Wow ... had no idea how timely it would be for me to read (and finish) this now 10-year old book. But, in today's news: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/01/us... - or, from another source: https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/... ... Wow. Just wow....

As for the book:...., well, it's three (3) really interesting - and highly informative - books rolled (or should I say "scrambled"?) into one, cogently constructed epic/saga by a Pulitzer prize winning author. If I was repackaging the book into three shorter works for folks with a more limited attention span, I might have titled the three subsidiary works as follows*:
* Bernard Schriever: The Life and Times of the Immigrant Could've-Been-A-Golf Pro Who Became the Architect/Father of the U.S. Ballistic Missile and Military Space Programs.

*A Nuclear History of the Cold War: Or How, Over the Course of a Generation, the US-USSR Nuclear Arms Race Evolved Into a Safe(r), Stable, Stalemate, Based Upon Mutually Assured Destruction; and

* From Dumb Bombs to Men on the Moon and GPS: Or How Aerial Bombing Begat Rockets, Which Spawned Satellites and Space Travel.
Any of the three of these could have been worth reading, and, jumbled together, the mosaic covers a lot (and I mean a lot) of ground, but almost all of it is fascinating. Having grown up and served in the military, having read more than my fair share of military history, and having visited or worked with many of the organizations/institutions discussed in the book, I found it - for the most part - utterly captivating, but I do wonder how all of it would appeal to a more casual reader. Part of me thinks it rollicks along at a pretty good clip that might derail your average reader, even if he or she has a genuine interest in history (or even military history, and, specifically, the technical or weaponry side of things).

But, hey, Sheehan is a pro, he did his homework, and even though - at times - I felt he may have bit off more than he could chew in a single volume - I thought it held together just fine. Having said that, Sheehan isn't hiding the ball with regard to whom he respects (heroes his main subject, Schriever, and, apparently, Kennedy) and folks whom or institutions (including contractors) that he ... um ... well, ... uh ... gee, that's another story.

Reviewer's Contemporaneous [circa 2019], Off-the-Wall Observation: Given the subject matter, it's no surprise this is very much a book about boys and men, and a sociologist could have a field day isolating and discussing and drawing conclusions from the various portrayals of women throughout the book. Early on, the protagonist's mom gets a starring role, but, let's just be clear, this volume won't appear on the same shelf as Dava Sobel's The Glass Universe, or Margot Lee Shetterly's Hidden Figures (full disclosure: I haven't read the book, but I loved the movie), but, hey, it is what it is.

*Postscript: If the discussion of alternative titles, above, interests you, check out Baime's The Arsenal of Democracy, to which I had a similar reaction, which I explained here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...military non-fiction12 s Jonathan222

This sprawling chronicle is the story of the intercontinental ballistic missile -- its background in the Manhattan project, conception in the first years of the Cold War, creation in the late 1950s, and refinement to terrifying reliability and ubiquity by 1970. The book also covers the earliest years of the American space program, which grew out of military rocketry. The core protagonist is Bernard Shriever, an engineer from Texas who rose to the rank of full general in the US Air Force. Appointed by Hap Arnold shortly after World War II as head of a new air force research branch, Shriever struggled to coordinate the efforts of scientists, generals, and politicians to secure technical superiority for the United States. These secondary characters constitute more than a supporting cast; they frequently take over the show. Always, however, the narrative returns to Shriever as the one figure with the patience and management ability to see his projects to completion.

A curious tension runs through the book. On the one hand, Sheehan is sharply critical of almost every aspect of American policy. From the beginning, he argues, the United States misjudged both the intentions and the abilities of the Soviet Union. American politicians chose, sometimes sincerely and sometimes deliberately, to perpetuate an unnecessary frenzy of public fear. This climate led them to develop unstoppable weapons of unconscionable destructive power, "hellish" devices that were supposed to prevent the destruction of the United States but that also placed enormous power in trigger-happy hands.

