To try and maintain relationships with those scientists, now returning to their universities, Arnold formed a new Scientific Liaison Branch and wanted Schriever to head it. Schriever did not disappoint and went on to become the father of the modern, hi-te ch Air Force by building the first missile defense.

Meanwhile, American scientists were busy creating the first H-bomb - an 82-ton 1952 monster with a 10+ megaton TNT (MT) explosive force. This quickly was trimmed to the first 'droppable' version weighing 21 tons with the same explosive force. General LeMay, SAC Commander, pressed for even lighter version, and the 1956 'model' was down to less than 8 tons. LeMay's goading eventually resulted in an American stockpile of 20,941 MTs. LeMay also planned to fuse a lot of his monster bombs for ground or near-ground bursts to ensure crushing underground bunkers and other hardened targets. The result, unfortunately, would have been to poison the atmosphere and bring on a nuclear winter for the entire northern hemisphere.

While General LeMay was building SAC's bomber inventory up to a 1,769 level (vs. 85 for the Russians) and around 250,000 men, Schriever's R&D focus made him aware of John von Neumann and Edwin Teller's prediction that by 1960 the U.S. could build an H-bomb weighing less than a ton and with the explosive force of a megaton. The implication was it would be possible to build a rocket that could fling a thermonuclear projectile down on any city in the Soviet Union. Schriever seized on that knowledge - adding to his workload involving in-flight refueling systems, thwarting LeMay's request for high-flying bombers (Schriever saw them as vulnerable to rockets), and encouraging the development of turbofan=2 0jet engines allowing low-level bombing runs that evaded both radar and missles - without rapidly running out of fuel.

Moscow, moreover, was not sleeping. Russia did not have the experience building and using heavy bombers that the U.S. had, nor the ability to encircle the U.S. with its bases as we could them. It did, however, have about 5,000 German rocket engineers and technicians with V-2 experience. Thus, the Soviet Union instead opted for rockets - first SAMs capable of reaching Francis Gary Powers' U-2 at 70,000 ft. in 1960, rockets to launch Sputnik in 1957, and then deployed ICBMs of their own (1959).

Schriever concluded that existing plane manufacturers were too staid and slow to either attract the required top-notch scientific talent he needed or meet demanding timelines. Instead, he arranged to work with Simon Ramo and Dean Wooldrige (TRW after 1958). Schriever also determined that he needed high-level Air Force support, and found that in Trevor Gardner, a high-level assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force. Not only did Schriever have to compete with General LeMay's SAC for funds and attention, but the Army's Jupiter rocket program led by Werner von Braun as well. Then there were technical problems - creating a multi-stage rocket, engines that could steer by being swiveled, and the lack of sophisticated microcircuitry, a presidential directive to move vital defense production into the heartland (away from California's high-technology resources), and airplane manufacturers co mplaining that they were being unjustly left out. Schriever achieved his desired highest Air Force priority, but still found himself fighting for money - eight levels of budget approval, with Secretary of Defense Wilson in opposition. Thus Schriever, along with his civilian 'godfather' maneuvered to make a presentation to President Eisenhower, via the Dept. of State.

After thirteen failures, Schriever's group successfully launched a satellite that could take photos over Russia before being retrieved over the Pacific. This accomplishment immediately put to rest both the myth of a 'bomber gap' vs. Russia and the fear of another 'Pearl Harbor' sneak attack. (The 'missile gap' myth was also put to rest via these spy satellites.) Reliability improved - between 1966-70 Schriever's group recovered all 28 film capsules launched. The Air Force also improved its missiles via development of a 2nd-generation solid-fuel rocket (immediate launch, vs. hours of loading dangerous and unstable fuel into liquid-fueled rocket tanks).

Sheehan credits General Schriever and those he led with purchasing the time in which the Soviet Union could self-destruct economically. Their Air Force ICBMs also became the vehicles that opened the exploration of outer space. General Schriever died in 2005, at the age of 94, having come a very long way from his humble birth in Germany and introduction to the U.S. through Ellis Island.

Bottom Line: Bernard Schriever brought great political and leadership skills, as well as a strong personal drive and initiative to the important task given him by General Arnold. His contributions are related well by Sheehan. The unasked question, however, is: "Why were Schriever vs. von Bruan, and the Air Force vs. Army, in competition to build America's first missiles?"

If you're an older baby boomer and remember the days of air raid drills in grammar school, this book will enlighten you, perhaps for the first time, what was REALLY going on during those apparently peaceful 50s !

