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. 

16. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 406-439

Book VI: Building the Unstoppable, 66. A Victory Despite the Bugs; 67. Minuteman: Ed Hall's Triumph; 68. "You Couldn't Keep Him in That Job". Book VII: A Spy in Orbit and a Game of Chance, 69. A Would-Be Spy in the Sky Goes Awry; 70. Mathison Snatches the Prize; 71. Discoverer Goes "Black" into Corona; 72. A Hare-Brained Scheme

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After the deployment of Atlas D at Vandenberg, there was a year's learning curve for the SAC launch crews. Maj. Benjamin Bellis was put in charge of straightening things out, which he did by insisting on full documentation of every modification that engineers made to the missiles, particularly if they were successful, "because you know you got it right but you can't repeat it," Bellis observed. "It drives you wild." Meanwhile, work was proceeding on the F series, the last of the Atlas models and the first to be put in underground silos. By December 1962, there were 132 Atlas missiles ready to be used against the Soviet Union. And the Titan, originally a fallback missile in case Atlas didn't work, had added another 54 missiles to the arsenal.

Now attention turned to "the ultimate in ICBMs," the Minuteman. Ed Hall had been angry at being shoved aside on Atlas and requested a transfer, but instead Schriever put him in charge of the Minuteman project, which was the creation of a solid-fueled ICBM that would have an advantage over the liquid-fueled Atlas and Jupiter. It could be much smaller, for one thing, as long as the bomb it would carry could be sized down. And it could be launched more quickly than the liquid-fueled rockets, which took fifteen minutes to fuel. Minuteman could be launched instantly. Hall managed to win over even Curtis LeMay by creating a vision of hundred of Minuteman that could be launched simultaneously:

Hall got the impression that what appealed most to LeMay was the massiveness of the scheme. The thought of hundreds and hundreds of rockets roaring out of silos was LeMay's vision of how to frighten the Russians and then to reduce the Soviet Union to cinders if it did come to nuclear war. 

Approval of "what would probably be the biggest rocket program the Air Force would ever undertake" was granted in February 1958. But Schriever disappointed Hall once again by taking the project out of his hands. Hall was so bitter that he left the Air Force and went to work as an engineer at United Aircraft Corp. A young colonel named Samuel Phillips, who had worked on the Thor installations in Britain, was put in charge of Minuteman. The first test of the missile, in February 1961, was a complete success that earned Philllips a promotion to brigadier general at the age of 40. He went on to run the Apollo moon landing program on loan to NASA.

The creation of Minuteman now put the United States so far ahead in the strategic missile competition that the Soviet Union was confronted not with a gap but with a chasm." It would be five years before the Soviets acquired a solid-fueled missile.... The advent of Minuteman put an end to the fear of a nuclear Pearl Harbor that had haunted Eisenhower.... And even if by some miracle the Soviets managed to hit first with everything they had, there wuld still be plenty of Minutemen intact in their steel and concrete shelters to doom Russia. No Soviet statesman with a vestige of sanity could risk a surprise attack.

But Schriever still had work to do, this time on spy satellites. He had been put in charge of the Air Force's satellite program in 1955, partly because he was also the one in charge of the rockets that would put the satellites into orbit. Nothing much got done on them, largely because of Eisenhower's budget concerns, until Sputnik was launched in 1957. Eisenhower authorized creation of a spy satellite in February 1958, with the Air Force in charge of development but the CIA in charge of the finished product, an arrangement parallel with the one that had been successfully used on the U-2 spy plane. Of course, Schriever would take the blame for any failures.

The project was announced as a scientific and medical one called Discoverer, to test the effect of space on the items "from human bone marrow to corn seedlings" that would be carried into orbit and then retrieved. But the CIA called it Corona, and the most important things to be sent up would be cameras and film. Schriever put "Moose" Mathison in charge of satellite control, which was first housed in a motel in Palo Alto and then in a room at Lockheed in Sunnyvale. The equipment used to control the satellites was primitive -- there were no minicomputers or solar panels, and the control system was a strip of plastic tape with holes punched in it that was hooked up to an electric timer.

