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.

I knew I had to read this book when I first saw it. I had previously enjoyed "A Bright Shining Lie" and knew Sheehan is a good storyteller. In telling the story of Bernard Schriever, he's done it again with the "only in America" of an immigrant boy who made good. I am a former USAF missileer,and have spent time in Schriever's legacy organizations doing work on missile and space R&D, so I could relate to much of what is discussed in the book. Contrary to some of the reviewers who complains about the discussions of programmatic or bureaucratic details of Schriever's battles to get his programs on track, I found them to be fascinating and illuminating to the extent of what he had to do to accomplish his goals. I will quibble with some of Sheehan's technical errors in discussing some of the missile systems, but that's to be expected in a layman's work. The book is almost too short, and too many details skimmed or passed over to make it readable. I would have loved to learn more about some of the characters like Ed Hall, and to read more about the legacy Schriever left the USAF after he became the head of Systems Command. But these are minor complaints in an otherwise great read.

This is an excellent history of the role of one American general and the development of the Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM). This weapons delivery system capable of touching any place on earth had a dramatic impact on the creation of the early Cold War and the interaction of states. The impact on the strategic outlook of many countries political leadership is hard to overstate. This is an excellent read for those interested in these topics. I highly recommend this book.

This is a definitive biography of General Benard Schiever, an immigrant from Germany who rose to the very top in the US Air Force. The book traces the history of the US air defense from the very beginning as the US Army Air Corp through the formation of the US Air Force. General Schriever contributed to the evolution from winged aircraft to the establishment of the US missile supremecy that contributed so much to the winning of the cold war, and laying the foundation for manned space flight.He had to fight incredible resistance, especially from General Curtis Lemay who believed passionately in the manned bomber. Woven into this true story is so much history up until this book has not been readily reported, especially interesting are his exploits during WW II. The contibution of so many immigrants fleeing the Nazi tierney during the 1930's is remarkablely described here.

In "A Bright Shining Lie" Sheehan mastered the technique of writing the history of a complex subject (in that case, Vietman) through the biography of one man. In "A Fiery Peace," Sheehan attempts to duplicate the feat by telling the tale of the Cold War through the story of the creator of the American ICBM program, USAF General Schriever.

Sheehan's gifts as a writer and the compelling nature of the classified subject of the U.S. missile program that has not been sufficiently addressed before combine to make this a wonderful book. It is an entertaining and informative read.

At his best, Sheehan is able to show the combination of "victory disease" and the well known failing of generals who fight the last war to explain the complacency of men who went with an enormous B-52 force that was hopelessly vulnerable to first strike by missile technology that was initially ignored by the Americans. The portrayal of LeMay, who went from a truly great and creative WWII commander to a close minded tyrant lacking any policy and technology insight, is terrific.

Also well done is Sheehan's brief recount of the the Cuban missile crisis in light of everything the reader learns from the story of the American missile program. It's clear that the Russians had tactical nuclear weapons and some warheads that were mounted and then unmounted from missiles in Cuba. Had Kennedy gone along with the military's recommendation for a massive strike and invasion, these weapons would have most probably been deployed on invading troops and possibly on some American cities. Then the massive American aresenal would have obliterated the Soviet Union and possibly created a nuclear winter for the rest of the world. Kennedy's choices are vindicated by this retelling.

Also fascinating is the huge missile gap in the American's favor by the 1960 election. Sheehan portrays Sputnik as a great feat but as something of a publicity stunt. The Americans had the lead in deployed intermediate range ballistic missiles and in a practical ICBM at the development stage. It was not until the end of the 1960s did the Soviet Union begin to deploy practical missile technology that threatened a credible second strike capability.

The problem with this book is that Schriever is not as complex a man as John Paul Vann, and that the Cold War is remarkably more complex than even Vietnam. As a consequence, it is really not possible to capture the Cold War through the biographical device used so effectively in "A Bright Shining Lie."

Still, this book is absorbing and haunting in its depiction of men very comfortable with the deployment of massive nuclear strikes and even with the possibility of a first strike preemptive war. In the end, Sheehan is comfortable with more sober minded men like Schriever and sees his technology as having successfully deterred World War III. Perhaps -- but I get the nagging feeling after having read this book and others that we were very, very lucky to have escaped a nuclear holocaust during this period.

Just as he used John Paul Vann, a relatively obscure participant in great events, in A BRIGHT SHINING LIE to tell the tragic story of American involvement in Vietnam, Neil Sheehan here uses Air Force officer Bernard Schriever to examine the Cold War missile race of the 1950s. The result is compelling, graphic, and enjoyable -- a satisfying combination of journalism and history. Falling within Sheehan's scope are science and politics, lesser known figures like Schriever and better known ones like Curtis LeMay and Paul Nitze, headline-making events like Sputnik and behind-the-scenes intrigue and machinations. Highly recommended.

I remember reading Neil Sheehan's first big hit, "A Bright Shining Lie," in high school how much I enjoyed an assigned reading... a rarity in public school. As such, when I saw his newest book, "A Fiery Peace in a Cold War," on my Vine Club reading list I immediately jumped to the chance to read it. Needless to say, Sheehan had some big expectations to live up to.

Fortunately, after spending a week or two reading and analyzing "A Fiery Peace," I can safely say that Sheehan has lived up to the standard he set in "A Bright Shining Lie."

A Fiery Peace follows the life of Air Force Genaeral Bernard Schriever, the brain child of the Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) and USAF Systems Command. It was Schriever that conceived the future of the USAF to go from Curtis LeMay's manned bombing fleet to a fleet of unmanned missiles. Similar to Billy Mitchell's experience in the 1920s, Schriever's idea went up against those of his superiors including General Curtis LeMay, who did not at all like the idea of abandoning a massive bomber fleet for the nuclear deterrent.

This fascinating tale of a relatively unknown Air Force legend proved to be a great, albeit somewhat slow, read. Sheehan left very little out of his biography on Schriever down to the individual products his mother sold at the snack bar on the golf course he grew up at. This gives the reader every conceivable detail, but to the point where it also somewhat bogs down the flow of the book. Such attention to detail will, most likely, drown out the attention of any casual readers whereas such a practice is actually normal for us historians. As such, A Fiery Peace is probably more ideal for history buffs and historians rather than the casual audience. Such bogging down of content and interest is not necessarily a bad thing since the book does live up to its original premise without sacrificing quality.

All in all, a solid A.

"A Fiery Peace in a Cold War" is probably the best history of the development of the ICBM program that's not classified. It is also an ok, but not spectacular, look at the lives of the people - most specifically, Bernard Schriever - who developed the program. It's probably unfair to compare this to Sheehan's best work, "A Bright Shining Lie," but the narrative bogs down in detail at times and the characters aren't as clear cut. 4 stars.

Herman Wouk once said his goal with creating Victor "Pug" Henry in the Winds of War/War series was to reflect a class of people he saw in the military that outsiders don't recognize - the high performers that are near-misses, never quite getting the top job or the public recognition, but who under the surface are often the difference between life and death for an awful lot of people. The part of the book that deals with General Bernard Schriever pretty much nails him as an Air Force version of that fictional character. Schriever's early choice to turn down a chance to be a pro golfer and help his family out of poverty eventually ended up with him being responsible for the development of the Minuteman, and that changed history even if nobody had heard of him outside the Pentagon until this book.

The failing here, though, is that it's not a biography. It's more a history of the program and those involved in it, and as such there is just too much detail for anything but an academic reader well versed in the subject. The mini biographies of others in the program are well done, but when there are quite literally tens of them it becomes very hard to keep a coherent narrative going. Add on the plethora of weapons systems details - Sheehan would have had a heck of a career as a procurement officer - and the book simply bogs down. A reader of "Lie" really gets the coherent takeaway that US policy in Southeast Asia was well intentioned but a disaster from almost when John Paul Vann stepped off the plane. In "Peace," it's hard to come up with a direct takeaway from this one since Sheehan doesn't really end up with much of an argument one way or the other for judging the whole effort, let alone leaving all but a few readers with enough energy to finish the book.

Still, it's a heck of an overview of a major aspect of the Cold War, which would give it 5 stars normally, but the need for editing and lack of focus takes it to 4. Still recommended for those with a major interest in the subject.

A few years ago I read Neil Sheehan's "A Bright Shining Lie" which told the story of Lt. Col. John Paul Van and the war in Vietnam. I loved that book because it brought the Vietnam War alive. That book was about the man with all his personal quirks. By the time I finished it I felt I really knew John Paul Van and was not surprised that Neil Sheehan won a Pulitzer Prize. In "A Fiery Peace in a Cold War" the author tries the same technique. Unfortunately, it doesn't work.