On the other hand, Sheehan clearly admires many of his characters for their patriotism as well as their brilliance, and he tacitly agrees that a form of mutual assured destruction was an inevitable, and perhaps even the best possible, policy. This book thus has a strong Niebuhrian feel. Sheehan sees the arms race as a tragedy that bred execrable hubris and hatred in many people, but he also praises those who tried modestly to find the least unacceptable way through it. In other words, I think, the author honors those who could tell the difference between strategy and tactics. A stark contrast emerges between Shriever and one of his nemeses, Gen. Curtis LeMay, who saw nuclear war as an occasion for thrilling action by bomber pilots and who seemed to have no concept of overkill. Bernard Shriever saw from the start that the whole point of the ICBM was to make open nuclear warfare inconceivable, not winnable; Sheehan honors him for it.

In fact, someone the traitor Ted Hall, who passed early secrets from Los Alamos to the Soviets in hopes of balancing out American nuclear superiority, seems quite sympathetic in this book. This leads me to a paradox lurking within the tension I described above. Sheehan admires sang froid, yes, but he also admires zeal. He veers between lavishing praise on technocrats and showering admiration on dreamers, including dreamers from whom he differs.

For example, Sheehan seems to Johnny von Neumann, a brilliant Hungarian mathematician. This is despite the fact that Von Neumann advocated preventive atomic war against the Soviets, which is clearly an idea Sheehan loathes. Yet Sheehan loses no love on Werner von Braun, the former architect of the Nazi rocket program who didn't seem to care what his missiles landed on as long as they landed accurately. Von Neumann was mistaken, in Sheehan's estimation, but Von Braun was amoral. In addition, Sheehan relishes the temerity of American officers who talked back to their superiors and who wrangled funding from tightfisted bureaucrats and committeemen. Fixity of principle apparently counts for a lot with this author.

All in all, then, the central virtue championed in this book is courage. Sheehan derides any sign of panic. In his account, the Cold War began because the United States was unnecessarily frightened of the Soviets; the American military-industrial complex then overproduced planes and missiles by a factor of 100 because of wild stories about Soviet power. Sheehan also praises any sign of fortitude. He sees Shriever as a hero because he didn't flinch in the face of bullying by generals or politicians; he sees John F. Kennedy as a hero because he kept his cool during the Cuban Missile Crisis when everyone around him wanted to unleash war -- and because he was willing to risk war with Khrushchev. Sheehan's position on the Missile Crisis is more than a little unbalanced. But it is consistent with his general admiration for people who hold firm in difficult circumstances.

I'm not sure it would be possible to resolve these tensions and still do justice to the inside of the story. None of these characters was a monster, however much some of them struggled with private demons; to show them as full human beings means producing an ambiguous account. Neil Sheehan has done this admirably.

Full disclosure: I solicited and received a free advance copy of this book from the publisher through the first reads program at Goodreads.com.20th-century-america advance-reading-copy first-reads ...more9 s Bruce885

