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A Fiery Peace In A Cold War
Neil Sheehan
Bernard Schriever And The Ultimate Weapon
Random House
November 2009
On Sale: November 17, 2009
560 pages ISBN: 0679422846 EAN: 9780679422846 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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.
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