The first launch attempt, in January 1959 from Vandenberg, was a disaster that the crew labeled "Discoverer 0." But the Discoverer I launch went fine, sending the Agena rocket into orbit, though with an attempt to eject and recover a capsule. Discoverer II also launched well, but the control station in Hawaii lost track of the rocket. The capsule was supposed to be ejected and recovered in the Pacific northwest of Hawaii, but there was no way to control the satellite after radio connection was lost. It was calculated that, left on its own, the capsule would  land on a Norwegian island near the Arctic Circle. Mathison flew to the island, whose governor reported that people had seen the capsule, attached to a parachute, descend. But there was nothing at the site except tracks in the snow leading to a coal mine, a concession that belonged to the Soviet Union. Mathison was convinced that the Russians had the capsule, but Schriever messaged, "Tell Moose to stay out of Soviet territory." The capsule, which had no military value, was never found.

A year and a half followed with little success and increasing complaints from Eisenhower to Schriever and to Richard Bissell, the CIA man put in charge of Discoverer/Corona. Schriever was about to dismiss Mathison from the project until Discoverer XIII was launched in August 1960. When he learned that the orbit was perfect, Mathison flew to Hawaii and recovered the capsule, which contained only instruments and an American flag. He flew back with the capsule to Andrews Air Force Base, where Schriever was waiting. The capsule was taken to the White House where the flag was removed and presented to Eisenhower. Then the capsule was displayed to Sen. Richard Russell, the chairman of the Armed Services committee, and Lyndon Johnson, the Senate Majority Leader before being sent on a tour of the United States and eventually winding up in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

In fact, Mathison had made an end run around the CIA, which was supposed to pick up the capsule from the Navy ship that retrieved it, and fly it to Rochester, New York. It was meant to be a dress rehearsal for the top-secret delivery to Eastman Kodak of the film capsules that would eventually be placed in the capsule. The CIA was furious, and accused Mathison of a "unique mix of creative anarchy and casual effrontery." (Mathison had even packed a service pistol to intimidate the captain of the ship if he put up any resistance to his taking the capsule.) Mathison was just doing what Schriever, who had learned the value of publicity, wanted him to do. 

The next launch was the real thing, and this time Mathison left retrieval up to the CIA. Discoverer/Corona XIV went into orbit eight days later, carrying a panoramic camera developed by Itek, a company founded by Richard Leghorn, a colonel in the Air Force reserve. Launch, orbit and recovery were perfect, and the resulting photographs of the Soviet Union were deemed "terrific, stupendous." Eisenhower was pleased, of course, but he also insisted that the pictures be kept secret, for fear that Khrushchev would find a way of retaliating. Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy was briefed on the spying, and as a result stopped talking about the "missile gap," though as Sheehan notes, "he did not stop his supporters from talking about it, and Nixon suffered the consequences on election day." Discoverer was now Corona, a project that remained secret as its successors have done.

As for Minuteman, the first ten missiles were placed in silos in October 1962 -- the same month that Khrushchev "brought the United States and the Soviet Union the closest they were ever to come to nuclear war." When Leonid Brezhnev took power from Khrushchev two years later, he cited the Cuban Missile Crisis as an example of Khrushchev's "harebrained scheming." Khrushchev had been most irked by the presence of missiles in Turkey, the closest to the Soviet Union, and decided that sending IRBMs to Cuba would test the United States' resolve. The Soviet R-12 missiles in Cuba would threaten Eastern cities as far north as New York, and as far west as Dallas and Oklahoma City. Both Khrushchev's friend and adviser Anastas Mikoyan and his foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, advised against it. Khrushchev failed to realize that "Americans regarded the Caribbean as the Romans had regarded the Mediterranean. It was Mare Nostrum, Our Sea." And that "No American president could withstand the political firestorm that would ensue if he acquiesced in the positioning of Russian nuclear missiles on" Cuba. 

8. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 177-207

Book IV: Starting a Race, 29. Seeking Scientific Validation; 30. When Hungary Was Mars; 31. A Fascination With Explosions; 32. Finding an Ally; 33. Marshaling the Expertise

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Rescued from exile in South Korea by powerful friends, Schriever continued to try to advance American air supremacy, now turning his full focus on the intercontinental ballistic missile "in the opening years of the the sinister arms competition between the Soviet Union and the United States, a rivalry that would help to bankrupt and dissolve the immense Soviet empire and bequeath America a national debt of colossal proportions." At a meeting of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama in March 1953, he met two men who would be key figures in this competition: mathematician John von Neumann and physicist Edward Teller. They told him that it was theoretically possible to build a nuclear warhead light enough and a rocket powerful enough to blast any target within the Soviet Union. In May 1953, Schriever went to see von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. While waiting for his appointment with von Neumann, Schriever met and introduced himself to Albert Einstein, who had become a vocal opponent of the postwar arms race.