This book fits into a couple of different categories. The subtitle “Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon” leads one in the direction of a biography and it is, in part. However, it is not a single biography as it contains ‘mini’ biographies of several individuals of men connected to the development of the ICBM (both in the US and in the then USSR) and that were connected, directly or indirectly, to General Schriever’s programs and life. These are men one seldom hears of but were crucial to the development of the ICBM: Theodore von Kármán, John von Neumann, Trevor Gardner, Simon Ramo, Dean Wooldridge, Sergei Korolev, and a host of others. “A Fiery Peace in a Cold War” is also part military history; Sheehan provides a synopsis of World War II and a bit on the German rocket program. A study on the difficulties of getting new technology accepted and new programs initiated and supported is also gleaned from this work. Part of this difficulty arises from dealing with old school, traditional leaders (for some of which Sheehan provides biographic information) and the other from inter-service rivalry. [Both of which still create problems.:] Just before the epilogue (which includes a lengthy description of Schriever’s funeral) several pages are devoted to the Cuban Missile Crisis which is the last of several other diplomatic episodes diplomatic episodes discussed in this work.
What ties the book together is the relationship of individuals to the late Gen. Bernard Schriever, a disciple of Henry ‘Hap’ Arnold, the only individual to hold five-star rank in two services, and the development of the ICBM. Schriever developed a vision and had a knack for choosing the right people for the positions needing to be filled and the work to be done. He would not back down from defending what he thought was right, standing up to senior officers and politicians regardless of the possible damage to his career. Fortunately, he also had supporters in high places that would back him up. He, in turn, had his own group of subordinates that were him – bold, clever, and willing to take the initiative and who he backed up.
The book is not strictly chronological and Sheehan sometimes goes back a few years in his discussions yet he generally keeps within the decade or so that the majority of the book covers. There are 82 ‘chapters’ divided into seven books and an epilogue and. What one might term a contradiction occurs when comparing a statement in Chapter 15 when Sheehan posits that a mis-reading of Stalin led to the Cold War. However, later, in Chapter 18, he mentions that Andrei Sakharov (father of USSR’s H-bomb) noted in his memoirs he was certain Stalin would not have reciprocated any American restraint in creating the hydrogen bomb. Perhaps as a result of his book on Vietnam, Sheehan, in Chapter 45, in essence says America’s anti-communist theology got in the way of perceiving reality and led to the disastrous consequences of Vietnam War. Though I can agree with Sheehan’s view on America’s anti-communist theology I have difficulty believing Stalin was mis-read.
Having just read the 1986 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History – “The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age“ by Walter A. McDougall, I am surprised Sheehan did not mention the discussions of international law relating to the question of surveillance from space. Once Sputnik was up, the Soviets could not complain about satellites flying over their territory.
While many of us are familiar with the ‘heroes’ of space flight, e.g. Neil Armstrong, Yuri Gagarin and Sally Ride, few people know of those who made space flight possible. Individuals Gen. Schriever, Theodore von Kármán, John von Neumann, Trevor Gardner, Simon Ramo, Dean Wooldridge, Ed Hall, and Sergei Korolev and his team of Soviet scientists, who provided the means by which the astronauts could go into space. This work makes us aware of those individuals and those programs while providing an informative introduction to Cold War history and the development of the ICBM.
“Fiery Peace in a Cold War” is an easily read narrative history, rather than footnotes or endnotes Sheehan has a section titled Source Notes revealing he did a lot of interviews for this work, primary sources, and lists their names with a majority described as USAF (Ret.) Sheehan has also included a rather lengthy bibliography (which includes McDougall’s work).
Available in bookstores on 22 September 2009.
military-history us-history5 s Janene287 8

This was a first reads win!

I brought this book to a very good friend of mine...who reads as much...if not more...than I do. I think he favors biographies. He's in his 80's...and has many, many war stories he loves to share...and some he doesn't talk about. I thought this book would be right up his alley.

I got an email from his wife today....and in part, this is what she had to say:

"Just wanted to tell you that John is really enjoying the book you brought him. I noticed he was on page 60 and asked how it was going and he said, "This is one hell of a book", so you know. I tend to scan and read over less interesting parts but when he sets out to read something, he reads it from beginning to end. And he never cheats and reads the last page I do. Right now he is out on the front step sitting in his rocking chair and reading. Anyway thank you so very much for thinking of him."


I will add to this as updates come in. ;)first-reads-wins4 s Charles Matthews144 59

I very much admired Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie, which won him the Pulitzer Prize. So when Random House sent me this review copy I kept it, instead of donating it to the public library the way I do with most of the review copies I'm sent. I don't think it got much review attention -- at least I didn't notice it.

One reason may be that this is a less successful book than A Bright Shining Lie, though it takes the same approach: viewing a major period in American history through the life and work of one person. In the earlier book, that person was Lt. Col. John Paul Vann, a severe critic of the conduct of the Vietnam War, and his life and death provided great insight on an ill-conceived conflict. In A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, the central figure is Bernard Schriever, who eventually became a four-star general in recognition of his work directing the Air Force project that produced the "ultimate weapon" of the book's subtitle, the intercontinental ballistic missile. Schriever is not so vividly controversial a figure as Vann, and consequently the book lacks a strong conflict -- unless you count the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union.