Subtitled, "Bernard Schriever and The Ultimate Weapon", this is the true story of cold war politics and the race with the Soviet Union to develop nuclear weapons. It includes the conflicts and clashes with scientists, military leaders and political figures. Much of it was fascinating. However, Bernard Shriever just doesn't come alive as a compelling figure I could relate to. And there were so many other scientists and personalities in this epic that I was often confused as to who was who. There is also a lot of science and physics and even though it was explained in a way that I could follow it, I had to struggle to understand. That said, I still found the book fascinating.

I find it interesting to look at the 1950s through the eyes of 2010 and realize how close the United States was at that time to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. There was real danger out there and the men (and yes, they were all men) who worked on developing America's nuclear arsenal were all brilliant scientists with a wide variety of backgrounds. Often though, their efforts that looked so good in theory just didn't work or had serious problems. But they just pushed on, making changes, trying new things and not giving up. In spite of numerous setbacks and a constant worry about the Soviet Union's own nuclear arsenal, they persevered, eventually achieving success. And success, as I see it, was keeping us all out of a devastating nuclear war which was a very real possibility at that time.

The book is only 480 pages long but I must say it was a tedious read. It took me a long time to finish because I couldn't read more than a few pages at a time if I wanted to really understand it. I did learn a lot however and will never think of the arms race or that time in history in the same way again. It did enrich my understanding but I'm just glad I finally finished it.

I think this is an important book work reading. It would appeal particularly to those with a scientific background. I just can't give it more than a lukewarm recommendation though.

Neil Sheehan apparently spent 15 years writing this account of a little known Air Force General, Bernard Schriever, and the time he spent on the man shows in this comprehensive account. He has performed a very valuable service in bringing this rather obscure character to life and driving home the importance of his accomplishments. Schriever was one of the individuals most responsible for jump starting the US's missile program, especially shepherding the development of the ICBM. Sheehan does a great job bringing to life all the characters that Schriever was associated with, from his mentors in flight school (including General "Hap" Arnold) to his bete noir, the notorious Curtis LeMay, to his contact with brilliant scientists John von Neumann and Edward Teller whose contributions were critical for America's missile and atomic bomb programs.

Sheehan provides ample background and little known tidbits of Schriever's life and times. For instance I was not aware that the US Air Force was a rather inefficient backwater organization till the mid-1930s, easily outclassed by its European counterparts. Apparently at one point, pilots were asked to deliver the mail in the wake of a post office scandal. Their inexperience in flying and the loss of life that resulted galvanized FDR and others to issue directives for a modern Air Force that would become among the best in the world.

The main problem I have is that while Sheehan's digressions (for instance on the atomic bomb project and Soviet espionage) are fascinating and reflect the most up-to-date information, they are too many and too frequent. An editor who could have shaved off a few pages and encouraged a tighter narrative would have definitely helped. The digressions draw your attention from direct information about General Schriever. To be fair the book is not supposed to be just about him, but a little less meandering would have been a boon.

In spite of this deficiency, the book will be fascinating for Cold War enthusiasts who want to know about the development of the US Air Force and its atomic and missile arsenals during the early Cold War. There is also a fair amount of technical detail about missiles explained in relatively plain and accurate language. After JFK came to power Schriever's influence waned and the latter part of the book is not as interesting. Nevertheless, Sheehan has done a valuable and outstanding job in bringing a little known individual to life and telling us about his enormous contributions during a critical period of American history.

In the years following the Second World War, the world changed, with the balance of power fundamentally changing to polarize the world between the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States was virtually untouched by the war, with its infrastructure and industrial base, already booming from supplying the military with hardware, and allowed the United States to establish its power as one of the dominant forces in the world. The Soviet Union, while devastated by the attacks from Germany, with tens of millions of people killed, maintained a large conventional military with the desire to expand its influence. The roots of this conflict had begun much earlier, and throughout the Second World War, this began to rise between the two nations.

It is within this context that we see the dramatic and important rise of Maj. General Bernard Schriever, who helped to implement one of the greatest instruments that the United States could field against the Russians: a deterrent to their nuclear arms, the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), and an organization that could deploy and support this weapons system. Neil Sheehan outlines his story in his recent book A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon.While Schriever wasn't directly involved in the creation of missiles and the advances that brought them further into the sky, he was an early proponent of the technology, and correctly saw that this had the ability to change warfare by eliminating it. A missile deterrent system allowed for both the rapid delivery of nuclear warheads to any point in the globe, but also allowed for a smaller conventional force, a key element to cutting costs under the Eisenhower administration.

The key in this instance was to take the bombs that had been brought the Second World War to an end, and to expand and plan out their use. With the end of the war, the United States enjoyed an unprecedented control of the skies through the Air Force, a major step forward over the Soviets, who were mired with a massive conventional military. Under General Curtis LeMay, bombers were in the skies at all times, even over Russia, where they were untouchable, in a show of power. What Schriever, proposed, after learning of the technology, was a new style of warfare that was drastically different from what had been implemented before: the threat of warfare and mutually assured destruction.

Schriever's story is interwoven with numerous other Air Force officers and specialists who came together during the 1950s and 1960s to develop a viable delivery system and supporting organization, against all odds. Schreiver and his colleagues had to convince not only their superiors, but members of Congress and ultimately, the President of the United States. Sheehan captures a number of these scenes in vivid and exciting detail, keeping an eye towards history, but also towards keeping the reader riveted to the story that he was telling, from both the laboratories, launch fields and the White House. Numerous notable figures make their appearances throughout: General LeMay, President Eisenhower, Robert McNamara and President Kennedy, demonstrating the vast influence that Schreiver would gain over the course of his career.

For a biography, there is a lot left to be desired: Sheehan steers clear of Schriever's personal life, with few notes until the very end, focusing on his professional achievements. Instead, it's better to look at this book as a look at Schriever and his team, and how they changed the world. Johnny von Neumann, the brilliant physicist who helped create the first atomic bomb, and nuclear strategy, Lt. Col. Edward Hall, the difficult rocket engineer who helped to build some of the most critical systems and solve some of the daunting problems, and numerous others who contributed to the success of the program.

Rather than a biography of Schriever, this is a biography of the ICBM, from the Thor and Atlas IRBMs, eventually to the Titan and the Minuteman Missile. With the story of the development of these weapons, there is the story of the incredible struggle to put them into place, but also how the project grew in momentum to overtake Air Power as the dominant defensive doctrine. Sheehan weaves this story seamlessly over the course of ten years. The book is very well written, capturing numerous small details that ultimately flesh out all of the central figures and how they went about their work, but there are some small problems - Sheehan doesn't footnote (although there is an extensive bibliography) anywhere, and at times, the small details are dropped in favor of the overall story and big picture.

Where many military history books are about something that went wrong, this book tells the story of where almost everything went right. The style of warfare that Schriever and his team introduced predicated on the threat of war, rather than outright hostilities. The mere fact that this book was written is a testament to its success, as the United States and the Soviet Union, both rational international players, never would have gone to nuclear war with one another, despite several close calls. Indeed, Schiever was the right person for the job, and took the right risks and directions in which to take the program, while putting together a team of experts, rather than political and commercial appointees.

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War does more than just tell the story of the ICBM; it provides a detailed insight into the workings of the Cold War, one of the most significant times in United States history. As Sheehan points out at the end of his book, the missiles did more than just expand and hold U.S. power in the world; they prevented war, and brought about incredible advances, such as spaceflight. What Sheehan has put together is an incredible story that captures the people central to it and some of the major events that shaped the middle of the 20th century.


Originally posted to my blog.

This was a deeply frustrating book to read. The core subject - the creation of the US ICBM force - is important, fascinating, and under-reported, and I'm pretty sure that buried in Sheehan's 560 page tome is a good 250 page account of this. (Good, but not great - as many reviewers have pointed out, Sheehan tends to force-fit history into his preconceived structures, and the results are sometimes jarring.)

Also buried in here is a biography of Bernard Schriever, who was a participant in the process. Indeed the title and the opening chapters seemed to suggest that the book was first and foremost a biography. I had to get a couple of hundred pages in before I finally realized that the actual biography was a relatively minor element. (And that's a shame, because I doubt that anyone else will attempt a pure biography. There are many people who deserve to have their stories told, but for whom there's only really room for one book.) As the book progresses, the Schriever thread becomes less biographical and more of a memoir: more selective and self-serving, less objective. Ultimately it seems to be no more than a structural device.