One wonders what [Einstein] might have said had he known he was shaking the hand of a man who was making it his mission to put not a mere atomic bomb, but rather a hydrogen bomb of eighty Hiroshimas, on the tip of an intercontinental ballistic missile.

Von Neumann had none of Einstein's reservations about the nuclear age. He was an ultrahawk whose advocacy of "preventive war" -- a first strike against the Soviet Union -- exceeded even Curtis LeMay's. "If you say bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at five o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?" He once told Robert Oppenheimer, "I don't think any weapon can be too large." He was also a pioneer in the use of digital electronic computers, making possible computer simulations of proposed weaponry.

Like Teller and von Kármán, he was a product of the "golden age of Jewish secular life in Central Europe" that flourished from 1867, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was formed, to the end of the First World War. Hungary had encouraged the participation of Jews in public and professional life after the unification with Austria as a way of seeing to it that its interests were on a par with Austria's.

Although a mere 5 percent of the population as a whole, by 1910 Jews comprised approximately half of Hungary's lawyers, journalists, and commercial businessmen, nearly 60 percent of its doctors, and 80 percent of its financiers.

The von Neumanns were secularists and John von Neumann was educated at the Lutheran Gymnasium in Budapest, where he was recognized as a mathematical prodigy. "As Mozart could hear the music in his head while he composed his scores, so von Neumann could see in his mind the steps leading to the solution of the mathematical challenge."

The first threat to Hungary's Jews came with the defeat of the Germans and their Austro-Hungarian allies in 1918, leading to the dissolution of the empire. In 1919, Béla Kun, a Hungarian socialist, led a revolution that lasted 133 days and was suppressed by the forces of Admiral Miklós Horthy, a right-winger who became dictator of Hungary and executed many of the supporters of Kun's revolution. Because many of these supporters were Jewish, there was a resurgence of anti-Semitism when Horthy took over. Von Neumann's family had been opponents of Kun's revolution, which was modeled on the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, and John von Neumann retained his antipathy to Russia and to communism, describing himself as "violently anti-Communist." But the Horthy regime resurrected many of the anti-Jewish laws that had been suspended since 1867, reducing the chances that John could get a position as a university professor of mathematics at the University of Budapest. So he went first to Berlin to study chemistry and then to the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich where he got a degree in chemical engineering in 1925. He returned to Budapest for his doctorate, which he earned in just one year, getting his Ph.D. in mathematics at the age of 22. He went back to the University of Berlin as an assistant professor of mathematics, but left in 1929 when Princeton offered him a visiting lectureship, followed by a professorship in mathematics and mathematical physics. He gave up his idea of returning to Europe when Hitler took power in 1933. Like Schriever, Sheehan comments, von Neumann had "the patriotism of the immigrant who is deeply grateful to a land that has been good to him."

Von Neumann became fascinated by the mathematics and physics of explosions, which caused Robert Oppenheimer to ask him to Los Alamos in 1943. Together with Stanislaw Ulam, he worked out the mathematics of the implosion method of detonating an atomic bomb. Despite his ultrahawkishness, he would later testify in defense of Oppenheimer at the hearing that took away Oppenheimer's security clearance because of his opposition to the hydrogen bomb. But it was von Neumann's hawkishness, as well as his scientific achievements and expertise, that made him such a valuable ally for Schriever in his quest to persuade the Air Force to support his vision of the ICBM.

Another ally was Trevor Gardner, special assistant to the secretary of the air force for research and development. He, too, was an immigrant, born in Wales in 1915. Gardner had a bachelor's degree in engineering and an M.B.A. from the University of Southern California, and had run the developmental engineering section of Caltech during the war. He then started Hycon Manufacturing, which produced electronic components for the military. Horace Talbott, the secretary of the air force under Eisenhower, brought him to Washington. Gardner's executive assistant was Col. Vince Ford, whom Schriever had hired as an assistant in 1948. Gardner's bluntness, as well as a drinking problem, had made him some enemies among the Air Force brass, but Schriever, who was introduced to Gardner by Ford, saw his potential for getting the ICBM project under way. And when Talbott was ordered by Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson to sort out the various missile projects being studied by the Pentagon, he put Gardner in charge of the task, Gardner saw it as an opportunity to advance Schriever's ICBM project.