What makes the book valuable and readable in my point of view is that it illuminates so much of what you might call "mid-range" recent history -- the years from 1945 to 1962, or from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was a period I lived through and consequently never studied in history class, which means that a lot of my conceptions of the period are oddly unformed. My bias is to think of the arms race as a Bad Thing -- and in certain ways it was. It produced what Eisenhower (who comes off rather well in this book) called the "military-industrial complex," which still has a stranglehold on the American economy and American politics. And there's a strong case to be made that the arms race was unnecessary, that it arose out of a fear of the "international communist conspiracy," which didn't really exist. But Sheehan also makes the case that the development of ICBMs on both sides helped stabilize the post-WWII world. By achieving a balance of terror, Mutual Assured Destruction, the arms race helped bring about peace.

On the other hand, by focusing on Schriever, Sheehan is precluded from exploring what happened to the world, and especially to the United States, after the nuclear stalemate was achieved. That is, of course, material for another book or several, many of which have been written by Richard Rhodes. A lot of A Fiery Peace is anticlimactic: the book concludes with a long, detailed description of Schriever's funeral, which, while it has some touching moments (and some ironic ones, including the appearance of Donald Rumsfeld at the interment) takes up too much space that might otherwise have been devoted to exploring the consequences of what Schriever -- and what seems a cast of hundreds of officers and engineers -- created. 3 s Sky74 38

This was an amazing (albeit very in-depth) look at the history surrounding the development of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM). As a former nuke security officer, I feel I should have already known this story. It would have given me a much different perspective on the era during which these systems were developed and the philosophy and purpose behind their construction.2 s Michael Burnam-Fink1,538 247

I'm an airpower and Cold War aviation buff, and yet, most people outside the ranks of missile operators, General Bernard 'Bennie' Schriever was totally unknown to me. Yet for those in the know, General Schriever is the father of the ICBM, the architect of the ultimate weapon. For the slightly more than 30-odd year between the deployment of the first nuclear ballistic missiles in 1959 and the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the world stood a few minutes away from midnight. Schriever's missiles put us all on that precipice, and also prevented us from going over.

Schriever was born in Germany, but came to the states in 1916 when he was six years old, crossing the Atlantic from neutral Holland weeks before America joined the war. He grew up in Texas, achieving some local renown as a golfer, and then joined the Army Air Corps in the depths of the Depression. In peacetime, he supervised a CCC camp and flew hazardous airmail routes, becoming a protege of 'Hap' Arnold. In the Second World War, Schriever saw duty in the Southwest Pacific, where he flew 10 combat missions and gained a reputation as a wizard of logistics and maintenance.

In the immediate postwar period, airpower was king, as epitomized by the Strategic Air Command's B-36 Peacemaker, a monstrous 10-engined bomber nicknamed 'aluminum overcast', and a rigorous culture instilled by Curtis LeMay that ensured that bombers would rain down atomic devastation on Russian cities. But bombers could be intercepted or destroyed on the ground. Schriever, on a mission to search out technological edges, realized that rockets mated to miniaturized hydrogen bombs, were the last weapon, the ultimate argument of kings. What followed was a bureaucratic and technological struggle to get the finicky missiles to work. Schriever's Thor program was designed using the new techniques of systems analysis as developed by Simon Ramo, which went against established aeronautics design techniques. Werner von Braun's Army team with the Redstone missile was an existential threat to the Thor. But Schriever won through, and his Thor, Atlas, and Minutemen missiles became one of the most secure legs of the nuclear triad.

So this is a pretty good book, but I'm frustrated, because I wish it were a great book. Sheehan is a reporter, and at the end of the day he's more interested in people as compared to things. The problem is that General Schriever is ultimately not that complex of a person, at least not when compared to John Paul Vann or Captain Arnheiter of the USS Vance. He definitely had a spark of originality and talent in seeing the missile project through, but Sheehan doesn't quite capture that, decades after the fact. And a great study of a technology, The Soul of a New Machine or The Making of the Atomic Bomb or The Perfectionists, gets into the gritty details and makes the process of invention come alive. Instead, we get doughy and unoriginal paragraphs on Cold War geopolitics. By the topic, this book was made for me, and yet I didn't love it. 2019 biography history ...more1 G.d. BrennanAuthor 24 books14

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, Neil Sheehan's book about American ballistic missile pioneer Bennie Schreiver, evokes memories of past triumphs--both in rocketry and book-length journalism. The development of the Air Force's long-range nuclear missiles during the Cold War has long been obscured by secrecy and bluff and political posturing; still, as a book topic, it seems designed to follow up on Richard Rhodes' highly acclaimed works on the Manhattan project and the subsequent development of the hydrogen bomb. And the structure, wherein Sheehan shines a light on the life and career of a heretofore-unknown subject in order to bring out new shapes and shadows in a familiar historical terrain, calls to mind Sheehan's own magisterial work about Vietnam, "A Bright Shining Lie."