This book reads like a novel and provides incredible detail and perspective to the do-or-die race for ICBM supremacy, and the subsequent victory by the US in the Cold War due to its winning that race.

The personality portraits of the players: the scientists, the generals, the politicians is fascinating for anyone interested in the workings of our government, and how things truly get done.

Yet all this detail only enriches the story, not bog it down.

I've read a lot of books over my lifetime, and "A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon" ranks high up on the list of memorable ones !

To me this was an extremely interesting story. I worked on the Ballistic Missile Program and was in a number of meetings where General Schriever was present. However, I did not know much about his personal life or his career, nor of the background of getting the Program off the ground, so this was very enlightning.

My only reservation about the book was that he gave Col. Ed Hall far too much credit for creating the rocket motors used in the missiles. Hall started some programs at Wright Field, handing out contracts and being the central point of contact with the government. When the Ramo-Wooldridge team was given the job of technical direction of the program, Hall no longer had such a central position. As a consequence he was extremely bitter and called Ramo and Wooldridge a couple of crooks. It was the team that Ramo and Wooldridge put together, together with the prime contractors, who solved the problems and perfected the system. In the case of Minuteman, this team did the preliminary design of the missile making use of the state-of-the-art esisting in a number of companies around the country. Hall had very little to do at that point.

I as mostly involved with the reentry part of all the missiles but I knew the people working on the propulsion part and later worked for Bob Anderson who was immersed in the propulsion program.

Dr. John R. Sellars

If you are fascinated by the Cold War and the theory of nuclear deterrence, then you'll really like Neil Sheehan's "A Fiery Peace in a Cold War." I've read a fair amount of nonfiction about the game theory aspect of the Cold War (i.e., William Poundstone's Prisoner's Dilemma), so I was familiar with the role that game theory/physicist John von Neumann played in building the US nuclear force. But for some reason I had never heard of Air Force officer Bernard Schriever, who turns out to have played a key role as well. Schriever is the nominal biographical focus of Sheehan's book, but apart from the first 50 pages or so, which cover his childhood and early adult years, it's really about the race to build an ICBM.

It's been said that journalism is the first draft of history, and this book is a great example of that. Schriever was alive until only recently, and Sheehan had access to him while writing the book. Therefore, the book has a lively quality to it, in parts giving the sensation of listening to Schriever tell the story himself (even though he is quoted only in small chunks). It makes this a very readable account.

Others have commented on how Sheehan has a discursive style, in that he'll mention a new military or civilian person and then provide a mini-biography of that person, before returning to the action at hand. I noticed this (you can't miss it), but it didn't actually bother me because Sheehan delivers the background efficiently and interestingly.

There are a couple of things, though, that I think would have helped while reading this book. First, a cast of characters, because there are so many people who come in and out of the story that you can easily lose track. Second, a timeline of events, particularly because the discursive style leads to quite a bit of jumping back and forth. Nevertheless, these are minor quibbles, and overall, I loved this book.

*I received an advanced reader copy of this book through the Amazon Vine program.*

The American bibliography of the Cold War is dominated by policy wonks like Dean Acheson, George Keenan, and Henry Kissinger, spooks like James Jesus Angleton, Allan Dulles, and Richard Helms, politicians like Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Reagan. The military component have been well represented as well in the literature with larger than life characters like Admiral Hyman Rickover and General Curtis LeMay of the Strategic Air Command (who was satirized on screen as General Jack D. Ripper).

Benny Schriever is one of the good guys of whom you have never heard. Coming to the United States at age seven in 1917, as this nation teetered on the cusp of entering the Great War, Schriever joined the Army Reserves to learn to fly. After a brief career as an airline pilot he was one of those recruited in the late 30s by the founder of the Army Air Corps General Hap Arnold to join the Regular Army to test and train the men and equipment which would be required for the coming war as the Second World War ended he had gone from Second Lieutenant to bird colonel in a few short years largely on the strength of his engineering talent.

As Arnold prepared to retire from what was now the United States Air Force , he assigned Schriever a mission that was to make him the definitive cold warrior- to utilize civilian science, scientists, engineers and industry to make the Air Force the dominant player in the missile and space game. This assignment would ultimately earn Schriever four stars of his own, but bring him into conflict with men like LeMay who had other ideas for the future of air power in projecting global hegemony by the United States.