One major problem was finding an American industry that could take on the project -- "the United States had an aircraft industry, but the nation was yet to acquire an aerospace industry. To get the ICBM built, Gardner would have to find the genesis of one." He found it at Hughes Aircraft Company, owned by Howard Hughes, who paid no attention to the company, letting it be run by Simon Ramo and Dean Wooldridge. Ramo was tapped to be the chief technical director and engineer of Schriever's ICBM project. It would launch the company co-founded by Ramo and Wooldridge, TRW Inc., into one of the country's major aerospace firms and make them "immensely wealthy princes of the American military-industrial complex."

Ramo had a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and physics from Caltech and had gone to work for General Electric in Schenectady in research and development in the electronics division. But he found GE's managers "unimaginative bureaucrats," so at the end of World War II he looked for a job that would take him back to California. He saw Hughes Aircraft as a place that was likely to be less hidebound than GE and ready to meet the postwar challenge of the atomic age. He went to work there as general manager in 1946, and brought on Wooldridge, a classmate and friend from Caltech, as partner that summer. Wooldridge took over the administrative side and Ramo the research and engineering. He hired young engineers interested in military innovation. "In these immediate postwar years, long before the Vietnam conflict, there was no stigma attached to employment in military industry." Hughes Aircraft soon established itself as a major provider for air defense equipment for the U.S. Air Force. And they developed the Falcon, the Air Force's first air-to-air guided missile, which led Schriever to them.

7. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 142-173

Book III: The Perils of an Apprenticeship, 24. Into the Lion's Den; 25. Moscow Opts for Rockets; 26. A Nuclear Reactor in the Sky; 27. Low-Level Tactics and the Flying Boom; 28. The Last Tangle and an Ambush

_____

When LeMay complained that SAC was not getting enough attention from the research and development people, Schriever was put in charge of satisfying him, specifically his latest concern: that SAC's bases needed to be dispersed enough so that they could survive a Soviet attack. One idea Schriever came up with was to equip SAC bombers with pontoons, so they could take off and land on water. Unfortunately, Schriever's superiors actually sent him to LeMay with the idea, which was met with "disgust and ridicule." While the idea was far-fetched, LeMay had started ignoring even more practical suggestions. He was, Sheehan says, "no longer willing to hear anything that did not fit his preconceptions. He was the classic example of a man made arrogant by power."

For one thing, he became fixated on bombers and bombers alone, which closed his mind to the intercontinental ballistic missile, which the Soviet Union was putting its R&D efforts into. He argued that bombers were superior to ICBMs because they could destroy the launching sites, even though destroying a launching site after the missiles had been fired seems somewhat illogical. LeMay even wanted to abandon all conventional weapons and go entirely nuclear -- an idea that was not publicized by the Air Force because it would have "set off a political firestorm at home and abroad of nuclear dimensions." He asked for 1,900 B-52s. Eisenhower gave him 744. He wanted the Scientific Advisory Board to investigate the possibility of a twenty-megaton hydrogen bomb, "an idea Eisenhower is said to have vetoed as beyond common sense."

Pressure from LeMay was to be the major impetus in driving the yield of the American stockpile of nuclear warheads up to the record 20,491 megatons peak it was to reach in 1960, enough to provide each of the approximately 180 million inhabitants of the United States at the time with bomb material equivalent in explosive force to 110 tons of TNT.

And he seemed entirely indifferent to the suggestions that use of a nuclear weapon would also mean "national suicide" for the United States. One mitigating factor in the use of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was that they were detonated in the air, limiting the extent of the radiation they released. LeMay wanted his bombs detonated at ground level, which would fill the atmosphere with radioactive dust. On the plus side, LeMay's mad abandon and devotion to overkill may have been a powerful deterrent to Soviet adventurism as Nikita Khrushchev took over leadership in the Soviet Union. But the "bomber gap" he proclaimed when it became evident that the Soviets were developing new bombers was bogus. He spooked Congress into adding $1 billion for bombers to the Air Force budget in 1957 and 1958, even though the CIA reported that the Soviets were producing fewer bombers than LeMay claimed, and they cut back on bomber production in 1958.