It's difficult to oversell that book, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; one of my journalism professors at Columbia, a member of the Pulitzer committee, called it "one of those rare books that enhances the Pulitzers, rather than the other way around." But that book's massive shadow seems to diminish this well-researched and well-written but comparatively pedestrian work.

Sheehan's subject in "A Bright Shining Lie" was a fascinating Army officer and civilian advisor named John Paul Vann whose distinguished military efforts and dark personal life mirrored the well-meaning public rhetoric and duplicitous behind-the-scenes behavior that characterized America's efforts in the Vietnam War. Bennie Schriever, by comparison, is somewhat flat and uninteresting as a subject for biography. His story has a certain God-mom-apple-pie American simplicity to it; he emigrated to the U.S. from Germany at a young age, worked hard and played a lot of golf, and gained the organizational and bureaucratic skills necessary to get the U.S. Intercontinental Ballistic Missile program going and help the U.S. win the Cold War. Yet there's little sense of Schriever's personal failings; Sheehan mentions family tensions and a divorce almost in passing, and the book ends up feeling more hagiography than biography.

Consequently, Sheehan ends up looking for conflict not within the man, but between him and a familiar cast of characters--the Neanderthal-minded SAC generals Curtis LeMay and Tommy Powers, who were so famously eager to bomb America's enemies back to the Stone Age. And so, while detailing the various troubles and triumphs Schreiver faced in getting the Air Force's Atlas, Titan and Thor missiles off the launch pad, Sheehan also describes the difficulties he had in arguing against LeMay and an institutional mindset that valued "operators," the bombers they operated, and preventative war far more than it valued the untested deterrent powers of silo-based nuclear missiles.

All of this bureaucratic infighting occurs, of course, against the backdrop of the larger Cold War. Here, Sheehan provides some very insightful history, but when it comes to analysis, he often sacrifices ideological coherency for hindsight-based have-it-both-ways criticism; in his estimation, for instance, the United States was both wrong to stand behind South Vietnam in 1963 and wrong not to stand behind South Korea in 1949. (Many of the references foreshadowing Vietnam felt forced, almost as if Sheehan got worried about writing a puff piece about a Cold Warrior and wanted to buff up his already-shiny Vietnam-dove-street-cred rather than make useful commentary; I felt pulling a Big Lebowski on him, grabbing him by the shoulders and yelling, "Everything isn't about Vietnam, Walter!")

Still, rockets, all books must have their proper arc, and Sheehan finds his by guiding his narrative to the most dramatic moment of the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Popular history has it that the crisis was a near-triumph of the nuclear-knuckle-draggers, and Sheehan very much focuses on that aspect of it, showing how LeMay and other top Air Force brass pushed for massive airstrikes against Cuba once Khruschev's ploy of stationing missiles there was discovered, and how this probably would have set off World War III. (While still chilling, this is hardly new material; Errol Morris covered the same territory far more interestingly in his documentary "The Fog of War," for instance.) However, many popular historians, he fails to mention that the crisis was also a logical culmination of the nuclear doctrines espoused by civilians within the Kennedy administration, many of whom bought into the theory of "escalation dominance," whereby the United States would try to perpetually one-up its Soviet adversaries by being willing to use slightly more force than them in any conflict or area of contention. Sheehan could have just as easily blamed the crisis on Robert McNamara as on Curtis LeMay; moreover, he could have just as easily blamed it on his own main character, whose success in developing deployable ICBMs while similar Soviet efforts were blowing up on the launch pads was surely a factor in the Soviet Union's panicked decision to put short-range nuclear missiles in Cuba.

