'A Fiery Peace in a Cold War,' by Neil Sheehan
Published 4:00 am, Sunday, October 25, 2009
A Fiery Peace in a Cold War
Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon
By Neil Sheehan
(Random House; 534 pages; $32)
Remember the Cold War? I don't mean the early Cold War of the late 1940s between Harry Truman's United States and Josef Stalin's Soviet Union, the one with airlifts in Berlin. I mean the real Cold War, the one with Khrushchev and Brezhnev and Eisenhower and Kennedy. That Cold War was about ideology, espionage, proxy wars and an arms race featuring nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles. The key part was the arms race, which reached its most frightening pitch in the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, with Soviet missiles stationed just 90 miles from American soil.
The Cold War was striking for the absence of, well, war - at least in Europe or directly between the superpowers. "A Fiery Peace in a Cold War," Neil Sheehan's exciting and highly readable new book, is a history of something that did not take place (World War III), told through the biography of one individual who was exceptionally talented at making things happen: Bernard "Bennie" Schriever, the man responsible for the development of those intercontinental ballistic missiles, which he credits with keeping the Cold War cold and "buying the time necessary for the Soviet Union to exhaust itself."
Schriever is a fascinating person, and Sheehan, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "A Bright Shining Lie," is to be commended for his careful gathering of interviews and documents to put flesh on this most unexpected warrior, and for shifting the focus from atomic weapons to the delivery systems that would bear them. Except for a few (staggeringly dangerous) combat missions in the Pacific theater of World War II, Schriever distinguished himself as a man who could solve problems from Australian bases, getting planes up in the air so the war could continue. The war was the last combat Schriever would see. Then the real fighting began.
Most of Sheehan's narrative details the arduous course of the missile through the military bureaucracy (42 agencies would have had to sign off on it). This is, surprisingly, utterly riveting reading. It may seem odd that a soldier whose distinctions centered on making aircraft go (and also playing excellent golf) would become committed to creating rockets to rain destruction down on enemies half a world away. That mission came to him as a sacred trust from his mentor, Gen. Henry "Hap" Arnold, to keep the U.S. Air Force at the forefront of technology. This first important meeting opens Sheehan's book.
Schriever's second important meeting was with Hungarian emigre scientist, John von Neumann. Shortly after the development of the first American hydrogen bomb in 1952, Schriever went to Princeton to follow up a hunch. Would it be possible to shrink these warheads so that they could fit in the nose of a rocket similar to those the United States (and the Soviets) were then reverse-engineering from the V-2 developed in Hitler's Germany? Von Neumann said yes, and this got Schriever thinking. If the United States could develop missiles that could be hurled beyond the Earth's atmosphere on a parabolic trajectory and then land less than an hour later, they would have the "ultimate weapon," the greatest deterrent precisely because there could be no defense.
But first he had to bypass Gen. Curtis LeMay, the architect of the firebombing campaign that had incinerated urban Japan in the last war. LeMay was a bomber man, and maneuvered as hard as he could to block Schriever. Suffice it to say that Schriever won, LeMay remained disgruntled, and the United States built its rockets and its nuclear deterrent (although not before the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik in 1957). The go-ahead came through a direct appeal to President Dwight Eisenhower, and Sheehan spares no details of how the bureaucracy was tamed. When Schriever took full control of the project, he did so "provided I can run it - completely run it - without any interference from those nitpicking sons of bitches in the Pentagon." All that remained was to surmount the far-from-trivial technical challenges.
The result was the tens of thousands of nuclear missiles that each Cold War antagonist aimed at the other (and still do, although Sheehan doesn't make a point of it). Yet for all the deftness of the personal drama, Sheehan's early and later Cold War fail to connect. He affirms the scholarly consensus that, American fears notwithstanding, Stalin had no intention of expanding beyond Eastern Europe, and so LeMay's bomber deterrent was superfluous. But if Stalin was not expansionist, surely his successors were even less so. Why was Schriever's invention - the absolute deterrent - necessary at all?