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

_____

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. 

15. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 371-406

Book VI: Building the Unstoppable, 59. Jamie Wallace's Thor Show; 60. The Biggest Airlift Since Berlin; 61. "Roy ... I Want You to Get Me Camp Cooke"; 62. A Tie; 63. Black Saturday; 64. The Trials of Atlas and a Christmas Surprise; 65. Whose Missile Gap?

_____

Jacobson put Jamie Walker Wallace, an Air Force major, in charge of the ground support equipment needed to make Thor operational on site in England. In December 1957, Wallace mounted a display of the missile and the ground facilities it would need in Los Angeles. Three thousand people, including the brass and contractors but also a lot of others from the scientific community and elsewhere, attended the two-week show. Security was low, partly because Schriever wanted word of the missile to leak out, although there was virtually no attention from the press. And in August 1958, the first Thor was flown to England. It was followed by fifty-nine more in "the biggest airlift since Berlin," organized by Wallace. Control of the missiles was to be under joint command, with both the RAF launch control officer and a SAC officer having to agree to launch.

Meanwhile, Schriever had been negotiating for an operational base and permanent training ground for the ICBM. His choice was Camp Cooke, on the California coast near Lompoc, because it was "the one coastal area of the United States from which a polar orbit of a space satellite was most easily achieved." From that site, there is almost nothing but ocean all the way south to Antarctica. In the summer of 1956, Schriever deputized Maj. Roy Ferguson to persuade the brass to let him have Camp Cooke. Ferguson had an ally in Capt. Richard Henry, who had been designated by LeMay as SAC's liaison officer to Schriever's program, an appointment, given Henry's low rank, that LeMay had meant as "a gesture of contempt." Henry recognized that Camp Cooke was an ideal for SAC, once it took charge of the missiles after development. Ferguson had been told by Schriever to stress that he wanted the location as a training base, and not to mention that it was ideal for missile launchings, but confronted with the boredom of his audience, Ferguson took a chance and pulled out his charts about using the site for shooting the missiles. From that location, a missile could reach all of China and the eastern Soviet Union, including Vladivostok. As a result of the presentation, Camp Cooke was handed over to the Air Force and in 1958 was renamed Vandenberg Air Force Base. In 1978 Richard Henry became its commander.

The Thors in England gave the joint RAF and SAC command the capability of hitting all of the western Soviet Union. Finding European sites for the Jupiters was more difficult, especially after Charles de Gaulle took office in France in 1958. "Although he privately admitted that Western Europe's security relied on American power, he was not about to publicly concede dependence on anyone by leaning on Washington's missiles. De Gaulle refused the Jupiters." But the Italians gave them a site in the boot heel of the peninsula, with thirty missiles also under joint command. Fifteen more were located in Turkey, which lacked the skilled manpower for joint command but provided security troops for the missile sites. The Turkish missiles could reach all of European Russia and as far as Soviet Central Asia. The Russians had deployed their IRBMs earlier, but now the arms race was a tie.

Schriever's fame had reached the point that he made the cover of Time magazine in 1957. The magazine described him as "hard-eyed," "a tomorrow's man," a "discerning, thinking leader," and an "outstanding and extremely tenacious manager." The Air Force had now designated the branch to which Schriever belonged the Air Force Ballistic Missile Division, and he was in charge of 485 officers and noncom specialists as well as 222 civilians. Ramo-Wooldridge had grown from 170 scientists and technicians to 1,961, and by the close of FY 1958 "had earned approximately $70 million." There were seventeen major contractors in the program working on the two ICBMs, Atlas and Titan, and 200 subcontractors and suppliers. Once a month all the project managers were summoned to a briefing they came to call "Black Saturday." Each manager presented a report to Lt. Col. Charles Getz III, whose "ruthless efficiency" and demand for paperwork made him "the most unpopular man in the command." Adding to the unpopularity was the insistence on reporting the bad news -- Schriever wasn't interested in progress reports so much as in problems that needed to be solved.

Atlas had been one of those problems. Its first launch in June 1957 had been a failure -- it had flown for only twenty-four seconds before it "flipped wildly through a loop-the-loop and fell back into its trail of fire" and had to be destroyed. But Schriever regarded it as a "partial success" because the missile hadn't broken up before having to be destroyed. The second Atlas had a similar performance. Schriever was once again under pressure, but the third Atlas, launched on December 17, the fifty-fourth anniversary of the Wright brothers' flight, went 350 miles downrange as planned. More tests were done to work out problems with the booster engine, and in November 1958 the Atlas 12B "became the first to fly the entire 6,330-mile course." And on December 28, another Atlas was launched into orbit, broadcasting back to Earth Christmas greetings from President Eisenhower -- a surprise public relations gimmick. There were more failures to come as the C and D series was tested, but in September 1959 "the initial battery of three Atlas D missiles, manned by SAC crews, was declared operational at Vandenberg."