This is no mere biography of a soldier and airman. Rather Neil Sheehan sets the geopolitical stage of the Cold War with intriguing portraits of its principal domestic and international actors. We glimpse the brilliance of Kennan, the steely resolve of Kennedy, and the imperiousness of Acheson. It is a tale of a world many of us lived in every day, now thankfully gone, and the men who fought the good fight to keep the peace. Before this you may have never heard of Schiever but with another Pulitzer clearly in Sheehan's sights, he is one man you will never forget.

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War presents itself as an epic story of the genesis of America's nuclear missile program, centering around one man whom, Sheehan tells us, was perhaps the single most influential actor in this saga. It is indeed an epic tale, and it it masterfully told. But it is good history?

The book begins with the story of how the Schreibers arrived in America from German- interesting reading, if not terribly germane to the history of America's missile program. The rest of the first 50 pages are devoted to following Schreiber's career, up through the end of WWII. The narrative then switches over to a discussion of the Manhattan Project, the use of the atomic bomb, and post-war developments in Europe- especially those involving Stalin's Soviet Union. Sheehan's discussion of Soviet atomic espionage is pretty good (although there are no particular revelation here) but his interpretations of Stalins intentions in the post-war period are a bit confused. He states that Stalin had no expansionist intentions- beyond holding on to large parts of Eastern Europe, which certainly strikes me as expansionist. Sheehan also states that Stalin opposed North Korea's actions against the South- yet Stalin also supplied heavy weapons and aircraft to North Korea, and supplied pilots to fly these aircraft for the North Koreans.

Schreiber re-enters the narrative in 1950, with his assignment to an advanced planning group at the Pentagon, reporting to the Air Force's new chief, General Curtis LeMay. Sheehan's description of LeMay vacillates between portraying him as an egotistical buffoon and a skilled leader. Whenever Schreiver goes up against LeMay, LeMay is a cigar-chomping buffoon. When he supports Schreiber, suddenly he's a man of great judgment and honesty. And that brings up a major flaw of this book: Recounting history via the life of one individual is a good technique for building an interesting and personal narrative, but it invites the error of assigning too much importance to a single individual, and in the hands of many amateur historians, blinding the author to the faults of his hero, and the accomplishments of others. Sheehan does occasionally fall into this trap. In the nearly 500 pages that comprise this volume, I don't think there's a single sentence that describes a fault in Schreiber's character, or a poor decision he made- although much is made of the flaws in the character and decisions of others.

Sheehan's story is also troubled by a large number of technical errors that suggest Sheehan didn't really understand the the things he was writing about enough to question them. He states that the manned space program capsules were modified versions of the reentry vehicles designed for nuclear warheads, which is absolute nonsense.The two may look alike, but function in completely different ways. He repeats the error of ascribing the design of the IAS computer to John von Neumann, who wrote the official government report on the machine, when it was in fact designed by Mauchly and Eckhart. In his discussion of the resolution of the first spy satellites, he confuses the resolution of the optical system- 50 lines/mm- with its resolution of targets on the ground. He refers to a radar PPI display as an "oscilloscope", which it may have resembled, but was a very different device. Many of his his attempts to explain technical matters are just plain confusing, like his explanation of inertial guidance.

The bulk of the book is taken up with the decisions that led to America's first ICBMs and IRBMs, the struggles between the USAF and NASA, political infighting, and how this all played out on the world stage. There's a good historical discussion of the Cuban Missile Crisis, although unlike many historians, Sheehan portrays Kennedy as the unquestioning hero, contrasting his careful, decisive confrontation with Khrushchev against those hotheads who argued for a preemptive military strike.Lost in this discussion are those who argued for a third course that would probably have accomplished the same ends diplomatically, by trading the US missile bases in Turkey (which were what triggered Khrushchev's decision to place missiles in Cuba) for the Cuban missiles without bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Sheehan also notes how the increased threat and cost of a superior US nuclear arsenal helped to bring about the collapse of the USSR- although oddly missing is any discussion of the MX system that began under Carter, the IRBMs placed in Great Britain and Europe in the 1980s, or any mention of Reagan and Thatcher, two rather important persons behind those decisions.

And yet, for all these faults, this is still an worthwhile book that presents, in a clear narrative, a fairly good overall picture of the genesis and the history of the US missile program in a way that makes clear how and why many critical decisions were made. Readers interested in the history of the 20th Century, and America's rise as the dominant world power will still find much in it that's both enlightening and interesting. But it should be read with a critical eye.