What LeMay failed to take into account was that the Russians had a long history of experimental rocketry, and although Stalin had stupidly purged Marshal Tukhachevsky, the leading military proponent of rocket-propelled weaponry, in 1937, Sergei Korolev had survived to become a leader in the postwar era. In 1953 the Politburo put him and rocket engine builder Valentin Glushko in charge of developing an intercontinental ballistic missile, which would change the "strategic equation" and make LeMay's bombers less effective. But LeMay persisted in his single-mindedness, which brought him into conflict with Schriever over the creation of a nuclear-powered bomber.

Schriever was put in charge of recruiting a team of engineers that could fulfill LeMay's dream: not only a nuclear-powered plane but also one capable of flying faster than sound. But all of the scientists and engineers involved agreed: supersonic flight in a bomber powered by a nuclear reactor would create temperatures so high that no known material could withstand. "The reactor would melt." LeMay would not listen, even when Schriever told him that none of the scientists and engineers he knew believed it was possible to "build a nuclear-powered engine that will operate at supersonic speeds." LeMay persisted that if the Navy could build nuclear-powered submarines, somebody ought to be able to solve the problem of the nuclear-powered bomber. Sheehan comments,

The idea of airplanes flying around with nuclear reactors in them might seem daft to subsequent generations, given the appalling consequences if one crashed. In the edge-of-battle atmosphere of the Cold War, such risks were rationalized as necessities. 

And in fact, the Air Force did manage to install a nuclear-reactor in a converted B-36, which made forty-seven flights between Fort Worth and Roswell, N.M. The flight crew rode in "a twelve-ton lead-and-rubber-shielded compartment, with leaded glass windows almost a foot thick." And the plane was always followed by a B-50 with paratroopers who were trained so that in the event of a crash of the nuke plane they would jump onto the crash site and cordon it off until a cleanup team could arrive. Sheehan comments that the flight path took the plane over Lake Worth, Fort Worth's main water supply, and that a crash into the lake would have been cataclysmic. President Kennedy canceled the project in 1961.

Meanwhile, the Soviets had developed the surface-to-air missile, which were deployed around Moscow in 1957. The SAM demonstrated its effectiveness in 1961 when it downed Francis Gary Power's U-2 spy plane. Schriever saw that low-altitude bombers, which could fly under the radar, might be more effective than the high-altitude ones that LeMay insisted on. But attempts to demonstrate this to LeMay were failures. And LeMay also stubbornly resisted attempts to change SAC's reliance on a fueling technique that involved what was called the "flying boom" method. Schriever's Development Planning Office was asked to do a study of in-flight fueling methods and concluded that another method, called "probe and drogue" was more efficient. But when Col. Bill Maxwell was tapped to present the results of the study to LeMay, he was met with hostility. LeMay asked, "Who the hell keeps promoting that probe and drogue stuff?" Maxwell responded, "Every pilot that ever flew it is promoting it." Whereupon LeMay walked out. Schriever realized that LeMay was doing "all he could to keep the Tactical Air Command, with its fighters and fighter-bombers, in check."

Schriever's ultimate clash with LeMay was over the next-generation bomber, the one designed to replace the B-52. LeMay wanted it to be supersonic, to be able to fly at extremely high altitudes, to carry a heavy bomb load and to be able to reach the furthest targets without midair refueling. Schriever did everything he could to emphasize the impracticality of such a plane, but to no avail. LeMay, Schriever said, "was of the school that 'Goddamn it, I know what I need. This is a requirement, goddamn it, no go out and do it.'" Schriever persisted in trying to create the best practicable plane, choosing Paul Blasingame, a Ph.D. aeronautical engineer, to head the project. One result of the team's work was the development of a more effective jet engine, one that would produce more thrust with less fuel. The turbofan engine would do the job and require a much shorter runway for takeoff. Blasingame also devised advanced navigation and bombing systems for the plane. But it was never built: LeMay rejected it. Instead, he had a team develop the B-70 Valkyrie, which was "massive," "supersonic," "expensive" and "useless." The project was canceled by Kennedy as "unnecessary and economically unjustifiable." The B-52 never had a real successor: It was used for the infamous carpet-bombing raids in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, in the first Gulf War, in the second one and in Afghanistan.