Despite the efforts to hammer history and biography into a familiar ideological mold--one that's been battered by its use on previous, better books on the subject--and despite Sheehan's somewhat annoying tendency here to substitute hypothesis and conjecture when it makes for better imagery than documented fact, this is a decent book, and a relatively enjoyable read. Un Schriever's and Sheehan's most famous creations, though, it falls a bit short. 1 Rick373 8

“A Fiery Peace in the Cold War” by Neil Sheehan (Random House, 2009) is a fascinating piece of nonfiction that could really have been fashioned as an academic history book – but here is offered as a popular one. Sheehan originally earned his reputation with the Vietnam book “A Bright Shining Lie” and now takes his talent to the subject of the cold war and the development of nuclear missiles.

At the end of World War II Stalin had just finished a brutal slugfest with Germany where some 28 million estimated Russians perished, and Stalin came out of that experience with more than a little swagger. Stalingrad had been the turning point of the war – not Normandy 1½ years later. With Stalin’s forces eventually taking Berlin, his bluster and arrogance increased…and then came Hiroshima. With the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Stalin’s confidence took a giant hit.

Sheehan’s book stars as a history lesson on post-World War II advances in military power with a focus on the development of the aerospace industry, oftentimes at the expense of the aircraft industry. It compares and contrasts the Russian and American approaches to technological development and research. It touches on all the major players of the period: politicians such as Stalin, Khrushchev, Beria, Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy…scientists such as, Kurchatov, Khariton, von Neumann, and von Braun…civilians such as Simon Ramo and Dean Wooldridge (who became the RW in TRW)…corporations such as Convair (General Dynamics), Boeing, General Electric, and Douglas Aircraft…and military figures such as Zhukov, Marshall, LeMay, Arnold, and the centerpiece Schriever.

In Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie he wrapped his narrative of the Vietnam War around the character of John Paul Vann. Here Sheehan uses Bernard Schriever as the centerpiece in writing the story of the cold war. Schriever’s mentor was Hap Arnold and his foil was Curtis LeMay, the bomber pilot and head of SAC. Schriever became the missile guru who ended up building the third leg of the nuclear triad – bombers, submarines, and ICBMs. It is a fascinating story of the interplay among all the characters for dominance in funding their parochial projects…with deadly consequence.

Ostensibly the story of missile development and the men who brought it off, this tale really is about all the facets of the cold war – it will drag you in and not let go…especially if you are from that era. Many readers will remember that in the 1950s grammar school kids used to practice getting under their desks and covering their heads to avoid being hit by broken glass in the event of a blast! How America arrived at that nuclear fear, how much Stalin sacrificed to achieve nuclear parity, how American spies gave Russia the atomic bomb, how American foreign policy misread Russian intentions, how Russia was really not a threat…all are touched on in this tale.

Besides the race to develop ICBMs, the storyline also touches on the Cuban missile crisis, photo reconnaissance spy satellites replacing U-2 flights, how the Soviet Union bankrupted itself, and the space race to the moon. In the end, all of Schriever’s work in developing missiles led to the development of so much we take for granted today – such as GPS in our cars and on our telephones, satellite TV, weather satellites, etc.

If you have an interest in the cold war period – how America and Russia faced off against each other with world peace in the balance – this just might be your cup of tea. All in all this was fascinating history presented in an approachable way. Highly recommended.
1 Scottnshana298 16

