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A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon
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| Part No: | 0307576698 |
| Manufacturer: | Random House Audio |
| MFG Part: | |
| Customer Rating: | 4.0 / 5.0 |
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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.
| Decent read... keep your political opinions to yourself | 2010-09-02 | 4 / 5 |
| | As an AF space officer I read the book on a recommendation from a coworker. A bit dry but a good history of the ICBM program and, more importantly, the very capable father of our nation's spacelift capability Gen Bennie Schriever. Neil Sheehan leans way too far to the left for my taste so his shots at Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush seemed unnecessary, petty and detracted from his well written book. I think I'll pick up Warren Kozak's book on Curtis LeMay now. |
| Fascinating Topic, Boring Book | 2010-07-16 | 2 / 5 |
| Sheehan's method is to investigate a broad topic through the lens of one particpant's story. It worked brilliantly in Bright Shining Lie, but fails here. I wanted more of the technology and drama, but the book is mainly a series of mini biographies structured like this:
[Male human] grew up in [region]. He entered [education institution] and studied [some technical field]. He joined the army air corps in [year]. He served in the [WWII theatre] as a [military specialty]. After the war, [Army general] noticed his talents and he joined [missile development team].
There must be two dozen such bios and their repetition is tedious.
Sheehan's predictable Cold War revisionism is restrained, and only occasionally annoys.
Two stars for inherently interesting subject matter and a smattering of high points. |
| Ah, the good old days | 2010-04-18 | 4 / 5 |
| Mr. Sheehan takes us back to the last days of the last five star general and the only Airman to hold that rank, Hap Arnold; he saw the future, needing command engineers, not just bomber commanders, those daring ops men of old. Enter Benny Schriver, not the only German-speaking gun of post-war America. Not a sailor, he was of Bremerhaven. I will forgive Mr. Sheehan for his biographically suspect device of tracing the importance of golf among the winning traits of this central figure. He reasons that this solitary pursuit of competitive excellence accounts for Benny's (as the golfing press dubbed him) staunchness under fire while creating America's Intercontinental Ballistic Missile program; after all Mr. Sheehan could hardly have foreseen the timidity of the Tiger in our woods, so to speak. Post hoc, propter hoc is his growling error. But biographical astuteness is no requisite for another fine book of his. I had not known that Texas A&M had been an all-male military school. Benny bounced into flight school at Kelly Field, home of Air Corps advanced training, to solo after just six hours. His depression era pay was already much above average because a fifty per cent kicker for flight pay - a.k.a. the crash and burn differential. Mr. Sheehan is now in stride as Benny gets another leg up by falling in with Tooey Spaatz, who would become the first A. F. Chief of Staff. You will be relieved to know that officers during the Great Depression did their part by working only half days, which does wonders for your gold handicap.
After the start of the war, Lieutenant Schriever studied aeronautical engineering at Stanford; his sad father-in-law, George Brett had the bad luck to be the Air Corps general assigned to MacArthur, whose combat experience consisted of shooting American Veterans against the direct orders of his Commander-in-Chief (this turned out to be good practice for later) at the Anacostia debacle. Mac had refused to admit Brett to his staff meetings because he was not "Regular Army". He must have missed the memo on Pearl Harbor. Mac did not want anybody talking to somebody like Hap Arnold. As a result, Brett was denied permission to bomb the Japanese Air Force, caught on the ground. The Japanese General was sure it was a divine omen. Mr. Sheehan merely says George Kenny replaced Brett; and in general shows little interest in the Pacific War. Otherwise this hefty volume would add another couple hundred pages.
After the war came the early days of espionage, when the focus was political instead of practical. Because Robert Oppenheimer was a political target, enormous energy was spent hounding him. This smear campaign left generous cover for the real spies, who, as real spies, knew to keep a low profile. Oppenheimer was merely an activist, open and forward, always playing by the rules. The political baboons completely overlooked the treacherous agents who were in the same laboratory, Hall and Fuchs. Hall's brother was an Air Force big shot, and Fuchs played the good little ex-Nazi ex-pat. They efficiently and quietly passed atomic secrets to the Soviets of far greater impact than anything the hapless Rosenbergs were ever accused of and executed for. It should not make us feel any better, but the vaunted British counter intelligence was hardly any better. It was they who vetted Klaus Fuchs and sent him to Los Alamos in 1943.
Did you know Stalin was his stage name? It means man of steel. His real name was the lilting Tjzhugashuili. By 1950, Ole Huga and his NKVD chief, Berea had some 200,000 German slave laborers mining uranium. They later died in the gold mines to preserve secrecy. He attributed the deaths of millions of Ukrainians he had murdered during the war to the German Army. He just swept their bones under the capacious Nazi rug. But Mr. Sheehan's point is that Stalin was not an expansionist like Hitler. Stalin preferred to keep his atrocities in his own yard. The U. S. assumed he was bent on world domination. Europe was only a buffer zone. We watched Soviet adventurism in Iranian Azerbaijan and in Afghanistan. It was all Stalin could manage to keep Czarist trophies in the south and east under control.