And there are also many other biographical essays: LeMay, Von Neumann, and others. And this was really frustrating: Sheehan seems unable to resist the temptation to digress. When a major character enters his narrative arc, Sheehan is compelled to inject several chapters about their entire lives. Perhaps he felt that the reader would be unable to appreciate the character's motivation without this level of detail, but the effect is simply distracting.

(An aside: the version that I read was the pre-publication review draft, so this may have changed, but I felt that Sheehan should have discarded much of his extraneous detail and pushed the rest into end-notes. Instead, everything was in the body of the text, which slowed things down.)

I finished the book, because I was really interested in the core subject matter. I learned a lot. I just wish it hadn't been such a slog.

I think this would have been better if the topic didn't primarily deal with dull engineers with relatively stable family lives. A Bright Shining Lie was really well done, and the main character was so flawed that it added a more interesting dimension to the biography. The guys in this book are so boring, and the fact that missiles are really boring when they're not getting shot at people, that I don't think Sheehan could do anything more with this.

When I first saw this offering through Amazon's Vine program I groaned. Do I really want to read a 500 page book about generals, and the Cold War arms race? Fortunately I re-considered, after seeing the author, for whom I have immense respect for his quintessential book on the Vietnam War, "A Bright Shining Lie." And I was richly rewarded for overcoming my initial aversion.

Sheehan has spent some time in Arlington National Cemetery, a good place for reflection, for all of us. He commenced "A Bright Shining Lie" there, with the funeral of John Paul Vann in 1972, and that is where he ends "A Fiery Peace in a Cold War," in 2005, with the funeral of General Bernard Schriever (who I had previously never heard of.) Nine of the ten current four-star generals attended. Even Rumsfeld showed up. Sheehan's technique is to identify a major American historical event, in one case, the Vietnam War, in the other, the Cold War, and then identify an individual who was key to this event, and developed and changed as the event unfolded. True, Vann and Schriever were very different men, and I think it is very much to Sheehan's credit that his portrait of each rang true. Particularly in this book Sheehan provides numerous other mini-biographies of the major "players." I was impressed with the one on General Curtis LeMay, who as a young officer commanded the American Air Forces in the Pacific, particularly in the fire bombing campaign against Tokyo. Then he was quite willing to listen to all ranks for ideas on how to become more effective. He followed an all too human trajectory, and morphed into an arrogant, racist bigot, who entertained no opposing opinions, who ran as the vice-presidential candidate on the ticket with George Wallace in 1968, and was lampooned as the cigar-chomping General Jack D. Ripper in Kubrich's film, "Dr. Strangelove." Sheehan takes some heat from some of the more conservative reviewers, particularly Air Force officer types, but as one of those same officers says: "The Truth hurts." Another key mini-biography is of Johnny von Neumann, one of the most "brilliant" men of the 20th century, by numerous measures. Sheehan has a wonderful, keen journalistic knack for seeing a key detail in the man that explains so much. In von Neumann case it was a photo of him riding a mule down the Bright Angel trail at the Grand Canyon. He is attired in a business suit and tie, and even has a white handkerchief in his lapel pocket. Irrelevant trivia? Or, what a evocative way to underscore von Neumann's fundamental insecurity and dislocation from his Hungarian homeland, his hatred for things Russian, and his continued unease at having to flee the Holocaust to come to a new homeland. Therefore, he must always be immaculately dressed; no "screw-ups" the third time. Sheehan also underscores how both these brilliant dynamic men would accept the killing of a billion people or so, and even the elimination of all life in the Northern Hemisphere as part of their Cold War strategy.

The lessons of the Cold War are hardly ancient history. Sheehan examines the geo-political thinking of the time, and underscores in numerous ways how the threat of the Soviet Union was greatly exaggerated, both for political as well as economic reasons. Consider just this one fact: "Then, in 1958, when the Russians had about eight-five bombers of both types and SAC had 1,769, including 380 B-52s, the Soviets curtailed bomber production" (p 151). You'd think someone would say: "Enough is enough." Surely a three to one superiority ratio is sufficient. As Sheehan reports, one man was trying: "Dwight Eisenhower was the last American president to believe that military spending which was not absolutely necessary was money wasted and that a well-founded economy was as important to the security of the country as armed might" (p 363). Amen. And how many magnitudes worse is it now, with all the fighter jets and nuclear submarines chasing guys armed with box cutters? There is also the numerous "intelligence failures" (a now familiar term) from that era, from the failure to identify who was actually spying at Los Alamos, to the deliberate faking of intelligence by Edward Hall so as "to frighten the Air Force into leaving his money alone." (p 246) to the scaremongering of Dr. Edward Teller, who asserted that the Russians would be able to control the weather in the United States, restricting rainfall. (p 365). And Sheehan certainly does not spare the media either. Bernard Schriever made the cover of Time magazine in 1957, and Sheehan describes how their coverage of him was almost all completely fictitious (p392).

There is much else as well. Concerning the ability of those in power to wear ideological blinders, Sheehan says: "Their dissent (referring to two specialists on the Soviet Union) was of no consequence. The men of power were not interested in what the men of knowledge had to say. Their ears were attuned to the skirl of a different piper." Speaking of ideology, from the other side, Sheehan quotes Leonard Breznev, whose true interests ran to young mistresses and expensive foreign cars: "All that stuff about Communism is a tall tale for popular consumption. After all, we can't leave the people with no faith." Hum! Could the same thing be said about "free markets"? Finally, you had the poignant revelation that Ed Hall, one of the archetypical Cold War warriors forgiving his brother, Ted, in 1996, for being one of the two principal spies at Los Alamos.

There are already a number of excellent, thoughtful reviews on this work, including some by those who were directly involved in these events. Almost certainly, Sheehan has made some mistakes, and in dealing with events as complex and broad-scoped as these, it would have to be inevitable. Did Hitler put the gun in his mouth, or to his temple? And does it really matter? Did Sheehan get the technical details of some of the rocketry issues wrong? Probably. In an ideal world Sheehan would carefully evaluate the points made in the more thoughtful reviews, and issue a "revised," or, more commercially, a "new and improved" edition in two years time.

Like Tom Wolfe's book, "The Right Stuff," which concerned the American astronauts and the "race" to the moon, Sheehan has written an excellent book on an important portion of American, and world history before the embers of these events have gone completely cold. It is the equal to his previous book, and hopefully will be acclaimed as such.

What could have been a dry repetitive tale of a time of fear is literally a page turner. I kept this book with me wherever I went so I could continue reading in spare moments. I was shocked to find that during World War II, Bernard Schriever was stationed in Australia and New Guinea at the same time as my father. His comments and assessments of the personnel, the difficulties with shortages of everything from airplanes to supplies duplicated the information my father had given me through his writing and conversations over the years. It was something to recognize the names mentioned in the first part of the book but to me that verified the accuracy of the commentary about the Cold War.As a child I spent time under my desk during the drills "in the event of a nuclear attack" and prayed for peace at that same desk.I only knew the concerns from a civilian's perspective during the Cuban missle crisis and the speculation of the range of the missles. Since then I have read classified information from that time and the preparations of the Strategic Air Command and the level of radar monioring they had around the world. It was a scarey time!We were so fortunate to have a person of Bernard Schriever's considerable intellectual gifts as well as his military experience and perhaps more importantly his gift for diplomacy to temper it. It had been many years since I read Neil Sheehan's book on Vietnam, he has not lost a step as they say, or perhaps a key tap. This is a wonderful book and I only wish it could be required reading for those who never spent time quivering under a desk in a nuclear drill!

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.

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

I'm not a big Neil Sheehan fan. Sheehan was one of the clueless breed of Vietnam-era journalists who sought to undermine the war effort by peddling the Ho Chi Minh line. His prior book, "A Bright and Shining Lie", was a disgraceful piece of work which attempted to rebury a dead man. Sheehan is Oliver Stone without a film crew.

That said, "A Fiery Piece in a Cold War" is a very interesting look at how the Space Age came about. Sheehan being Sheehan, he has to have a hero and villains. In this case, Bennie Schriever, father of the Minuteman missile, fills the former role with General Curtis E. LeMay and a host of lesser known Army men serve as the heavies. Sheehan makes no pretense of even-handedness throughout---LeMay might as well have a Snidely Whiplash moustache.

So why such a high rating?

