Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3530 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-22
• Released on: 2009-09-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 560 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780679422846
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

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)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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?

Review
Advance praise for A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

“Neil Sheehan has triumphed again in this sweeping and absolutely fascinating book. Using the personal passion of one Air Force officer as a lens, Sheehan takes on the epic tale of how science, the military, and politics became interwoven during the Cold War. It’s a crucially important topic, but also a colorful narrative tale filled with memorable characters such as Bennie Schriever and the geniuses he enlisted in his cause.”
–Walter Isaacson, author of Einstein: His Life and Universe


Praise for A Bright Shining Lie

“Masterly . . . a compelling, graphic and deeply sensitive biography [and] one of the few brilliant histories of the American entanglement in Vietnam . . . Sheehan’s skillful weaving of anecdote and history, of personal memoir and psychological profile, [gives] the book the sense of having been written by a novelist, journalist and scholar all rolled into one.”
–The New York Times

“If there is one book that captures the Vietnam war in the sheer Homeric scale of its passion and folly, this book is it. Neil Sheehan orchestrates a great fugue evoking all the elements of the war.”
–The New York Times Book Review

“A brilliant work of enormous substance and ambition. In telling one man’s story [A Bright Shining Lie] sets out to define the fatal contradictions that lost America the war in Vietnam. It belongs to the same order of merit as Dispatches, The Best and the Brightest and Fire in the Lake.”
–The Washington Post Book World

“[A Bright Shining Lie] is more than a biography. It is also a compelling and clear history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Mr. Sheehan’s book . . . is the best answer to any American who asks: &#...

Customer Reviews

Rockets to Russia
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.

Excellent for Cold War history buffs, and for those interested in jet planes.
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.

Mixed feelings
In this much-lauded book, Pultizer-winner Sheehan traces the political and administrative background of the development of ICBMs in the postwar period, with a particular focus on the personality of the man most responsible for selling them to the government and pursuing their development and deployment.

I picked this item because I loved "A Bright Shining Lie," which I still admire, and because the dynamic Sheehan describes here was the fundamental one of my childhood: nuclear missiles, their presence, and the fear of them that was a constant of the late Cold War years. I think the topic is not only interesting, it's also worthy of much more attention than it has received, particularly as discussions of missile defense systems, mostly dead since the termination of SDI research in the mid-1990s, are revived in western Europe.

At the same time, that topic deserves a better treatment than it gets here. The technical issues are explored only superficially, and not in a way that leads the reader to understand the actual difficulties and questions that relate to the construction of a missle. Science is touched on only obliquely. Sheehan is much more interested in decisions that get made. That's a fine focus, but he explores it mostly by means of personality studies, and he often gets off topic. An attempt to portray one participant as forceful, for example, turns into a one-page discussion of his behavior at the delivery of his son that completely distracts from the actual point being made. In general, the chapters are poorly organized and go off on tangents too often. Also, Sheehan seems to pick and choose in terms of scholarship that supports his account. As far as I know, for example, no historian except maybe Russians takes seriously anymore the idea that the Berlin Airlift was a defensive measure on the part of the Soviet Union. Sheehan also seems unaware that Venona pretty definitely established Alger Hiss's guilt. His portrayal of Curtis LeMay as a wack job is tedious and overdone. As a leftie myself, I don't mind a left-leaning history, but I think that authors of histories need to face facts, and it seems to me that Sheehan cherry picks here to suit his own position. The prose is also often disjointed and Sheehan frequently uses vocabulary incorrectly.