The conflicts with LeMay caused Schriever to suffer from tension headaches. But the turbofan engine was a success that "set off a revolution in military and commercial aviation." It made possible the C-5 Galaxy, which "could lift virtually anything that might be loaded into its astonishing 34,000 cubic feet of cargo space" using only four turbofan engines. And the development of the first jumbo jet, the Boeing 747 changed commercial passenger flight forever. Even SAC began using Schriever's low-altitude tactics after LeMay retired.

Schriever was promoted to brigadier general in 1953. But LeMay still managed to get his hand in: Schriever was reassigned to South Korea as chief of logistics for the Fifth Air Force units there. It was clear that LeMay was behind the move. But he stuck with the Air Force and was vindicated.

Bernard Schriever was to be the indispensable man in the creation of the intercontinental ballistic missile during the Cold War and the enormous consequences that were to flow from it -- America's penetration of space and an unspoken but permanent truce of mutual deterrence with the Soviet Union. 

6. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 117-142

Book III: The Perils of an Apprenticeship, 21. Hap Arnold's Legacy; 22. Getting Organized; 23. Bomber Leader

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After his return from the war, Schriever was sent to the Army Air Force headquarters at the Pentagon where he was assigned to the Scientific Liaison Branch of the Research and Engineering Division, where his job was to forge connections with the civilian scientific community. This put him in contact with Theodore von Kármán, a Hungarian-born aeronautical engineer who had come to Caltech in 1930. Hap Arnold had been acquainted with von Kármán for some time, and in 1944 recruited him for the Scientific Advisory Group that would plan the postwar direction of air power. Von Kármán, whom Arnold made a major general, was among the first to go to Germany after the end of the war in Europe in 1945. There he met Wernher von Braun and Gen. Walter Dornberger, who had been the head of Germany's rocket program, both of whom had surrendered to the American forces.

From what he learned about the advances in rocketry made by the Germans, von Kármán and his team put together a report called Toward New Horizons that laid out a vision of "world air supremacy" (Sheehan's italics) as the key to security for the United States. One of the things von Kármán proposed was an emphasis on research and development, particularly the establishment of a research and testing center that would have to be located near a source of hydroelectric power. The first of these was established at Tullahoma, Tenn., and named the Arnold Engineering Development Center after Arnold's death. Arnold also created a permanent Scientific Advisory Board and put von Kármán in charge of it.

After Arnold's retirement in 1946, however, the Scientific Advisory Board was almost abolished. Arnold had made Curtis LeMay the assistant chief of research and development, and LeMay wasn't interested in anything but bombers. The establishment of the Air Force as an independent branch of the service in September 1947 also led to its being a target of the other branches, which were always in search of something that could be cut from another branch's budget. But the Scientific Advisory Board survived, especially after LeMay was promoted to command the Air Force in Europe and Maj. Gen. Laurence Craigie took over as head of a new Directorate of Research and Development. Craigie had known Schriever since 1923 when Craigie was learning to be a pilot at Kelly Field in San Antonio and played golf on the course where 13-year-old Schriever was a caddy.

In 1949, Schriever was scheduled to spend a year at the National War College, but before then he and some other members of the Scientific Advisory Board invited the Air Force chief of staff Hoyt Vandenberg, whose uncle was the influential Sen. Arthur Vandenberg to speak to them. Hoyt Vandenberg canceled, but his place was taken by his vice chief, Muir Fairchild. And a committee was formed that included the enormously influential Jimmy Doolittle, who supported the aims of von Kármán and Schriever, which meant that Vandenberg would take notice of the committee's recommendations. The result was that in January 1950, the Air Research and Development Command (ARDC), was established under the direction of Maj. Gen Gordon Saville.

After returning from the War College, Schriever was called back to the Pentagon by Saville and given the job of assistant for development planning. But this put him in direct conflict with Curtis LeMay. Curt "Bombs Away" LeMay is best-known today as the right-wing ultrahawk who was George Wallace's running mate in 1968 and who advocated bombing North Vietnam "back into the Stone Age." Sheehan also singles him out as "the inspiration for General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick's film Dr. Strangelove," although there were plenty of military men who went into that caricature. At the time, however, LeMay was generally regarded as an American hero for having contributed to the victory over Japan by the ferocious bombing raids that devastated the metropolitan areas of that country. Sheehan calls the attack on Tokyo on March 9, 1945, "the most horrendous fire-bombing in the history of modern warfare." LeMay himself didn't fly in that raid because he had been briefed about the atomic bomb and it was feared that he might be tortured into revealing its secrets if he was captured. Although the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a kind of coup de grâce, Sheehan sees LeMay as "the man most responsible for ending the war with such swiftness."

