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. 

12. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 279-311

Book V: Winning a President, 45. A Difficult Dialogue at Geneva; 46. Dazzling the Monarch; 47. More Nitpicking; 48. A Radar in Turkey

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When the John Birch Society claimed that Dwight Eisenhower was a dedicated agent of the communist conspiracy, it had in mind things like the 1955 summit meeting in Geneva at which Eisenhower met the post-Stalin leaders of the USSR. At the time, it was unclear precisely who was in charge among Bulganin, Zhukov, Molotov and Khrushchev, but it was the last who emerged there as the most decisive figure. Eisenhower made his arms-control proposal called Open Skies, which would allow aerial photographic reconnaissance of the military installations of the participating nations. The United States was backed by Britain and France in the proposal, and at first Bulganin seemed amenable to considering it. But it was clear that Khrushchev "wanted none of it." (In fact, the United States was preparing to do unilateral photoreconnaissance anyway, with the U-2.) So Eisenhower returned to Washington "in a mood to listen to a briefing on how to build an ICBM."

Schriever and his team were ready to present their case, and did so on July 28, 1955. They were aware of the powerful forces in the Pentagon arrayed against them, each believing that its project deserved priority above the others. They had to persuade Eisenhower "that the ICBM was not just another parochial Air Force project, but rather an issue of the most acute national and international significance." At the meeting they would be facing not only Eisenhower and Vice President Richard Nixon, but also Arthur Radford, the chairman of the joint chiefs; Secretary of State John Foster Dulles; and his brother, Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA. Gardner went first, discussing how the downsizing of the hydrogen bomb "had made possible the creation of the intercontinental ballistic missile" and that it was now possible to lob a nuke from the Soviet Union to the United States in thirty minutes. Von Neumann followed with a technical explanation that he made clear to non-scientists and adding that during half of the time a Soviet ICBM would be on its way to the target, it would be undetectable given the state of the American radar system at that time. And Schriever -- whom Sheehan, with his fondness for nicknames, describes as looking like "James 'Jimmy' Stewart," the "Hollywood actor" -- described the way the current Atlas project was set up.

The presentation went over well, especially with Nixon: "'Why haven't we started this sooner? What's been the holdup?' the vice president said, tapping the palm of his left hand with the stiffened fingers of his right in a gesture of emphasis that was peculiar to Nixon." And then they had to give the spiel all over again to the National Security Council's Planning Board, which would draft the directive for the president to sign. Which Eisenhower did, two months later, giving the project "the highest priority above all others." But still the project was tangled up in bureaucracy, so Schriever drew up some "spaghetti charts" that demonstrated the tangle of red tape that any request for the project would encounter and Gardner put a man named Hyde Gillette in charge of a committee that presented a request for streamlining the approval process to Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson. The result, approved by Wilson, became known as the Gillette Procedures, which essentially "pushed authority downward to those who were doing the work."

 Meanwhile, long-range surveillance of the Soviet Union was being improved with the creation of a specialized radar installation in the Kurdish region of eastern Turkey. The Turkish Radar, as it came to be called, was made possible by the work of Burton Brown, a radar specialist at GE, with the encouragement of Trevor Gardner. It went online in June 1955, with the expectation that the Soviets would try to jam it immediately. But they never did, partly because of another Cold War standoff: in return, the Americans could jam their radar off of Cape Canaveral. Only a week or two after the Turkish Radar was activated it discovered that the Soviets had a missile capable of traveling 1,100 miles. They "were clearly testing an intermediate-range ballistic missile, or IRBM. It was certain now that they were in a race."

11. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 261-278

Book V: Winning a President, 41. An Assault From an Unexpected Quarter; 42. A Sense of Adventure; 43. No Time for Family; 44. Getting to Ike

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The "unexpected quarter" was Air Force Secretary Harold Talbott, who was put in a cover-your-ass situation by President Eisenhower. Schriever and his team had settled on a production method that relied on redundancy: They would build two prototypes, so that if the first one failed they would have a second to fall back on. And they chose another California firm to produce the rocket engines for the fail-safe ICBM. But Eisenhower was concerned that too much of the military's production work was taking place on the East and West Coasts, which were, he thought, more vulnerable to attack than places in the heartland, and that California's economy was growing too heavily dependent on military-industrial work. So Talbott flew out to tell Schriever that he should cancel his contracts with California firms and find places elsewhere in the country to do the research and development work.

When Schriever, who knew that the expertise he needed was at this time available only in California, balked at the order, "Talbott lost his temper and threatened to fire him on the spot and reduce him in rank." Schriever dug in his heels, however, and went ahead with his plans, telling Gen. Power that he was doing so. Power didn't object, and later in the year Harold Talbott was forced to resign because of a conflict of interest scandal. The ICBM project was also eventually granted exemption from Eisenhower's dispersal order.

Schriever's commitment to the project was based not only on a sense that the rockets being developed were necessary for strategic warfare, but also that they would be valuable in exploration of space. The capsules that the first astronauts rode in were in fact modified versions of the original warhead. As for strategy, in an address to the RAND Corporation in 1955 Schriever conceived of the ICBM as a weapon that "would have the 'highest probability of Not being used,'" that if it was successful "It would have 'deterred Total War.'" He "was articulating a concept that would subsequently become known as Mutual Assured Destruction." The rockets could also be used to send spy satellites into space, which "would deny the Soviets the possibility of a surprise attack, of a nuclear Pearl Harbor, the dread of which haunted many, including Eisenhower." His commitment to the project was so intense that it was straining his relationship with his wife and family, which now included a third child, Barbara Alice, born in June 1949.