As always with Sheehan, the real story creeps in between the lines. LeMay was a bomber man who respected unorthodox ideas so long as they proved out eventually---after all, LeMay himself was the man who overturned Army air doctrine with his Combat Box formation and strategic bombing tactics in WWII. He gutted Schriever early on, largely because Schriever could not make a practical case for any of his ideas. And yet LeMay, the most powerful man in the Air Force bar none, never pulled the trigger on him. Indeed, he recast SAC along ICBM lines as soon as the Minuteman came online. The answer is quite simple: LeMay wanted to win. Contrary to Sheehan's cartoonish depiction of the general, he dedicated his life to the service of this nation and sought only to keep America victorious in the air.

When things came to a head during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Sheehan presents the facts but completely fudges the interpretation. Kruschev won. He wanted the Jupiter missiles out of Turkey and that is precisely what he got. He wanted assurances against an American invasion of Cuba and that is precisely what he got. All Kruschev gave up was the Soviet missile sites in Cuba he had initiated to force the resolution he wanted. Since Soviet missiles were highly unreliable at this stage, there's no guarantee these particular missiles would function in any case. Sheehan spins this into a victory for JFK, the same way he spun the Tet Offensive into a win for Ho Chi Minh. One must read him as one read Pravda---the story's there, but beneath the surface.

Such is sadly the case with all the lefty journalists-cum-historians.

I was eager to read this book since I've got a background in political science, studied Russian, and wrote my thesis on strategic defense issues back in the early 80s, the environment that was shaped by the events chronicled by Sheehan in this massive book.

That's the problem with this work: it's simply too massive in scope. Even with a background in the chronology and issues; even with an interest in the topic, I found myself bogging down repeatedly in the mass of detail over who said what to whom. We get three to four pages of background information on every character as they appear on the scene -- and there are a lot of them. So by the time I got to the meat of the book -- the pitched battles within the Pentagon and various political administrations over the future of strategic defense and the role of rocketry and thus Sheehan's main focus in this book, Air Force General Bernard Schriever -- I was almost limp with exhaustion. I even found myself jotting down notes to myself on a pad about who was who.

That amount of detail and insight will probably make this book a great read -- four or even five stars -- for someone with an immense amount of patience or a real fascination with the subject. But I'd find it hard to recommend it to the reader with only a casual interest on those grounds alone.

A more jarring note was the fact that I kept wondering what the point of the exercise was. Was this intended purely as a work of history about the Cold War? If so, well and good -- that worked. But Sheehan keeps dropping hints about the misguided policy of the era -- of the many and varied ways in which mutual misunderstanding between the Soviet Union and the United States fueled the arms race and the Cold War, while at the same time celebrating the technological achievements of Schriever and the rocket scientists. (He's as awed, it seems, as any technology-addled teenager.) That juxtaposition was odd, and it's something Sheehan never addresses. Does Sheehan feel the 'end' was flawed? That's never clear; indeed, he seems very ambivalent about the broader meaning of this. The arms race took us to a place that -- while it helped kill off the Soviet Union -- has had nasty consequences for the world we inhabit today. Given Sheehan's previous writings, this book, which focuses very narrowly on the technological and political challenges facing the rocket-builders, felt oddly limited in scope, while still covering a vast array of people and events. Too broad, but not deep enough?

In any event, this ended up being a disappointing book for me, particularly as I had loved Sheehan's masterful book about another little-known figure from a previous war, John Paul Vann, A Bright Shining Lie. That book, while long, was tightly focused and a gripping and compelling narrative. This one make end up being valuable as an encyclopedic history of the rocket program, but it's not a gripping story.

Recommended to those with a lot of knowledge about the Cold War and interest in reading everything about the topic -- this is a massive book with incredibly detailed insights into all kinds of significant issues (and importantly, no digressions into the irrelevant). While it's well-written, it's dense, and will require a lot of patience to read. 3.5 stars, rounded down because it took me close to a month and repeated attempts to finish.

An excellent post war history analysis of the cold war and future implications for the United States.

Sheehan became famous for his Pulizer prize winning tome regarding the Vietnam War. I read the entire tome and it was stellar because it merged a biography of John Paul Vann and a history of the conflict. Viewing the entire conflict through the lens of Vann was brilliant.

So, I was really excited to get this book. Alas, lightning didn't strike twice.

Sheehan tried to do the same thing with the development of ICBMs as he did with the Vietnam conflict and it just doesn't work well. Maybe it doesn't work because Schriever was simply too bland unlike Vann, a colorful man with lots of skeletons in the closet.

Sheehan focuses on Schriever's military endeavors and does little to add depth to this character, although it is obvious that Sheehan has incredible respect (love?) for Schriever. There are, however, there are many other characters that get a mini-biography in this book. And I found it rather distracting. Some of these short biographical sketches should have been cut.

But that is not to say this isn't a good history. The story is quite fascinating and its skips along. Most of the good stuff happens in about a five year time span and the incredible time pressures are vividly portrayed. Near the end, rockets were being launched every couple of weeks. But I would have appreciated more technical detail regarding why it was so difficult to makes these rockets/missiles.

So, overall weak four stars.

It may be unfair to judge one book by how well it stacks up to a previous work by the author, but this book is structurally quite similar to the Sheehan's masterpiece of the Vietnam War A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (Modern Library)and it falls quite a bit short.

For one thing Gen. Schriever seems a pale subject compared to the deeply conflicted and charismatic Col. Vann. And for another, the subject of this book is mostly bureaucratic maneuvering between Schriever and Gen. Curtis LeMay among others. The book does not deal with issues of war and peace as much as between bombers and missiles.

Like many of the previous reviewers I too lived was a child during the Cuban Missle Crisis and the Cold War. I had high hopes for some insight into era, particularly from an author of Sheehan's ability, but came away disappointed.

U.S. Air Force General Bernard A. Schriever has a legendary reputation in the military and among modern rocket technology professionals. As the father of the Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile, he ushered the United States into the full-fledged nuclear terror of the cold war. As director of the U.S. Air Force's Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program in the 1950s, Schriever led the effort to field the first long-range missile to carry a nuclear warhead. Neil Sheehan, who gained fame as the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam" (1988), uses Schriever as the entrée point into the fascinating history of nuclear deterrence, cold war strategy, the arms race, and weapons development.

In this book Sheehan explores the ideology of the Cold War, and the weapons that sprang from it. At the height of the Cold War, with Schriever at the head of the Atlas development program, all the armed services worked toward the fielding of ICBMs that could deliver warheads to targets half a world away. Competition was keen among the services for a mission in the new "high ground" of space, whose military importance was not lost on the leaders of the world. In April 1946 the Army Air Forces gave Consolidated Vultee Aircraft (Convair) Division a study contract for an ICBM. The technology was still in its infancy, however, and the Air Force tabled full-scale development in favor of additional research into the problem of building a successful ICBM. This led directly to the development of the Atlas ICBM in the 1950s.

That delay of almost a decade positioned Schriever to play a major role. When the Air Force entered the race to build long-range ballistic missiles with dramatic flair in February 1954, it assigned the flamboyant and intense Bernard A. Schriever, by now a Brigadier General, responsibility to make it a reality. Known as the SM-65 Atlas program, it initially went by the name "Weapon System 107A." It did not take Schriever long to show results; the first Atlas rocket was test fired on June 11, 1955, and a later version of the missile became operational in 1959.

By the latter 1950s, therefore, rocket technology had developed sufficiently for the creation of a viable ballistic missile capability. This was a revolutionary development that gave humanity for the first time in its history the ability to attack one continent from another. It effectively shrank the size of the globe, and the United States--which had always before been protected from outside attack by two massive oceans--could no longer rely on natural defensive boundaries or distance from its enemies. In the space of Eisenhower's two terms as president in the 1950s, therefore, the United States moved from a position of having essentially no space launch capability to possessing ICBMs with a significant overkill capability.

The meaning of that capability is really what Neil Sheehan is interested in as he writes "A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon." The book tends to wander a bit, jumping from Curtis LeMay and the creation of the nuclear strike capability that he championed with the Strategic Air Command, to the technologists of the Air Force such as Schriever who saw ICBMs as a way to get "a bigger bang for the buck," to strategists such as Paul Nitze who argued for nuclear supremacy in the Cold War, to the wizards of Armageddon (to use Fred Kaplan's term) at Rand and other places who probed the mysteries of "Mutually Assured Destruction" (MAD)--certainly the best acronym ever to describe nuclear warfare. It takes some "stick-to-itiveness" to get through the book, and at 560 pages it is no light read, but Sheehan does a good job of bringing the story of the creation of the nuclear triad to life in this important book.