With the presidential race of 1960, missiles became politicized:

A terrifying fairy tale called "the missile gap," which had the Soviets surging ahead of the United States in ICBM capability was roiling Washington. The controversy was another example of the chronic American habit during the Cold War, partly from genuine fear but usually inspired as well by political and institutional motives, of seriously overestimating Soviet military power and technological capabilities.

John F. Kennedy made it an issue in the election, but Eisenhower knew there was no missile gap -- or rather that there was one, but that it was in our favor. It might have helped Richard Nixon in the election, but Eisenhower didn't reveal the truth, partly for security reasons. The Soviets had had their share of testing disasters, the worst one in October 1960 when the commander of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces, Mitrofan Nedelin, insisted that a test continue over the protests of the launch crew. The missile exploded in a great fireball, incinerating about a hundred people, including Nedelin. The Soviets were still having trouble with their ICBMs at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, when they had only twenty operational missiles as compared to the 160 that the United States possessed.

14. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 350-371

Book VI: Building the Unstoppable, 55. The Reluctant Rescuer; 56. Thor vs. Jupiter; 57. Sputnik; 58. Thor Readies for Europe

_____

Schriever asked Richard Jacobson, the chief of test facilities and operations, to take over the troubled Thor program. But when Jacobson declined, Schriever persisted, pointing out that the three failed launches were the result of the way the missiles were tested, and that Jacobson had the expertise to see that the mistakes were eliminated. So Jacobson agreed to become "acting" program director while Schriever found a new role for Ed Hall, the current program director. He tightened up all the launch procedures, and in August 1957 Thor 104 made it off the launch pad and flew for ninety-six seconds before exploding. In September, Thor 105 succeeded in releasing its payload, which flew on for 1,495 miles before splashing down in the Caribbean. And in October, Thor 106's warhead went the required 1,725 miles.

Meanwhile, Eisenhower had called for a review of both the Thor and the Jupiter projects, with an intention to shut one of them down. Schriever argued that Thor had the advantage because its missiles were being produced at Douglas, which was ready to gear up for full production, whereas the Jupiter missiles were still being made one by one at Redstone. Jupiter also lacked ground support and storage, which could also cause delay in production. The Army countered that Jupiter's reentry vehicle -- the warhead -- was lighter than Thor's and could therefore fly farther. But Mettler managed to lighten the reentry vehicle, which was the same one designed for the ICBM, and Thor 107's traveled 3,043 miles to splashdown. In the end, the competition was called off and both programs remained active.

One reason for the continued competition may have been the launch of Sputnik on October 4, 1957. It was a massive public relations coup for the Soviet Union, putting Eisenhower into a political hot seat. As Sheehan comments,

Dwight Eisenhower was the last American president to believe that military spending which was not absolutely necessary was money wasted and that a well-founded economy was as important to the security of the country as armed might.

Eisenhower's achievements during World War II had made people confident in his military leadership, but Sputnik caused people to doubt if enough was being done to win the rocket race. The Soviets followed with Sputnik 2, a 1,120-pound satellite carrying a dog named Laika, on November 3, 1957, the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Lyndon Johnson, the Senate majority leader, called for hearings by the Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Armed Services. "The leadoff witness at the Johnson hearings was that genius of scaremongering Dr. Edward Teller." It was not until January 31, 1958, after an embarrassing failure by the Navy to launch a satellite in December, that Wernher von Braun's team used Juno I to send Explorer I, which at eighteen pounds was lighter than either Sputnik, into orbit.

Schriever had been struggling with steady cuts in his budget until Sputnik and the Johnson hearings. Now he was getting ready to deploy Thor missiles in England according to an agreement signed with the British in January 1957. (Jupiters were being sent to Turkey and Italy.) And the ICBM program was still on track. Jacobson had been working on developing a series of tracking stations along the Atlantic range for testing the Atlas and Titan missiles, and the Los Alamos Laboratory had provided a simulated bomb to be placed in the reentry vehicle. Tests were being made of the inertial guidance system, which depended on vacuum tubes in the primitive computer. Thor 112 had to be blown up because it lost stability during its test in December 1957, but Thor 113 was a perfect flight whose payload landed directly on target. After more test launches in July and August 1958, Thor was deemed ready to be deployed in England, and the first missile was sent to its British launch site at the end of August.

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

_____

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. 

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.