The confrontation with Talbott had made it clear that what Schriever really needed to do was to get Eisenhower in line with what they were doing. He was chafing at the bureaucracy, and had his staff count how many agencies had to sign off on any request: forty-two. Convinced of the urgency of what they were doing, they wanted a "streamlined decision-making process," a separate budge and "a designation of the highest national -- not just Air Force or Department of Defense -- priority.... Only Eisenhower could give them these privileges." So they began to scheme how to get to him. Vincent Ford was the chief strategist in this mission, and Schriever and Gardner set to work wooing the powerful Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson with continued briefings on the top secret details of the missile program. Ford worked on members of the Presidential Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) and its subcommittee, the Technological Capabilities Panel. In February 1955, the panel presented a report "warning of the strategic consequences if the Soviets achieved an ICBM capability before the United States," and urging the National Security Council to endorse the ICBM "as a nationally supported effort of highest priority."

But nothing happened until Ford made connection with Carlton Savage, the executive director of the planning council of the Department of State, who arranged a briefing by Gardner and von Neumann for senior officials in the department, and another for William Yandell Elliott of the Office of Defense Mobilization. And in June 1955, Eisenhower received a letter from two senators, Jackson and Clinton Anderson, who was the chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, recommending a separate budget and a designation of highest national priority for the ICBM project. The letter had been written by Ford, Schriever and Gardner. Eisenhower agreed to a briefing at the next meeting of the NSC, which would take place after a summit meeting in Geneva with the leaders of the Soviet Union. 

9. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 207-228

Book IV: Starting a Race, 34. The Tea Pot Committee; 35. Getting Started; 36. "Okay, Bennie, It's a Deal"

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Gardner and Ramo had lived in the same apartment house in Schenectady in 1937 when Gardner was a student engineer at GE, and he knew about Ramo and Wooldridge because his company, Hycon Manufacturing, had been located nearby in Pasadena. So they came to mind when Gardner was looking for companies to work on the ICBM. Ramo suggested that Gardner needed a committee of top scientists to study the project and confirm to the brass that it was do-able. Von Neumann agreed to head the committee.

Meanwhile, Ramo and Wooldridge were looking to break away from Howard Hughes, who although he didn't interfere with their operation of Hughes Aircraft, had the potential to give them trouble. He refused to be fingerprinted, for one thing, which meant that he couldn't get a security clearance. So Ramo and Wooldridge left Hughes in September 1953 to start a computer and electronics firm called the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation. They secured financial backing from Thompson Products, which made automotive and aircraft products, and secured their financial backing. In 1958, Ramo-Wooldridge merged with Thompson and became Thompson Ramo Wooldridge, which was abbreviated to TRW Inc. in 1965. Initially aiming at the civilian rather than the military market, Ramo and Wooldridge were persuaded by Gardner to take on the ICBM project, which Schriever agreed to fund from his budget at the Development Planning Office.

Von Neumann's committee, which also included Clark Millikan, Charles Lauritsen, Jerome Wiesner and George Kistiakowsky, became known as the Tea Pot Committee -- a code name for use on the telephone. They examined the three long-range strategic missile projects the Air Force had under development and settled on the Atlas project, an intercontinental ballistic missile project based on improving the German V-2 that was directed by engineer Charlie Bossart. In February 1954 the committee issued a report certifying the feasibility of the ICBM and suggesting that one could be produced by 1960-61 and enough to be a deterrent threat to the Soviet Union could be in the field by 1962-63. They also suggested that current work on the Atlas by Convair be stopped and a new development group be put in charge of the entire project.

The report also played on the fear that the Soviet Union would be the first to develop an ICBM, although there was no evidence at all on what the Soviets were up to where missile work was concerned. The fear of a "missile gap" became a political football that Kennedy used to win the election in 1960. In fact, the Politburo in 1953 had decided on a strategy based on long-range missiles rather than the long-range bombers of SAC. And the first medium-range ballistic missile, with an 800-mile range, had been tested in March 1953. "The United States was indeed caught in a missile race, a strategic competition of profound importance of which it was quite unaware, and in which it was behind." Von Neumann's Russophobia had served him well.

But the task was now to convince what Gardner called "those narrow-gauged bastards in the Pentagon" that they needed a crash program to develop an ICBM. With the help of Schriever and Vince Ford, Gardner drafted a memo outlining a plan to have two launching sites and four missiles ready by June 1958 and 20 sites stockpiled with 100 missiles by June 1960. He proposed forming a division within the Air Research and Development Command to achieve this task. He also specified that Ramo-Wooldridge be hired to provide the scientific and technological expertise, and estimated that the five-year cost would be $1.545 billion -- "an enticingly reasonable figure that would prove to be a gross underestimate."

Interservice rivalry still needed to be dealt with. The Army had its own team of rocket men, headed by Wernher von Braun, at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. And there was intraservice rivalry too: Curtis LeMay, who opposed any project that would threaten to take money away from his bombers. Gardner formed a new Scientific Advisory Committee with many of the Tea Pot Committee members remaining, still under the leadership of von Neumann, with additions such as Norris Bradbury, director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, and Charles Lindbergh. Final approval for Gardner's proposal came in June 1954, one month after Gardner had asked Schriever to direct the project.

"I'll take the job," Schriever said, speaking slowly so that each word came through distinctly, "provided I can run it -- completely run it -- without any interference from those nitpicking sons of bitches in the Pentagon."

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.