Like "A Bright Shining Lie," Sheehan uses the career of Schriever as the vehicle to tell a much larger story; in that earlier book he used John Paul Vann's career to illuminate the Vietnam experience and in this case Schriever is a prop to discuss the Cold War and the arms race. He does this effectively if not as masterfully as in "A Bright Shining Lie." The work is also based on excellent research. He had poured over the written literature of the strategic conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and he conducted considerable numbers of interviews to craft his story. Less compelling was his referencing of this material. There are no foot or end notes; Sheehan uses source summaries for each chapter highlighting the most useful materials used in writing the chapter. "The summaries," Sheehan adds, "do not list all sources, only the main ones" (p. 487). So how might I, as an historian deeply interested in this subject, backtrack Sheehan's work and discover how he came to the point he offers? I do not find notes an intrusion into the text and certainly would like to have them here in such an important work.

Overall, this is a useful historical work, one that requires serious consideration. It is also a fine work of journalism and reads well.

The document depicts a complex process for development of missiles and is exceptionally well done.
There are a few errors and significant issues not covered. For instance, the first MINUTEMAN test missile blew up in the silo - it was not a successful launch.
THe reason the tactics for creating MIRV technology and MINUTEMAN III and eventually the ten warhead MX strategic missile was not covered. General Schriever was one of our greatest generals in the post World War II era, and that was well covered in book. H. Lee Fisher - Chief of Plans, MINUTEMAN R&D; formed and led the team to create MIRV technology and the MX strategic missile.

Although I have the greatest respect for Mr Sheehan, particularly his Pulitzer Prize work, I found the book essentially pedestrian in its pacing, uneven in its facts and terrible in his evaluation of Cold War policy, particularly in his attribution of George Kennan's views. He seems to think the "Long Telegram" was a clarion call for the militarization of the Western Democracies, a view that Mr. Kennan spent the rest of his life arguing against. In a classic case of picking the text to fit the view he quotes fairly liberally from the telegram without including its conclusions. I offer them here;

"For these reasons I think we may approach calmly and with good heart the problem of how to deal with Russia. As to how this approach should be made, I only wish to advance, by way of conclusion, the following comments:

(1) Our first step must be to apprehend, and recognize for what it is, the nature of the movement with which we are dealing. We must study it with same courage, detachment, objectivity, and same determination not to be emotionally provoked or unseated by it, with which doctor studies unruly and unreasonable individual.

(2) We must see that our public is educated to realities of Russian situation. I cannot overemphasize importance of this. Press cannot do this alone. It must be done mainly by Government, which is necessarily more experienced and better informed on practical problems involved. In this we need not be deterred by [ugliness?] of picture. I am convinced that there would be far less hysterical anti-Sovietism in our country today if realities of this situation were better understood by our people. There is nothing as dangerous or as terrifying as the unknown. It may also be argued that to reveal more information on our difficulties with Russia would reflect unfavorably on Russian-American relations. I feel that if there is any real risk here involved, it is one which we should have courage to face, and sooner the better. But I cannot see what we would be risking. Our stake in this country, even coming on heels of tremendous demonstrations of our friendship for Russian people, is remarkably small. We have here no investments to guard, no actual trade to lose, virtually no citizens to protect, few cultural contacts to preserve. Our only stake lies in what we hope rather than what we have; and I am convinced we have better chance of realizing those hopes if our public is enlightened and if our dealings with Russians are placed entirely on realistic and matter-of-fact basis.

(3) Much depends on health and vigor of our own society. World communism is like malignant parasite which feeds only on diseased tissue. This is point at which domestic and foreign policies meet. Every courageous and incisive measure to solve internal problems of our own society, to improve self-confidence, discipline, morale and community spirit of our own people, is a diplomatic victory over Moscow worth a thousand diplomatic notes and joint communiqués. If we cannot abandon fatalism and indifference in face of deficiencies of our own society, Moscow will profit--Moscow cannot help profiting by them in its foreign policies.

(4) We must formulate and put forward for other nations a much more positive and constructive picture of sort of world we would like to see than we have put forward in past. It is not enough to urge people to develop political processes similar to our own. Many foreign peoples, in Europe at least, are tired and frightened by experiences of past, and are less interested in abstract freedom than in security. They are seeking guidance rather than responsibilities. We should be better able than Russians to give them this. And, unless we do, Russians certainly will.

(5) Finally we must have courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society. After all, the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping."

A far, far better book on this period is Nicholas Thompson's "The Hawk and the Dove".

I have always been a history buff, but have focused more on history before my lifetime. I decided that I needed to learn more about some of the details of the Cold War since I lived through the latter part of it. Sheehan's reputation and the subject caused me to pick up this book as my starting point.

I had never heard of Schriever, but was familiar with most of the missile programs that he had developed. I had always assumed that von Braun was behind all of the rocket development and didn't realize that the ICBM's were done by a different group.

Many of the other key people were also new names to me and I was glad to learn more about them. As an engineer myself, it was interesting to learn of some of the technical challenges they faced. I would have liked to read about more of those issues than were covered in this book.

This story strongly reinforces how political as well as technical skills are critical to making anything happen. Schriever had this combination, but especially had the ability to pick the right blend of men to do the job. Overall, this book was enjoyable and a good learning experience that left me with a desire to learn more of this subject.

This books fails miserably on 2 grounds. First, Sheehan is a very poor historian. Apparently, he is working under some past review of his "perception" which doesn't show here. His so-call "history" of the Cold War is naive and amateurish. He continually berates American policy as backward and unaware of Stalin's "real" intentions. Can he be so stupid? Hindsight is always 20-20. He is judging past history not by what intelligence they had but by what we know now. How stupid! The second point on which this book fails is Sheehan's amateurish writing style. He love purple prose and his own self-judgement. He also love parentheses. He puts complete sentences - and even whole paragraphs! - into them.
Gen Schriever was a great figure in the creation of the ICBM and deserves a well-written, well-researched biography. Sadly, this naive piece of bad wriitng isn't it. Don't waste your time. Sheehan needs to go back to school instead of self-preening as an authority on anything. He didn't know who Gen Schreiver WAS until after starting this book. Duh!

What I had hoped to be a great fast-paced book about the development of the ICBM during the cold war period, quickly became a tangle of characters introduced sometimes three or more, within the space of a few pages. I was reminded of the dizzy dialogue between Abbott and Costello in "Who's on first." I simply could not keep track of who was who.

Sheehan's "stop and go" writing style only pulled my attention from the story promised--it did not enhance it. Nearly every person, even remotely associated with the development of the ICBM, is illuminated with tedious background information that has little if anything to do with the story. While I can understand what Sheehan was attempting to do with character development, I will say it was done to death.

Now three quarters of the way through, the story line still meanders across too many personalities, though it has gotten somewhat better. I can't say I have enjoyed this book, but feel compelled to finish what I have started in the hope that the last few pages will somehow redeem the several hundred "zzzzzzzzz" pages that preceded them.

I think the story editor fell asleep on this one

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 !

You can find plenty of details here on the topics this book covers, but I wanted to point out that the writing is precise, concise, and engaging. If you have interest in military aviation, missile development, the Cold War, and the advent and consequences of the ICBM, read this book. If you lived through through the Cuban Missile Crisis, or at least know what it is, read this book, If you lived through the Reagan years, resd this book. If you're interested in the forgotten heroes of U.S. postwar invention, engineering, and mathematics, read this book. If you love the film "Dr. Strangelove," read this book. It will likely spin you off to further reading. A rewarding investment of your time and mind.

Neil Sheehan tells excellent stories and A Fiery Peace is another great one outlining the massive contributions made by a small group of visionary leaders & thinkers, but especially General Schriever. Given the nature of the world today, it is hard to recall how different the world was at the immediate end of the Second World War - the tension, the relief, the bombast, the growing hubris of the American leadership. Coming out of that mix, it was fascinating to read how one man and a small group led by him was able to create an agent of war that was instrumental to preserving peace. And became a critical to the success of the US space program as well.

This book details the dedication, drive & determination one man had to understand and then realize how the world was changing in the face of technology and worked tirelessly to make certain the United States was positioned to be on the forefront of this change. Schriever's willingness to push strongly to achieve his vision is a great example of how to create success despite considerable obstacles.

Sheehan's book is a very engaging read and provides great context for the period in terms of technology, politics, & geopolitical issues. Having interviewed so many of the participants, the first hand observations are very rich and provide great insight into the challenges and opportunities of the time and of the project. And while you may know the outcome, yes Schriever does succeed in creating the ICBM, you find yourself rooting for him to overcome the challenges that are presented along the way.

I am quite happy that individuals like B Schriever are welcomed into the United States and subsequently contribute so much to the success, safety and prosperity of the country.