Mr. Sheehan spends a considerable number pf pages following Schrieber's early career; and through him, those of a number of Air Force luminaries: Jimmy Doolittle (the Great Misnomer); Carl Spaatz; Hap Arnold and Curtis LeMay. If you are reading this book with a focus on the nuclear aspect of the Cold War, you might grow a little impatient with all these colorful side shows through this longish section. More likely, you will enjoy his style and tid-bits. I had not known that General Jack D. Ripper was fashioned after LeMay in "Dr. Strangelove". Nor did I understand the Jet Stream rendered the Norden bombsight useless because the tail wind did not allow time for set-up. So Jack, er, Curtis simply ignored the military targets, dumped explosives for gasoline and petroleum gels, better know during Vietnam as Napalm, and went straight for the wooden residential areas.
LeMay was a myopic captive of the last war. Remember the Bomber Gap? LeMay again. He completely missed the Soviet change in direction away from bombers. They had a couple of hundred, the CIA figured from their photographs of tail numbers. They may have circled the same parade of all they had in successive loops on the May Day company picnic in Moscow. Eisenhower capped the B-52's at 744, which Kennedy upheld. At 30 megaton each that worked out to 20 billion tons of TNT, or 10 kilotons of TNT for each Soviet subject. Eisenhower quipped, "I do not know how many times you can kill a man, but about three should be enough.
LeMay sat in Omaha and sulked. And he hated Schriever in the worst way, pulling stunts like having him assigned to the motor pool in Korea to get him the heck away from Ike Eisenhower and the like. That one caused a scurry of brass all over Pentagonian creation to track down those petulant orders and rescind them to the circular file.
My one beef with Mr. Sheehan is his occasional quickness to confuse notoriety with excellence. He sometimes overestimates famous men, his biggest departure from his previous magnum opus, "A Bright Shining Lie". He does it with MacArthur, Edward Teller, and even with LeMay to an extent. On the other hand he does a panoramic job of parading this cast of characters in vivid little bio's between the heavy action. The magnificent von Neumann is remembered on his deathbed, listening to his brother read Faust. Impatient with the gap in poetry as the page so slowly turned, he, without missing a foot of meter began reciting the lines from the next page.
These were the glory days of American engineering, imported and home grown. Simon Ramo, born in my old stomping grounds at Salt Lake City, was lured to those of my parents, back East in Schenectady, New York by General Electric. The recruiter had told him he would enjoy playing in the city's symphony, as most of their musicians did. Simon became the Concertmaster, and then he became the "R" in TRW.
Mr. Sheehan takes us to the next big event following the hydrogen weapon: the Atlas Missile project to throw it with. Those were the very days when corporate treason led Eisenhower to understand that continuing assault on our Republic, that of the military-industrial complex. His last speech to us as President made it as clear as clear can be.
But it was off to that other gift of Atlas, the manned space program. Huh, turns out it is rocket science after all. |
| Unsung Heroes | 2010-03-29 | 5 / 5 |
| I couldn't put this book down and give it five stars partly because I knew many of the people who are in it. There were a lot of things I wish had been in the book but were not. Vince Ford was my next door neighbor for years, and I heard all the stories and more first hand. Vince and I went everywhere and did all kinds of things together well into his nineties. He was always a delight to be with. There was never a cross word between us, and I never tired of being with him. There was never a hint that he was other than scrupulously honest and forthright. He was of extraordinary high character.
The first time I met Bennie Schriever, I got into an argument with him. Hell, I didn't know who he was, yet. He was visiting Vince, and as it later turned out, he was right and I was wrong. I came to love Bennie the same as all the others who knew him. His abilities, his courage, his tireless dedication to our country made him a true hero to me. He was above all, a straight-shooter.
I came along after Trev Gardner and Johnny Von Neumann were gone, but I heard everything about them from Ford. What I find a little disappointing is that there were so many anecdotes and little asides that would have made delightful additions to the book that were left out. For example, Vince Ford was known as "Grid" (as in "you may fire when ready, Gridley") to Bennie and all the insiders. It characterized so well his role for Bennie. There were so many little stories to tell. One time we were out, and I ordered a martini straight up. Vince said, "You're supposed to sip those things, aren't you?" I nodded. He went on to say that he had had lunch with Von Neumann in Princeton one time, and "Johnny" brought Oppenheimer along with him. "Oppenheimer ordered a martini. I turned my head for a moment, and, when I looked back, Judas! It was gone! He put down three more of them the same way."
Sam Cohen is prominently missing from the book. Sam is the only member of the inner sanctum still alive, and although Sheehan lists him among those he interviewed, he has nothing else to say about him. Sam was a nuclear physicist and is known as "the father of the neutron bomb." He was an integral part of Bennie's team. Sam is almost ninety now and still tough, brilliant, forthright and at times testy. He loved Bennie and served him well. Sam is prominent by his absence.
Vince Ford enjoyed personal friendships over his long life with such folks as Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Stewart, Charles Lindbergh, Hap Arnold and many more. He had many adventures and served the highest levels of our military and government with honor and excellence. He never set out to talk about himself; all these things just came out in context of our discussions.
Bennie, Vince, Trev, Johnny and all the other guys on Bennie's team were of inestimable service to our country at a time of great danger. Tragically, most people today never heard of them. |
| Brief Review | 2010-03-11 | 5 / 5 |
| I bought this after hearing Sheehan interviewed on NPR.
It sat on my desk for about two months. I've finally gotten to begin reading it and I am having a hard time putting it down.
I'm fascinated by it-I think it's fantastic. If you're any kind of political junkie, if you want more back story about the Truman and Ike years, this book really fleshes things out.
I think this was well worth the price. |
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