In October 1948, LeMay was put in charge of the Strategic Air Command, "a languishing organization" that by 1951 he had turned around "into an organization that inspired dread in Moscow" and had earned him a fourth star as general. SAC, with its long-range bombers capable of reaching any point in the Soviet Union, had "become the centerpiece of America's national strategy." But of course, this rankled the other services, which wanted to demonstrate their usefulness, leading to a "Revolt of the Admirals" in 1949 after Truman canceled the Navy's "supercarrier" so it could put more funds into LeMay's B-36s. Truman was forced to sack the secretary of the Navy and the chief of naval operations because of their protests. And even after the Soviet Union acquired the bomb and Truman left office, President Eisenhower continued the policy of relying on nuclear-equipped intercontinental bombers.

By 1954, when LeMay would have 1,500 atomic bombs at his disposal, the estimate was that 60 million people would be killed and 17 million injured within the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China if SAC was unleashed.... While Eisenhower reduced the overall strength of the military establishment by nearly a million men, inflicting most of the cuts on the ground forces of the Army but also shrinking the Navy and the Air Force as a whole, he encouraged SAC to grow.

5. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 94-114

Book II: Inheriting a Different World, 17. Neither Rain, Nor Snow, Nor Sleet, Nor Fog; 18. Stalin Gets His Bomb; 19. The Consequences of Delusion; 20. Good Intentions Gone Awry

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When the Americans, British, and French started talking about creating a West German state, with a view to rehabilitating the country's economy and controlling any militaristic tendencies, the Soviets panicked. The French were initially opposed also, but were won over by the American promise to keep U.S. troops stationed in Germany for an indefinite period. The first step was currency reform, scrapping the now-worthless Reichsmark and creating a new Deutschmark. When the new currency was introduced in June 1948, Stalin moved to blockade all ground transportation into Berlin. Gen. Lucius Clay, the U.S. military governor in Germany, called on Curtis LeMay, "that Cromwellian wielder of bombers who had leveled Japan's cities, now a lieutenant general commanding the U.S. Air Force in Europe," to mount an airlift into Berlin. Maj. Gen. William H. Tunner, who had been in charge of flying supplies over the Himalayas from India to China in World War II, was put in charge of the airlift.

Bernard Schriever also credits the foresight of Hap Arnold, who had pushed hard for an all-weather air force, and especially for the radar that made it possible to fly supplies into Berlin even in the worst winter weather. "By December, the airlift was supplying 4,500 tons a day, 500 tons more than the city's minimum requirement, the biggest portion bulky coal for heating." The Berlin airlift, which lasted until Stalin lifted the blockade and re-opened land routes in May 1949, was a huge success, not least as an anti-communist propaganda triumph. In the same month that the blockade ended, the Federal Republic of Germany was created, with its capital at Bonn.


On August 29, 1949, the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb in Kazakhstan. The scientists in charge of the project, Igor Kurchatov and Iulii Khariton, were generously rewarded by Stalin. (The story was told that the greatest rewards went to the ones who would have been shot first if the bomb had failed.) Meanwhile, work had begun on a hydrogen bomb as early as 1948. One of the participants was the physicist Andrei Sakharov, who "believed that our work was absolutely necessary as a means of achieving a balance in the world." Sakharov would later win the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in promoting civil liberties in the Soviet Union, despite persecution by the government.


Stalin for some reason did not announce the success of his scientists. A U.S. Air Force B-29 detected higher radiation levels in the atmosphere in September 1949, confirming the nuclear test. In January 1950, Truman ordered that work be started on a hydrogen bomb, which was detonated on November 1, 1952. The Soviet H-bomb followed in November 1955, after a preliminary test of an intermediate thermonuclear device had been successful in August 1953.


