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    A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon
    Unavailable
    A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon
    Unavailable
    A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon
    Audiobook19 hours

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

    Written by Neil Sheehan

    Narrated by Robertson Dean

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    From Neil Sheehan, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning classic A Bright Shining Lie, comes this long-awaited, magnificent epic. Here is the never-before-told story of the nuclear arms race that changed history-and of the visionary American Air Force officer Bernard Schriever, who led the high-stakes effort. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War is a masterly work about Schriever's quests to prevent the Soviet Union from acquiring nuclear superiority, to penetrate and exploit space for America, and to build the first weapons meant to deter an atomic holocaust rather than to be fired in anger.

    Sheehan melds biography and history, politics and science, to create a sweeping narrative that transports the reader back and forth from individual drama to world stage. The narrative takes us from Schriever's boyhood in Texas as a six-year-old immigrant from Germany in 1917 through his apprenticeship in the open-cockpit biplanes of the Army Air Corps in the 1930s and his participation in battles against the Japanese in the South Pacific during the Second World War. On his return, he finds a new postwar bipolar universe dominated by the antagonism between the United States and the Soviet Union.

    Inspired by his technological vision, Schriever sets out in 1954 to create the one class of weapons that can enforce peace with the Russians-intercontinental ballistic missiles that are unstoppable and can destroy the Soviet Union in thirty minutes. In the course of his crusade, he encounters allies and enemies among some of the most intriguing figures of the century: John von Neumann, the Hungarian-born mathematician and mathematical physicist, who was second in genius only to Einstein; Colonel Edward Hall, who created the ultimate ICBM in the Minuteman missile, and his brother, Theodore Hall, who spied for the Russians at Los Alamos and hastened their acquisition of the atomic bomb; Curtis LeMay, the bomber general who tried to exile Schriever and who lost his grip on reality, amassing enough nuclear weapons in his Strategic Air Command to destroy the entire Northern Hemisphere; and Hitler's former rocket maker, Wernher von Braun, who along with a colorful, riding-crop-wielding Army general named John Medaris tried to steal the ICBM program.

    The most powerful men on earth are also put into astonishing relief: Joseph Stalin, the cruel, paranoid Soviet dictator who spurred his own scientists to build him the atomic bomb with threats of death; Dwight Eisenhower, who backed the ICBM program just in time to save it from the bureaucrats; Nikita Khrushchev, who brought the world to the edge of nuclear catastrophe during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and John Kennedy, who saved it.

    Schriever and his comrades endured the heartbreak of watching missiles explode on the launching pads at Cape Canaveral and savored the triumph of seeing them soar into space. In the end, they accomplished more than achieving a fiery peace in a cold war. Their missiles became the vehicles that opened space for America.


    From the Hardcover edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateSep 22, 2009
    ISBN9780307576705
    Unavailable
    A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon
    Author

    Neil Sheehan

    Neil Sheehan is the author of A Fiery Peace in a Cold War and A Bright Shining Lie, which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1989. He spent three years in Vietnam as a war correspondent for United Press International and The New York Times and won numerous awards for his reporting. In 1971, he obtained The Pentagon Papers, which brought the Times the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for meritorious public service. Sheehan lives in Washington, DC. He is married to the writer Susan Sheehan.

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    Reviews for A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