The publisher claims that "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." Actually, that's an understatement. What Sheehan has done is put a series of human faces and personalities in their proper perspective in history in a completely entertaining book.

I lived through most of the time in history that he is writing about and remember the Cuban Crisis clearly as it was presented at the time. I also was trained to "duck and cover" in school and knew where every fallout shelter was in our local community. This book fills in what was really happening at the highest levels in our government and Russia during that period. The narrative is entertaining and filled with the personal histories and profiles of the people involved in the ICBM and space race and how they got us to the present day. The connection between MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) and our space satellite program and more than interesting . . . they illuminate how military science became part of the fabric of our lives today. We owe everything based on satellites today to this small group of visionaries in the late 40's to the 70's. Much of what we take for granted today was invented for the ICBM missile program and to spy on Russia's ICBM program during the cold war: GPS, world-wide TV, world-wide communications, advanced satellite-based weather forecasting, and so on.

One of the most important lessons of the book is how assumptions by our leaders and Russia's leaders that were not completely fact-based led to the cold war. We can see echoes of this in our current history. This is more than an interesting read, it is a reflection on what continues today in our government. It is also a lesson in how one man or woman can make a difference.

This is a must read book for history buffs, for those of us that lived through that era, and for our children to understand how conflicts happen between nations. What is more amazing about the book is that it is a fun and entertaining read, very hard to put down. It is about real American heroes: Highly recommended!

This is a most informative book. I grew up during the years in question. I have met Gen. Schriever and was delighted to know all of his contributions.

I recommend the book highly.

This book is supposed to be about the history of rocket development in the US after World War II. This is an important topic, deserving a full book treatment. In reality, however, this book is a biography of Air Force General Bernard Schriever. This human interest angle in fact not only makes the book less interesting but throws the account of rocket development off balance.
Schriever's group was not the only organization developing rockets in the US, and his main competitor appears in the book primarily as an obstacle to Schriever's progress, but it was Wernher von Braun's group, which contributed the Jupiter missiles that scared the Kremlin when deployed in Turkey, the Redstone that sent Alan Shepard into space, and the Saturns of the Apollo program.
Schriever's biography, per se, is dull, and the book includes a short biography of every one of his main collaborators or adversaries in the Air Force. After a while, these biographies all sound alike: like Schriever, these men generally came from a modest background, distinguished themselves as pilots or aircraft logisticians during World War II, and went to school to get engineering degrees afterwards. Then they become difficult to tell apart.
In addition, the author also injects irrelevant or questionable opinions at several points. For example, it is difficult to make a connection between the uses Spain made of gold from the New World in the 16th century with rocket development in the 20th. He also describes the shapers of US cold war policies as paranoid about the threat from the Soviet Union, but Russian rocket specialists like Boris Chertok acknowledge today that this threat was real. The author is particularly critical of George Kennan, the key instigator of the policy of containment. What Kennan spelled out in the late forties, however, reads like a scenario of the Soviet Union's collapse in the 1980s. The only thing Kennan got wrong is the time scale, as he expected the Soviet Union to collapse in 5 to 10 years rather than 40.
The book also suffers from a lack of illustrations. The author travels back and forth in time when describing several characters, in ways that I found confusing on several occasions. Illustrations as simple as a graphic timeline or a genealogical tree of rocket families would have made it easier to follow.

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.

A LITTLE MORE PUSH ON THE SOVIET SIDE THAN I CARE FOR DURING THE 1950'S.

HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN THERE DURING THAT PERIOD.

NOT ENOUGH INFORMATION ON THE MINUTEMAN MISSILE, NOW CALLED THE PEACEMAKER.

TJ

Easy reading, very interesting, and holds you attention. I am an Air Force veteran and familiar with the missile program.

Sheehan started out to write a history of the Cold War and its attendant arms race and then came across the story of Bernard Schriever, a man largely forgotten though he arguably played as large a role in space development - manned and unmanned, military and civilian - as many more celebrated figures such as his fellow German immigrant Werner von Braun (though Schriever immigrated when he was six). Fortunately, many of the major figures were still alive to interview when Sheehan started his project in 1993, and their personal recollections - as well as the traditional sources of the historian like other books and government documents - make this story of how America's intercontinental ballistic missiles were developed fascinating.

What Schriever contributed to that task was not so much technical expertise - though he did have formal training as an engineer - but a knack for human engineering, for finding and leading and retaining the right people in his quest to develop the ultimate deterrent. His people developed new rocket fuels, scrapped von Braun's designs for missile bodies, retooled Air Force procurement policies, developed new methods of project management and design, convinced a president to make their job the highest national priority, and, in one instance, produced fake intelligence to overcome Pentagon inertia. Schriever's leadership also laid the groundwork for the manned exploration of space by NASA - literally in the development of Cape Canaveral

Sheehan strikes about the right balance in going when giving the details of all these innovations - enough to get a sense of their significance and not a boring surplus. (Though there are bits of over explanation. For instance, did Sheehan or an editor really think we needed a definition of concrete?) Along the way, Sheehan sort of sneaks in an abbreviated version of his original plan. He covers not only major events of the Cold War like the Berlin Airlift and Cuban Missile Crisis but the deployment of intermediate range nuclear missiles in England and Turkey as well as some of the development of nuclear warheads small enough to put on those missiles. Sheehan makes all of his characters interesting and tries to put them in their historical context. For instance, though he is unkind to the later Curtis LeMay, he covers his early courage and contribution to the strategy of airpower.

And, while he sometimes pulls away from Schriever to talk about larger historical events or other figures, we still learn why the American Air Force never forgot Schriever and gave him its first Space Command badge. By the time the book ends with Schriever's 2005 death, we know why he was buried with the military's highest honors.

However, when he talks about the larger context of the Cold War, particularly Soviet intentions and aggression, Sheehan is less convincing. Sheehan's contention that Stalin's Russia was not bent on world conquest seems hard to square with a regime which ordered NKVD death squads into Spain, promoted subversion through the Comintern, and tried to subvert local communist movements. And, even if he had some notion of the capitalist West falling on its own or engaging in civil war, are we really to believe that the USSR wouldn't have taken advantage of a communist Western Europe after WWII - something Sheehan acknowledges was a possibility?

Still, despite Sheehan's unconvincing portrayal of the threat the USSR posed, this is still a story of a great, unsung American and his contribution to not only our security but the fabric of our modern life.

This is not going to be a full review. However, I will say that this is an interesting book in particular because it demonstrates how difficult it is to get anything done in this world, not least in Washington. And it is interesting because it clearly demonstrates the intricate relationship between politicians and the military and the intricate relationships between various branches and people within the military. And, too, it illustrates why contracting in the military is such a fiendlishly difficult and complex problem, particularly when it comes to new weapons systems.

All of this is, as I say, very interesting and useful. There is a sub theme in the book that is also interesting and hardly fleshed out and that is, I think, far more controversial than I have noticed in any review. Early on in the book it is stated that Stalin (and the Soviets in general) had a fairly benign foreign policy after the war, however monstrous Stalin was domestically. The author states that in 1991 we learned that Stalin had no expansionist ambitions beyond the traditional Russian ones of control of the states on its eastern border (think Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, etc.) along with other geographic entities on its borders. He also states that the Greek Communist movement was supported by Tito in contradiction to the wishes of the Soviets. And he seems to blame the Cold War on George Kennan's original post-war memo when he was stationed at the US embassy in Moscow and to "intellectual primatives" like Paul Nitze. The implication made but never argued is that the Cold War and the whole post war East-West confrontation was largely created out of the mistaken interpretation of Soviet intentions by wrong thinking Americans. If we had just let Stalin do what he wanted on his borders the world would have been at peace.

All of this, as I say, much more controversial and sort of covertly argued. I don't know how valid the argument is, though my guess is that it is less obvious than the author seems to be asserting.

Judged as a history of the US nuclear missile program as it might have been written in the early 1960s, I would place this around the midpoint of the opinions expressed to date. It's easy to read with lots of asides and personal detail of minor characters, short on technical facts and relation to broader events. The main thing I have to add to those reviews is this book will do nothing to help readers under 70 understand why talented, intelligent people in a time of tremendous technological progress, who could reasonably have hoped to cure cancer, eradicate poverty or build the Internet, instead chose to create devices to destroy all life on the planet.

