17. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 440-480

Book VII: A Spy in Orbit and a Game of Chance, 73. Palm Tree Disguises; 74. Keeping the Military on the Leash; 75. "Use 'em or Lose 'em"; 76. LeMay and Tommy Power as the Wild Cards; 77. Avoiding Götterdämmerung; 78. Buying Time for the Empire to Implode. Epilogue: The Schriever Luck, 79. Johnny von Neumann Finds Faith but Not Peace; 80. "The Slowest Old Trev Has Ever Gone in a Cadillac"; 81. Losing It All and Forgiving a Brother; 82. "Only in America"; 83. A Reunion With Hap

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At the end of May 1962, a Soviet delegation had obtained Fidel Castro's permission to place its missiles in Cuba, and between July and October Soviet freighters and passenger ships began moving the missiles and the troops to the island. Forty-one thousand, nine hundred two Soviet officers and men and thirty-six missiles, with launchers and nuclear warheads, had arrived by the time the crisis broke. Khrushchev retained the power to command the launch of the ICBMs, but the military could use any tactical weapons it saw necessary in case of an American invasion. That the transport went undetected can be blamed on the CIA, which was in disarray after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, as well as the grounding of the U-2 spy planes after one had been shot down in China in September. An earlier U-2 had photographed surface-to-air missiles in western Cuba in August. And finally, most people simply didn't believe that the Soviets would be insane enough to put long-range missiles in Cuba.

The Soviets got caught when U-2 flights over Cuba resumed in October. The Joint Chiefs recommended air strikes to take out the missile sights, but Kennedy was concerned about retaliation and ordered a naval blockade. The military still wanted to strike and to follow up with an invasion, and LeMay pulled out the old comparison to Neville Chamberlain. But Kennedy, who had been reading Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, and didn't want to blunder into World War III, stood firm. No one knew of the tactical nukes in Cuba or that the Soviets were prepared to use them to repel an invasion. This would almost certainly have provoked the United States to use its own tactical weapons, "incinerating much of Cuba and its inhabitants and would-be Russian defenders." It would also have empowered the ultrahawks like LeMay and Thomas Power. Kennedy "raised the alert to DEFCON 2, a single step short of all-out nuclear conflict, on Wednesday, October 24.... All of SAC went to the highest possible state of readiness." The potential was there for the destruction of "the entire Northern Hemisphere."

Khrushchev was, fortunately, not a lunatic, though he realized he had been a fool. He backed down and started negotiating, getting a promise from Kennedy not to invade Cuba and to remove the missiles from Turkey in exchange for the removal of the missiles and light bombers. The Americans lifted the naval embargo in November, and the Soviets removed all but a brigade of 3,000 soldiers from Cuba. The missiles in Turkey were slowly removed: The last one left in July 1963, three months after the ones in Italy were removed and only a month before the ones in England.

As it turned out, the most significant effect of the nuclear stalemate was "to help buy the time needed for the Soviet Union to collapse of its own internal contradictions." The Soviet Union, its agriculture crippled by the system of collective farms, was forced to import corn and wheat from the United States. The only exportable products it produced were petroleum and natural gas, most of which went to Eastern Europe to prop up the fractious states it supported there. Where Khrushchev at least attempted to make reforms, Brezhnev was corrupt and cynical; he once told his brother, "All that stuff about Communism is a tall tale for popular consumption. After all, we can't leave the people with no faith." He was also responsible for the disastrous campaign in Afghanistan in 1979. Gorbachev's civil liberties reforms in the 1980s brought about a significant change but he could make no headway in improving the standard of living because of the "sclerotic economic system." Trying to hold the Soviet Union together, he let the Eastern European satellites go their own way in 1989. Boris Yeltsin finally dissolved the Soviet Union.

The nuclear stalemate was dubbed "Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD. There was nothing mad about the grim equation. It made perfect sense by enforcing a nuclear peace." The madness lay in allowing the arms race to escalate: "Technology was in the saddle of a horse named Fear in a race of human folly." On the other hand, the rocket technology made possible the peaceful exploration of space: John Glenn rode an Atlas into orbit in February 1962 and the Titan II made the moon landing possible. The development of communications satellites made a global economy possible and transformed everyday life: "most people who slide their credit cared into the electronic reader on a gas pump or an automated teller machine have no idea their card's validity is being checked via space."

The question became not the quantity and quality of American military power, but whether the leaders of the United States would wield it wisely or foolishly, as the war in Iraq would so aptly illustrate. 

John von Neumann was diagnosed with cancer in 1955, was hospitalized in April 1956 and died in February 1857, age 53. Trevor Gardner, frustrated by the economies of the Eisenhower administration, resigned from his position as assistant secretary of the Air Force for research and development in February 1956. He returned to private business and wrote magazine articles denouncing the government's ineptness; these became fuel for the "missile gap" myth. He was regarded as "too controversial" for a government position, and died of a heart attack in September 1963, age 48. John Bruce Medaris found his space program handed over to a civilian agency known as NASA in 1959; he left the Army and became an Episcopal priest. Ed Hall, who never forgave Schriever, did forgive his brother Ted when he learned Ted was a spy.

Schriever became a four-star general in July 1961, but didn't get along with Robert McNamara and decided to retire in August 1966, just before his fifty-sixth birthday. His marriage to Dora went on the rocks in 1968 when he had an affair with another woman. They separated amicably but didn't divorce because Dora was a devout Catholic. In 1986 he met the retired pop singer Joni James, but didn't marry her until 1997, after Dora granted him a divorce. He was 87 and she was 67. In 1998, Falcon Air Force Base near Colorado Springs, a command center for satellites, was renamed Schriever Air Force Base. He died on June 20, 2005, age 94, and was buried in Arlington near Hap Arnold. 

13. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 315-349

Book VI: Building the Unstoppable, 49. A Competitor; 50. The Team of Mettler and Thiel; 51. John Bruce Medaris and Wernher von Braun; 52. The Cape of the Canebrake vs. "Moose" Mathison; 53. A Few Grains of Sand; 54. Medaris Goes for the ICBM

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The Soviets' intermediate-range missile made Washington decide that concentrating all missile efforts on the ICBM might not be such a great idea, so Schriever had pressure put on him to develop an IRBM as well. As so often, interservice rivalry had something to do with it, too: The Army had its Jupiter IRBM under way at Redstone, under the direction of Wernher von Braun. Now Schriever was forced to get people to work on the Air Force's version, which was named for another thunderer, Thor.

Ramo chose Ruben Mettler, an engineering and technical director recently hired by Ramo-Wooldridge, to head the Thor project. Mettler was an expert in radar and had been present at one of the postwar bomb tests at Bikini, an experience that "led Mettler to vow that he would do all he could in future years to prevent weapons like this from being used against the United States." He had worked for Ramo and Wooldridge at Hughes Aircraft, but had declined an offer to join them when they left. This time he agreed to work for them again. Assisting Mettler on Thor was Adolf Thiel, an aeronautical engineer who had worked on the V-2 and had come to the States with the group of German rocketeers recruited after the war in Operation Paperclip. He had worked with von Braun at Redstone, but had broken away to form his own research group. Thiel knew enough about the work being done at Redstone that it's no surprise "that Thor was essentially a copy of the missile that was to become the Army's Jupiter." Edward Hall was project manager for Thor, but he had his hands full working on the backup ICBM, Titan, as well.

Schriever's counterpart on the Army's missile was Maj. Gen. Bruce Medaris of the Ordnance Corps. Medaris had an advantage in the rocketeering expertise of von Braun and his fellow Germans. Von Braun was more interested in space exploration than in warfare; he claimed that his membership in the Nazi party, his commission as an officer in the SS and his work on the V-2 were merely means to an end: developing spacecraft. (This would lead to the joke that von Braun's book, I Aim at the Stars, should have had a subtitle: But I Sometimes Hit London.) He had in fact been arrested by the SS, under Himmler's orders, and briefly jailed on suspicion of "defeatist talk and hindering V-2 production by wasting time discussing the future of rockets in space exploration."

The stage for the conflict between Thor and Jupiter was a reclaimed canebrake in Florida called Cape Canaveral (Spanish for "canebrake"). Schriever put Lt. Col. Charles "Moose" Mathison in charge of supervising the construction of the launch facilities at the cape. Thor No. 101 (its designating number inflated to fool the Soviets into thinking it had a hundred predecessors) arrived there in October 1956 and was readied to launch in January 1957.

It rose about eighteen inches and then suddenly fell back on the pad. With a deafening blast and a shock wave that was felt in the blockhouse, the missile blew up, not only tearing itself into pieces but also damaging the concrete launch pad seriously enough that Mathison's civilian construction crews needed two months to restore the pad to usable conditions.

Mettler expected to be fired, but Schriever just said, "I expect things like this to happen." It turned out that two technicians in charge of the liquid oxygen (LOX) tanks had dragged the hose used to fill the tanks on the ground, contaminating the LOX with sand.

Thor 102 also met with disaster when it was launched in April 1957. It left the launch pad and headed out to the ocean, but 32 seconds into the flight it exploded -- or rather it was blown up by the range safety officer. Thiel was so enraged that he almost punched the safety officer, an Air Force major, in the face before Mettler restrained him. The safety officer had three instruments that showed the course of the missile, and one of them had shown it not heading out to sea but inland toward Orlando. It turned out that a Ramo-Wooldridge had installed the Doppler radar apparatus backward. But the safety officer should have checked the other two instruments before detonating the rocket. "He was transferred not long afterward to Alaska."

Thor 103 was ready to launch in May. The launch team had agreed on a countdown of twenty-four hours, reasoning that if the countdown lasted longer, everyone would be so fatigued that human error might be introduced. When they reached the twenty-four limit on Thor 103, Mettler and Thiel were so eager to launch that they called Schriever to ask for an extension. He was reluctant at first but finally agreed. But the technician in charge of reading the gauge that recorded the pressurization of the LOX tank was so exhausted that he didn't see the needle slip over into red. The rocket exploded, doing so much damage that the pad had to be rebuilt again.

Meanwhile, the first Jupiter had launched in March 1957, five weeks after Thor 101 blew up. It flew for seventy-two seconds before breaking up. A second Jupiter lasted ninety-two seconds. After they discovered that the breakup happened because of the sloshing of fuel in the tanks and adjusted for that, on May 31, 1957, ten days after the fireball of Thor 103, a third Jupiter flew downrange for eight minutes and 1,610 miles. The Jupiter's Germans had almost succeeded in creating a missile that would meet the required 1,725-mile flight. But Medaris was unhappy because of two rulings by Secretary Wilson: any successful missile that the Army produced would be turned over to the Air Force for deployment, and in the future, Army missiles would be restricted to a 200-mile range. On the other hand, Medaris could argue that the Air Force was incapable of building an IRBM, and if it couldn't do this, how could it be trusted with the more crucial ICBM project? Surely the success of von Braun and his team meant that the Army should take over the development of the ICBM?

Schriever blamed Ed Hall for the failures, which were not so much the result of flaws in the missile itself as flaws in the testing process. Hall was also at odds with Mettler, and Thiel regarded him as "a horrible guy ... very arrogant." Schriever decided he needed to replace Hall.