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    • 5/5
      Beautiful. Surprisingly heartbreaking. Sheehan is a powerful writer.
    • 4/5
      Like 'A Bright Shining Lie' before it, Sheehan is able to capture and explore the nuances of 'political' wars by exploring the biography of one who fought. His skills as a journalist and biographer allow Sheehan to draft some of the finest war histories of the 20th century.
    • 3/5
      Much as he used John Paul Vann to tell the story of Vietnam, here Sheehan uses Bernard Schriever to tell the story of the Cold War nuclear arms race. The book does a good job of explaining the various technical problems involved, while occasionally reminding readers of the horrors that the weapons being created were capable of. It also features excellent portraits of the various out-sized personalities (Curtis LeMay in particular) involved in the Cold War.
    • 4/5
      Like 'A Bright Shining Lie' before it, Sheehan is able to capture and explore the nuances of 'political' wars by exploring the biography of one who fought. His skills as a journalist and biographer allow Sheehan to draft some of the finest war histories of the 20th century.
    • 4/5
      Neal Sheehan ties the history of the Cold War to his biography of the Air Force officer in charge of developing the ICBM. As biography, it didn't really work for me but as history, this is a great survey of the Cold War, its causes and consequences. I especially like his focus on the politics of defense spending and on Eisenhower's concerns about defense versus social spending.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      To some extent the book's title is misleading. While Bernard Schriever features prominently in the book, his life is not quite the same organizing role for the history being told, as was the case in Sheehan's Bright Shining Lie. That having been said, the writing is of high quality and the historical drama is well described. The book reads easily and contains a wealth of fascinating characters.I came away feeling ambivalent about what I felt to be the author's historical judgment. He seemed to think that the development of nuclear ICBMs was inevitable, and it was therefore a good thing that both the US and the USSR developed them so as to bring about the deterrence of Mutually Assured Destruction. That is, the missile competition "worked" to end the Cold War. But at what a price! --the bankruptcy of the USSR (political, economic, and spiritual), and the political and economic dominance of the military-industrial complex in the US, with it concomitant skewed economic priorities. And we still have the nuclear warheads and the nut cases who want to use them, which is a major threat to the future of the world. It's a tribute to the honesty of the book that it provokes thinking along these lines.There are photographs from the life of Schriever, as well as other personages. There are also meticulous notes, bibliography, and and index. Perhaps the subtitle of the book should be something like "the US nuclear missile project"
    • 4/5
      Clear, informative, exhaustively researched, and balanced in tone. Sheehan honestly subverts the drama of his narrative by noting early in the book that post-Cold War research in the Soviet archives suggests that the Soviet Union never intended to launch a nuclear first strike or ground invasion of Western Europe.
    • 5/5
      I first read A Bright Shining Lie years ago and loved the book. When I got word I was receiving a review copy of A Fiery Peace in a Cold War I was quite excited. This book did not let me down. A history of the cold war told through an interesting perspective. Neil Sheehan writes some damn good history. This book should be read by anyone with an interest in cold war history and anyone who just wants a fascinating, intelligent, and hard to put down book about an important era in American history. I have very few complaints, and ones which in no way should stop someone from looking at this book further – I did enjoy A Bright Shining Lie more than A Fiery Peace, but I believe that is simply a result of me being more interested in the subject matter when I read it.
    • 5/5
      It is a recurring surprise to me that Neil Sheehan and I have not met, given the number of miles we have each travelled over common ground as members of the boomer generation as well as individually. As a result, reading “A Fiery Peace” was a bit like sharing a travelogue from a family friend describing his visit to some familiar locales – but with the added pleasure provided by a knowledgeable and different set of eyes that noticed things you didn’t. In my own lifetime as I passed through the era discussed in this volume, I went from preparing to survive a Soviet nuclear missile strike from Cuba on defense plants and installations in the St. Louis area to participating in discussions with Yeltsin-Putin area Russian officials about nuclear disarmament and cooperation in missile defense. These experiences meant that almost every word of Sheehan’s resonated with recollections and memories of related experiences.The heart of this book is Neil Sheehan’s recounting of the history of the Cold War and the story of the central contribution made to that struggle by Bernard Schriever. A career Air Force officer, Schriever was a key figure in the development of the emblem of the Cold War – the nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile. The author’s approach is a generally chronological narrative – with frequent diversions to bring the reader up to date on what was going on in the Soviet Union in the same period or to discuss important geo-political, technological, organizational, and/or industrial developments. The resulting work is more than a history of an era or a memoir or biography of an “important historical personage,” but rather a book that really does provide a glimpse of what it may have been like to actually live through the varied experiences and events that defined the Cold War. Sheehan offers an easily readable account of the Cold War - its roots; its key personalities and decision makers; the technological developments that defined the era at its beginning, during, and its final outcome – and he does it successfully whether talking about rocket propulsion, aerial refueling, or the internal politics of the Stalinist Soviet Union or the Eisenhower Administration. The author based his work on interviews with more than a hundred individuals including many of the key figures included in the text as well as an extensive collection of archival material, published memoirs, and other histories of the Cold War and its cited incidents. A 9 page bibliography and some ten pages of notes on his sources and passages in the text more than satisfy my scholarly training. Although almost 500 pages in length, the book is organized in 7 books (each of multiple chapters) and an epilogue, a structure that reinforces the author’s writing style and makes the work easily accessible even to the general reader.