I care less about Bernard Schriever's golf game than, say, whether he visited the survivors of atomic blasts when he was stationed in Japan soon after the bombings. Was he tortured by thoughts of a blasted planet, emptied of life by weapons he created? Did he think a nuclear war was survivable by anyone, and did he think it a topic worthy of research? How did he feel about civilian radiation deaths caused by testing, and the government lies about them? Did he have a clear strategic vision about how his missiles would lead to a better world or did he think that was someone else's department? Did he think the weapons would ever be used and if so, how could he build them, and if not, why devote his life to making them work? If Mutually Assured Destruction justified nuclear weapons, how did he feel about chemical and biological weapons, most of which had no military and no deterrent value? And how about all the energetic, skillful and brilliant people who worked for him?

I mean these questions sincerely. I'm not claiming everyone involved with nuclear weapons was evil or insane, but I would like to know what they were thinking. I find it strange that a book written in 2009, most of whose readers will be too young to recall the times in question, treats total destruction of the Earth as a normal career pursuit that needs no explanation. The author asserts that the weapons kept the peace until the Soviet Union could fall apart, and suggests this proves the wisdom of building them. I can't accept that, the second half of the 20th century was not peaceful and I can imagine far, far better courses of events. Worse courses are imaginable as well, and possibly nuclear missiles prevented them. But even so, I find it exceedingly lucky that the weapons were never fired by technical error, political miscalculation or sabotage; and that the Soviet Union could disintegrate politically without someone deciding to press a button; and that no smaller state or terrorist ever used a weapon; and I don't credit that anyone in 1950 could have been certain enough of that luck to bet everyone's life on it.

I realize that's more than enough on what the book isn't, I have a few things to add about what it is. It is very well-written and does an excellent job of keeping the main thread of the story going through changes in administration and technology. There are some clunker lines like, "The desire for clandestinity was unrequited," scattered throughout. I think this is supposed to be arch humor, but it pops up at inappropriate times.

The level of technical detail is uneven. On one hand, the author defines words like "mufti," so this isn't written for military junkies, but there is no explanation of the relation among the many commands and agencies involved in the story. If you don't know how much weight an assistant secretary of defense pulls versus a two-star general versus an Atomic Energy commissioner, you will have trouble sorting out events. Distances are always stated in both nautical and statute miles (but not tactical miles, what the Navy actually uses for ballistic missiles). Most readers don't care, and most of those that do can translate for themselves. A conversion table in an appendix is more useful than constant translation. Nuclear weapon yields are always given in both tons of TNT and "numbers of Hiroshima's." Neither one is likely to convey much to typical readers, and the second one is used almost exclusively by anti-nuclear writers. It would be far more useful to know how the yield translates into required accuracy for various types of targets, for example a warhead that can destroy a hardened military target if detonated within two kilometers of the site.

This book will not give you insight into the two decades of extraordinary technological and scientific progress that followed the Second World War, but it does give you the names and dates version of an important component of that progress. It comes with enough supporting detail and style to be a pleasant book to read.

Neil Sheehan has chosen a similar approach to his new subject, the development of the ICBM, as he did in his epic 'A Bright Shining Lie.' Mr Sheehan has found the central individual whose story best represents the complete missile picture and has woven another dense narrative around that framework. Bernard Schriever is the central figure in 'A Fiery Peace in a Cold War' a man who used many things to his best advantage in order to develop the ultimate weapon, including the golf links. General Shriever oversaw the development of Thor, Jupiter, Minuteman, and even the first spy satellite and is understood to have institutionalized the Air Force's penchant for technology.
'A Fiery Peace' is different in that Sheehan met with his principal subject, in fact he found after beginning his research that they lived only six blocks apart and hence was able to meet with Shriever more than fifty times, thus the book is a more affable account than the life of John Paul Vann, a man reconstructed from journals and through acquaintances. 'A Bright Shining Lie' completely encapsulates the Vietnam era in 800-odd pages, 'A Fiery Peace' is slimmer at around 500, and far more "character driven." As each person enters the narrative their life story is presented, and an anecdote or three thrown in, and the technique becomes digressive at times (there is a two papragraph tale told inside brackets of a man's difficult birth and his father producing a .45 to encourage the physician, however, it is a great yarn.)
As is the author's wont, new material is unearthed, all the names of the traitors who gave American nuclear secrets to the Russians are divulged, some only having come to light in the last few years. There is some great analysis from behind the Iron Curtain, Soviet archives were open to the author in that brief window of civility before Putin pulled it closed again ("Things have changed, but not that much," as my Hungarian friend was told by a Romanian border guard.) There are many colorful individuals who peopled the ICBM's history (the missile's name was changed from IBM due to a conflict in nomenclature), all the von's are in on it, Braun, Neumann, 'The Martians' as the Hungarian geniuses were collectively known (Teller, Wigner, von Neumann, Szilard, Karman) due to that fact that it seemed impossible so many Einsteins could spring from one small neighborhood, so they must have come from Mars. The book is devoid of footnotes, thus giving it a pleasant flow, and source notes are presented in a narrative style that makes for easy research. The only negative would be that despite so much time spent with Mr. Shriever, Sheehan doesn't seem to get beneath his skin, there is no journalistic dirt under the fingernails despite another fifteen year product-in-the-making.

Neil Sheehan has chosen a similar approach to his new subject, the development of the ICBM, as he did in his epic 'A Bright Shining Lie.' Mr Sheehan has found the central individual whose story best represents the complete missile picture and has woven another dense narrative around that framework. Bernard Schriever is the central figure in 'A Fiery Peace in a Cold War' a man who used many things to his best advantage in order to develop the ultimate weapon, including the golf links. 'A Fiery Peace' is different in that Sheehan met with his principal subject, in fact he found after beginning his research that they lived only six blocks apart and hence was able to meet with Shriever more than fifty times, thus the book is a more affable account than the life of John Paul Vann, a man reconstructed from journals and through acquaintances. 'A Bright Shining Lie' completely encapsulates the Vietnam era in 800-odd pages, 'A Fiery Peace' is slimmer at around 500, and far more "character driven." As each person enters the narrative their life story is presented, and an anecdote or three thrown in, and the technique becomes digressive at times (there is a two papragraph tale told inside brackets of a man's difficult birth and his father producing a .45 to encourage the physician, however, it is a great yarn.) As is the author's wont, new material is unearthed, all the names of the traitors who gave American nuclear secrets to the Russians are divulged, some only having come to light in the last few years. There is some great analysis from behind the Iron Curtain, Soviet archives were open to the author in that brief window of civility before Putin pulled it closed again ("Things have changed, but not that much," as my Hungarian friend was told by a Romanian border guard.) There are many colorful individuals who peopled the ICBM's history (the missile's name was changed from IBM due to a conflict in nomenclature), all the von's are in on it, Braun, Neumann, 'The Martians' as the Hungarian geniuses were collectively known (Teller, Wigner, von Neumann, Szilard, Karman) due to that fact that it seemed impossible so many Einsteins could spring from one small neighborhood, so they must have come from Mars. The book is devoid of footnotes, thus giving it a pleasant flow, and source notes are presented in a narrative style that makes for easy research. The only negative would be that despite so much time spent with Mr. Shriever, Sheehan doesn't seem to get beneath his skin, there is no journalistic dirt under the fingernails despite another fifteen year product-in-the-making.

Neil Sheehan has chosen a similar approach to his new subject, the development of the ICBM, as he did in his epic 'A Bright Shining Lie.' Mr Sheehan has found the central individual whose story best represents the complete picture and has woven another dense narrative around that framework. Each of these wonderful books was about fifteen years in the making and we can only hope that the author bangs out a couple more before he trots off this mortal coil. Bernard Schriever is the central figure in 'A Fiery Peace in a Cold War' a man who used many things to his best advantage in order to develop the ultimate weapon, including the golf links. 'A Fiery Peace' is different in that Sheehan met with his principal subject, in fact he found after beginning his research that they lived only six blocks apart and hence was able to meet with Shriever more than fifty times, thus the book is more intimate. 'A Bright Shining Lie' completely encapsulates the Vietnam era in 800-odd pages, 'A Fiery Peace' is slimmer at around 500, and far more "character driven." As each person enters the narrative their life story is presented, and an anecdote or three thrown in, and the technique becomes digressive at times (there is a two papragraph tale told inside brackets of a man's difficult birth and his father producing a .45 to encourage the physician, however, it is a great yarn.) As is the author's wont, new material is unearthed, all the names of the traitors who gave American nuclear secrets to the Russians are divulged, some only having come to light in the last few years. There is some great analysis from behind the Iron Curtain, Soviet archives were open to the author in that brief window of civility before Putin pulled it closed again ("Things have changed, but not that much," as my Hungarian friend was told by a Romanian border guard.) There are many colorful individuals who peopled the ICBM's history (the missile's name was changed from IBM due to a conflict in nomenclature), all the von's are in on it, Braun, Neumann, 'The Martians' as the Hungarian geniuses were collectively known (Teller, Wigner, von Neumann, Szilard, Karman) due to that fact that it seemed impossible so many Einsteins could spring from one small neighborhood, so they must have come from Mars. The book is devoid of footnotes, thus giving it a pleasant flow, and source notes are presented in a narrative style that makes for easy research.