In 1949, George Kennan, who had originally argued that the Soviet Union had expansionist aims, expressed second thoughts about military efforts at containment, preferring political and economic methods. He clashed with Acheson, who replaced him on the state department's Policy and Planning Staff with Paul Nitze, who argued that the Soviet Union was "inescapably militant" and that the United States was being "mortally challenged." He predicted that by 1954 the Soviets would have 200 atomic bombs and the capability of delivering them in a surprise attack. And he called on Truman to add about $50 billion to the defense budget, which Truman had been trying to cut to keep inflation in check. Truman signed off on Nitze's report on the Soviet threat and the need for a complementary U.S. military and civil defense buildup, but he backed off on the budget request.

To comprehend the real postwar world, one had to understand that while it was bipolar in terms of the two major powers, within the Communist sphere, as within the non-Communist one, there were national leaders with their own agendas who were prepared to act on those agendas regardless of what Moscow or Washington thought. The clue that the Communist sphere was also a complicated world, a world of varying shades of gray rather than black, was the phenomenon of national Communism, which appeared as early as 1948 when Tito of Yugoslavia openly broke with Stalin and went his own way.

But Tito was regarded in Washington as an "aberration." The Nitzean view of an "international Communist conspiracy" dominated American politics from Truman through LBJ, even though such blatant fissures in the "conspiracy" as the split between the Soviet Union and China suggested that it was illusory. Even Acheson recognized that there were tensions between the Soviets and Mao Tse-tung, and made some diplomatic efforts toward Mao, partly because it was obvious that the United States had wasted millions of dollars supporting the corrupt Chiang Kai-shek regime. But the right-wing Republicans put a stop to Acheson's efforts by charging that he had "lost China." The result of this continued delusion about the monolithic nature of communism was the Vietnam War: "Given these American delusions, Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese national leader in Hanoi, had no chance of being recognized in Washington for what he was, an Asian version of Tito."

Information provided by spies like Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall had speeded up the Soviet Union's development of a bomb, though the Soviet scientists would have succeeded in creating one anyway. Even in the midst of the intense anti-communist hysteria provoked by the Soviet bomb and the Korean War, Hall had managed to escape conviction. He had come under suspicion and had been questioned in 1951, however. He received his Ph.D. in nuclear physics from the University of Chicago in 1950, but he had become more interested in biophysics. He went to work at Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York and became recognized as a specialist in X-ray technology. In 1962 he went to the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University and spent twenty-two years there, retiring in 1984. Meanwhile, his brother, Ed, was working with Bennie Schriever on rocket engines, having received the highest security clearances. Ted Hall's espionage was not disclosed until the Venona documents were published in 1995 and 1996. Before his death from cancer in 1999, Hall told two journalists that he had no regrets about what he had done. "I still think that brash youth had the right end of the stick. I am no longer that person; but I am by no means ashamed of him."

But Hall's work, and that of his fellow spies, may have led to the Korean War. Korea had been divided at the 38th parallel by Truman and Stalin after World War II. But because the United States decided that Korea was of "little strategic interest" to it in Asia, it had withdrawn its troops from South Korea in 1949. This emboldened Kim Il Sung to invade the south, with the armaments provided by the Soviet Union and with the backing of Mao. This action seemed to give credence to Nitze's view of the Soviet menace, so Truman ordered MacArthur and his occupation troops in Japan into South Korea. The war lasted three years, and MacArthur would have invaded China if Truman hadn't called him back.

Possession of the bomb gave Stalin the confidence to back Kim in his invasion of the south. Sheehan argues that his previously demonstrated insecurity when the United States still held a monopoly on the bomb suggests that he wouldn't have supported Kim's invasion. And in fact, when Truman intervened, "a surprised Stalin abandoned Kim. He told the Politburo he was prepared to accept a U.S.-occupied North Korea rather than risk war with the United States." He left the job up to the Chinese. Ted Hall argued that by helping give the Soviets the bomb, he had prevented the United States from using it in China during the civil war that led to Mao's conquest of the mainland. But by helping Stalin acquire it sooner than he might have, Hall may have also emboldened Stalin. He also helped Truman get the military buildup budget he wanted.

The Korean War was a strategic disaster for Stalin. The Truman administration took advantage of it to array Western Europe against him.... Worse, by giving Kim Il Sung permission to strike south, Stalin, who was to die in March 1953, had brought to fruition one of his own nightmares. He had made so many West Europeans fearful they might be next that the former victims of Germany were now prepared to accept German rearmament. The Federal Republic of Germany, the new West German state, was being welcomed into NATO, and a new German army, the Bundeswehr, was being formed to march alongside the NATO forces.