    • 4/5
      Military men seldom become famous except through their exploits in war. However, perhaps the most important military “event” of the twentieth century was the one that didn’t happen—the nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Much has been written about the statesmen and politicians who helped avoid Armageddon, but very little has been written about the soldiers, scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs who developed the weapons, tactics, and strategy that made such a conflict unthinkable. Neil Sheehan’s A Fiery Peace in a Cold War is a tale of the people behind the evolution of the weapons and strategy that became Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), the doctrine that kept the Cold War cold until the breakup of the Soviet Union. Sheehan himself is considered a “giant” among journalists: the reporter who obtained the Pentagon Papers for the New York Times, and the author of a Pulitzer Prize winning book on Vietnam, A Bright Shining Lie. This latest effort from Sheehan is another fascinating look at the background drama of a major act in American history. The United States enjoyed a brief monopoly of atomic bombs from 1945 until 1949, when the U.S.S.R. detonated its own uranium and plutonium bombs. Five-star Army General Hap Arnold, the head of the U.S. Air Force at the end of WWII, had the vision to recognize the importance of science and technology for driving the defensive strategy of the U.S. in the atomic age. He also recognized the talents of a colonel with an advanced degree in Aeronautical Engineering, Bernard “Bennie” Schriever, a German immigrant who fought with the U.S. in World War II. Arnold picked Schriever to head the development of the ultimate military weapon – one which would deter war rather than be used in war - the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) armed with a thermonuclear (hydrogen) bomb. Sheehan’s writing is crisp and lucid. His description of the differences between uranium and plutonium bombs takes only one paragraph, yet it explains the reason why early production of the bombs was so meager [shortage of uranium, slow separation of U-235 from U-238 by gas diffusion] and the importance of the implosion concept for plutonium bombs [to avoid spontaneous fission from impurities]. Sheehan blames some of the frigidity of the early Cold War on a “misreading” of Stalin. Like the British Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher, he sees Stalin as a monster (on that, there is little to disagree about), but “he was not an expansionist monster in the likeness of Hitler,” as portrayed by George Kennan (an extremely influential American advisor on the Soviet Union). Where Kennan saw a “fanatical revolutionary,” Sheehan considers Stalin to have been a more complex mixture of genuine Marxist faith, cynicism, Realpolitik calculation, suspicion, and cruelty. In Sheehan's view, it was in part the psychological insecurity of some U.S. leaders that led to the country's distorted view of Stalin. Moreover, Sheehan characterizes Dean Acheson, Truman’s Secretary of State, as “and intellectual primitive” when it came to communism.Once the Russians (likewise saddled with some influential but intellectually primitive careerists in its military and diplomatic corps) had their own atomic bomb and the Korean War had shown that at least some communists were expansionistic, the trillion dollar arms race between the two super powers began in earnest. The first key strategic decision for American military planners was to devise a method of delivering atomic bombs to Russia. By the early 1950’s, Hap Arnold had retired and his place was taken by the crewcut wearing, colorful, fanatic, and (some would say) evil Curtis LeMay, who was parodied so effectively by George C. Scott in the movie "Dr. Strangelove." (LeMay was known for such policies as the firebombing of Tokyo with napalm in World War II; “Operation Starvation” against the Japanese; and the policy “to bomb [North Vietnam] back into the Stone Age.”) LeMay spearheaded the development of the monstrous B-36 (too slow to avoid jet interceptors), the B-47 (supersonic and beautiful, but too light and short ranged to carry atomic bombs to Moscow), and finally, the B-52 (there, that might do it). LeMay, however, was short-sighted in that he had no use for missiles, which he regarded as impractical. A former pilot, he thought “the bombers will always get through.” Fortunately, others in the government and military saw the potential in guided missiles. Schriever becomes the ultimate hero of the narrative as he shepherds the development first of liquid fuel rockets and finally the highly reliable solid fuel Minuteman missile. [Minuteman was the name given to the second generation solid propellant ICBM.] He was aided by the genius of John von Neumann, the emigre physicist from Hungary who made important contributions to any scientific field he entered. Von Neumann was able to demonstrate that as the size of hydrogen bombs became smaller (less than 1500 pounds), practical improvements in existing rocket motors could result in missiles capable of flying from the continental U.S.A. to Russia. The ICBM could fly across continents at 16,000 miles per hour and reach its target in just 30 minutes. Mutual deterrence became the strategy of choice for rational political actors.Sheehan