Unlike many readers I did not begin reading this book necessarily expecting the same caliber of writing as that found in Sheehan's Pulitzer Prize winning "A Bright Shining Lie." To replicate such a classic would be not only difficult but really next to impossible. Few writers, very few, have managed such a feat. I wanted to read the book to learn something about Bernard Schriever and his connection to "...The Ultimate Weapon."

I learned a good deal about both and much more. I also was not disappointed in that this book is not in the same class as "A Bright Shining Lie." That being said I did find the book worth reading in that I learned who Bernard Schriever was and got a pretty good overall picture of the history of the U.S. missile program and it's impact on the Cold War. In a readable narrative style typical of many trained journalists, I learned not only about the expected political events that both helped and hindered the U.S. missile program but got a mini course in the backgrounds of many of the major figures of the 20th century, both friend and foe. I learned just enough about Bernard Schriever to whet my appetite for more information and intend to seek other works that may provide more indepth information on him. I suspect he would not be allowed to function in today's military.

This is not an exhaustive treatment of either Bernard Schriever or the creation and development of missiles that are credited with sustaining the cold war long enough for the inevitability of time to destroy the Soviet Union as it was formerly structured. It does provide an acceptable overall picture of the development of the U.S. missile program and introduces the readers to many of the players that helped shape the world as we know it. It is not in the same class as "A Bright Shining Lie" but then I never expected it would be. That classic is a difficult act to follow as is evidenced by this book.

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.*

Bernard Schriever was summoned by General Arnold in 1944 to be told that the relationship of the Air force and the scientists should be preserved after the war. Arnold was establishing a Scientific Liaison Branch and wanted Schriever to head it. Schriever was an immigrant boy from Bremerhaven, later charged with creating America's interballistic missile force. As a young man, growing up in San Antonio, he was a golfer. After graduating from college, Texas A&M, in 1939, with a major in structural architecture, he decided to join the U.S. Army Air Corps. He entered Flying School in 1932. He graduated in 1933, was awarded his wings and second lieutenant's commission, and was sent for a year of active duty to the Ninth Bombardment Squadron, Riverside, CA.

In 1933 Henry 'Hap" Arnold was a lieutenant colonel. Arnold's deputy at March Field, (Riverside), was Major Spaatz. Spaatiz oversaw the strategic bombing campaign against Nazi Germany. Arnold had formed a friendship with Robert Millikan who headed Caltech. Golf brought Schriever to the attention of senior officers. In 1935 Schriever led a CCC Camp on the Gila River. At that time period he was a Reserve First Lieutenant. Later, on active duty, he went to the Panama Canal. In 1937 he left the service to become a co-pilot at Northwest Airlines. Arnold advised Schriever to apply for a regular commission in 1938 in order to be part of an all-weather air force. That same year Schriever did become a second lieutenant in the Air Corps, Regular Army. He entered the Air Corps Engineering School at Wright Field in 1940. He was selected to attend Stanford in 1941. After Pearl Harbor his orders specified that he remain at Stanford until he completed his masters degree. In June 1942, promoted to major, he set out for an assignment in Australia. Schriever started to move to a level of recognition and responsibility in the war. He received two promotions rather quickly. He became a colonel and chief of staff of the service command.

The U.S. and the Soviet Union emerged from the war with enhanced stature. Hiroshima destroyed Stalin's sense of security. Spies, Klaus Fuchs, George Koval, Ted Hall, provided information about the bomb. The Soviet Union had to create an entire nuclear industry. (Stalin believed he was bringing a new reality to fruition.) Prisoners building the atomic complex in the Soviet Union were sent to the gold mines to insure secrecy. A review of the documents discloses that Stalin had limited imperial ambitions. Kennan's analysis did not reflect the reality of the Soviet Union. It was difficult to penetrate, to read Stalin's closed society. The U.S. Air Force defeated the Berlin Blockade in 1948 through transporting needed goods to the city. The Berlin Airlift was drama. In 1949 Russia detonated an atom bomb. (Fuchs and Hall saved the Soviet Union a year or two.) The broken monopoly was a balance of terror. In 1949 Kennan and Acheson had a falling out when Kennan questioned the militarization of foreign policy. Nitze replaced Kennan. Nitze believed the Soviet Union sought to impose absolute authority over the rest of the world.

After the war Schriever wanted to get involved in research and development. He went to the Pentagon. Curtis LeMay's Strategic Air Command expanded its capability greatly, but the Soviets progressed from planes to rockets. Schriever's confrontation with LeMay may have begun over the feasibility of a nuclear powered air plane. LeMay wanted a supersonic plane. Schriever was charged with recruiting the scientists and engineers to build it. He discovered an atomic supersonic plane was a technological impossibility. No one at the Development Planning Office believed a nuclear-powered engine could operate at supersonic speeds. In 1961 the project was cancelled.

Surface to air batteries were deployed around Moscow in 1957. The efficacy of the system was shown when Francis Gary Powers was brought down in 1960. Another controversy arose over standardizing mid-air fueling. In 1953 Schriever was promoted to brigadier general. When Edward Teller and John von Neuumann said the hydrogen bomb could be reduced in size to under a ton, Scriever understood an ICBM system was possible. In 1954 the Air Force decided to go forward with such a program. Schriever, a one star general at the time, was selcted to run the program. Later, for his persistence in promoting the program, Schriever was awarded a second star. The ICBM project was placed on the NSC Agenda. Sputnik subjected the Eisenhower administration to polical pressure. 'Missileman Schriever' made the cover of TIME Magazine in 1957. In 1959 there was a missile gap, but it was in favor of the United States. Schriever and his associates bought time for the Soviet Union to exhaust itself.

Description and analysis of the arms race and the Cold War are set forth in competent and compelling detail for the reader. Sheehan's investigative undertaking results in a splendid text.

As more information from the Cold War era becomes declassified, the more we learn about what exactly happened during that era. As a result, formerly shadowy characters that seemed of little relevance start to loom larger and more prominent. Such is the case of USAF General Bernard Schriever. Born to a German-American family that immigrated during the depths of the First World War, Schriever seems an unlikely candidate to be involved in the Cold War. His service between the wars in the Army Air Corps was pretty much stymied and he was dismissed by 1937 and reduced to working as a pilot for Northwest Airways. With the outbreak of the Second World War his career is revived, and from there his services are much in demand for the nascent development of nuclear capability. Starting in 1954 Schriever headed a group of officers to create the U.S. Air Force's ballistic and systems division which was responsible for creating what became known nuclear triad, specifically creating the ground based and air based nuclear capabilities. "A Fiery Peace" is as much about Scriever as it is the world he helped create, one of MAD, Mutual Assured Destruction, but a world of tensions with competing rivalries within the Armed Forces and the political world. Touching on the development of the tensions that rose during the Cold War, "A Fiery Peace" is a look back at that era and the men and women that helped shaped that era's deterrent capabilities.

Utilizing a wealth of recently declassified materials, "A Fiery Peace" is a glimpse into the Cold War era, but there is little in the way of shocking new insight gained here; it's more in the realm of nuance and detail. That's not to say "A Fiery Peace" is boring or lacks fire, it's simply to say that it's more technical and detailed in nature rather than revelatory like One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (Vintage). An enjoyable read, "A Fiery Peace" adds to our understanding of the Cold War era.

Neil Sheehan has a proclivity of picking up on imortant histoical figures usually ignored. Like John Paul van, Mr Sheehan's previous anti-hero,here he has brought forth Gen. Bernard Schriever and his band of merry men,without who, in all probability,you and I would not be here. The intricate loopy Strangloveian moments that passed as standard operating procedure during the height of the cold war are portrayed here,in all of its insane detail.General Curtis Lemay,the strategic air command wacko last seen trying to start a war with Russia over Cuba ,then running as VP on George Wallaces' ticket in 1968,is shown here to be, well, a lunatic.Command and control is shown to be a terrifying chain of command, eventually relying on some poor s.o.b. in Kansas or North Dakota who would decide the fate of the planet! This is a sobering, horrifying, and I guess, hopeful book.Hopeful in that, with all the loose canons firing,no one ignited the final fuse.General Schriever,well done.deep sigh...recommended

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.

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?"