traces the ferocious funding battles and turf wars among the armed service branches as well as the large aerospace contractors. He also reports on the struggle between design concepts—intermediate range (1500 miles) vs. intercontinental (6000+ miles) missiles. Eisenhower became convinced of the special importance of the ICBM (mostly thanks to von Neumann), and by the end of his term, the U.S. had far outstripped the Russians in missile technology. Eisenhower knew of the American advantage because of the U-2 spy plane flights made during his administration, but could not say so publicly without admitting violating Russian air space. Thus, the evolution of four different technologies used by both Superpowers served to deter a catastrophic war: (1) reliable ICBM’s, (2) relatively small nuclear warheads, (3) powerful radar systems, and (4) spy satellites. With these in play, the nuclear stalemate called MAD became inevitable. Evaluation: Highly readable, important contribution to Cold War scholarship which recognizes the personalities that developed basic strategy during the Cold War. Recommended for those interested in a new perspective on this complicated and exciting period in history.
    • 5/5
      In A Fiery Peace in a Cold War Neil Sheehan has once again proven to be a master at blending biography and history, into a very readable narrative. As he did in A Bright Shining Lie Sheehan examines an important point in United States history through the life of a relatively obscure individual. In A Fiery Peace in a Cold War the story of the development of the ICBM is told by focusing on Bernard Schriever, an Air Force officer, who led a team of civilian and military scientists working in the early days of rocketry. Throughout the book Sheehan successfully weaves in the lives of Air Force legends like “Hap” Arnold and Curtis LeMay, into a story telling tapestry.If a person is going to read only one book on the Cold War, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War would be a good choice.
    • 4/5
      "A Fiery Peace in a Cold War", the new work from Pulitzer Prize winning author Neil Sheehan, chronicles the race for the development of an Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), a delivery system capable of delivering a thermonuclear warhead anywhere on the planet in 30 minutes or less. The story is told through the life of Bernard Schriever, a German immigrant who joined the U.S. Army between World Wars and worked his way up to the rank of a full general in the Air Force, overseeing the development of numerous missile systems along the way.Providing a fascinating overview of the development of Soviet-American relations after the end of World War II to put the (not always accurate) mindset of American leadership in the proper context, the book details Schriever's numerous competitors in the race for missile superiority. This includes battles within the Air Force (with the strategic bomber group, the other possible missile delivery mechanism), with other branches of the military (who wanted their own missile systems), with the executive leadership (who were desperate to keep military costs minimized until the public panicked about Russian superiority), and with the Soviet state (who of course wanted to keep the US from dominating the planet). This is the story of American rocketry from its inception with confiscated German WWII research (and researchers) through the inauguration of manned space flight.Sheehan's narrative style flows quite well and makes for enjoyable reading. After introducing the main characters and offering an overview of how the US and Soviet Union got through the war, the author clearly and simply explains the motivations behind Soviet postwar behavior and sets the stage for the coming missile race. Of course, history is rarely as straightforward as this story implies, but the details aren't crucial to the story being told. As a reporter, the author relies very heavily on interviews, including dozens with Gen. Schriever, to piece together the story of what happened both in the research and development labs and in the high-level briefings necessary to push a project of this scope successfully through the military bureaucracy. Most of the rest of the details seem to come from scholarly studies of other researchers, based on a perusal of the sparse endnotes, and minimal conclusions seem to be drawn. Although this oral history style can sometime produce a biased narrative in terms of the personalities presented, it is still a crucial part of any historical narrative, and Sheehan weaves the stories together into an entertaining and informative whole.
    • 5/5
      "A Fiery Peace In A Cold War" by Neil Sheehan is not just a biography of a man but also that of a key component of cold war strategy, the intercontinental ballistic missile. Sheehan has previously won a Pulitzer prize for telling the story of a critical era of U.S. history through the life and actions of a single man. He takes the same approach in this story telling the history of nuclear missile development during the cold war while celebrating the life of its chief developer General Bernard Schriever. Though the story focuses on Schriever and the missile program, the key people around him are also given deep and detailed biographic treatment including top politicians, military leaders and scientists. Also covered in detail is the backroom wrangling for funding, policy development over deployment of nuclear weapons, Soviet spying and the growth of the military industrial complex. It is obvious to the reader that Sheehan has high regard for the military and believes deeply in what General Shriever and his team were doing. He is overly harsh I feel on those that created the adversarial policy toward Soviet Russia immediately following WWII. We know now that Stalin did not aim for world domination, but was just insulating the Soviet Union in his creation of satellite states. Hindsight, however, was not a tool available to those attempting to see into the fog of a closed society. On the whole "A Fiery Peace In A Cold War" can stand proudly among Neil Sheehan’s body of work. For research, detail, interest and story telling he is top-notch