First, the only reason I didn’t give this book 5 stars is its lack of maps; any book discussing the campaign in the Pacific demands this. That being said, I didn’t want to this book as much as I did; I’m just not a big fan of the Space and Missile culture—in my opinion, checklists and engineers have their place, but given my experience with the aforementioned culture I didn’t expect to find many lessons on war leadership in a book about it. I credit the fact that I did to the fact that each of the men who conceived and built ICBMs did something else before 1945 (the book’s depiction of the professional soldiers who built the USAF from the foundations laid by American WWI pilots in the U.S. Army Signal Corps is interesting and essential to the narrative). General Schriever, for instance, learned quite a bit about motivating people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t as a lieutenant in charge of a Civilian Conservation Corps camp in the 1930s and later repairing shot-up aircraft in the Island Hopping campaigns of WWII; he also flew combat missions there. I d the fact that Sheehan has made this history more than a simple Schriever bio, though; people are molded by the events around them—large and small—and the geopolitics surrounding the U.S. Army Air Corps and the men who grew it into USAF are covered beautifully in this book. The Soviets, for example, also had a Manhattan-Style project, and it makes for VERY interesting reading. Again, the author doesn’t shy away from making a segue into a concept the evolution of air-to-air refueling, then conveying why he did so to evolve the macro-narrative. The one meeting between Schriever and Albert Einstein at Princeton and the first face-to-face between President Eisenhower and Khrushchev are covered in depth alongside the massive radar USAF built at Diyarbakir, Turkey to detect launches at the Soviet missile test range, and the famous rocket-launch fails depicted in “The Right Stuff”. I enjoyed the sales pitch Schriever made to President Eisenhower and the story of the U.S. Army grabbing 127 Nazi V-weapon engineers (to include Werner von Braun, whose history is NOT glossed over here) for its own program in 1945. Sheehan masterfully ties the sack shut with a simple so-what statement: “Although no one could have foreseen it when Bernard Schriever assembled his small band at the Schoolhouse in Inglewood in the summer of 1954, their greatest achievement and that of all those who were to labor with them was to help buy the time needed for the Soviet Union to collapse of its own internal contradictions.” No cheesy Lee Greenwood background music; no wargasm “bomb them back to the stone age” noise; just objective historical analysis. I think that this book is a fine companion-piece for Michael Dobbs’ fantastic “One Minute to Midnight” (which Sheehan cites when discussing the Cuban Missile Crisis) and Mike Worden’s “Rise of the Fighter Generals” (spoiler alert—if you d the way Curtis LeMay was depicted in “13 Days” and “Dr. Strangelove”, this book will support the bias you bring to it). Recommend.1 thewanderingjew1,563 18

Starting with the prologue this book implies to the reader the importance of a military that is innovative and always one step ahead of the game when it comes to all the other players. In the early thirties, America was fairly complacent regarding the development of deterrent weapons. After World War II, the focus changed. We were a superpower. General Hap Arnold believed that as the US emerged as a "predominant power" it would be subject to continuing threats from potential enemies. It would appear that he foreshadowed the future of America very clearly and his belief in the need for scientific research, to develop weapons as a deterrent to our enemies then, seems even more necessary today with the sophistication of weaponry being developed by all nations, some bent on the destruction of others they consider enemies, some not yet fully developed enough to understand the consequences of their own actions.
There is a saying that everyone has heard which tells us that if we don't learn from the mistakes of history, we are doomed to repeat them. What I am wondering is, has our course and strategy in the USA, in this year 2009, not returned to the mindset of the early thirties since our current government's strategy seems bent on reducing our defensive capabilities?
This book has, early on, raised red flags for me. I am hoping to learn from this book, based on historical events, whether or not our administration can be successful if it continues to develop strategic defense deterrents or chooses rather to follow a policy of appeasement, returning to polices of the past, less scientific research and development including a reduction of arms around the world. Can we totally trust and depend on the other nations of the world to follow the rules when they have not done so in the past, and are we prepared to do this and face the possibility of failure?
Are we doomed to defeat because of our rigidity and unwillingness to follow any policy other than a strict adherence to political agendas at all costs? As I read and learn from historic events, I hope I will be enlightened as to how our country might be expected to act regarding the preparation and response to any catastrophic event or conflict facing this nation, and on the other hand, I expect I will learn the opposite, as well, how it might not.
first-reads1 CV Rick437 9

This book was special for me. It explained a lot about my childhood. My father was in the Air Force, in SAC (the Strategic Air Command), and I lived on SAC bases through the 70's and into the 80's. Some of the characters described in this volume were people I'd met and for me they were just Colonel or General so-and-so. I had no idea that they were playing any more of a pivotal role in the arms race against/with the Soviet Union than any other officer.

So much of what comprised A Fiery Peace in a Cold War has only recently been declassified that I don't think this book could've been written till now. It details the principle driver of our missile, rocket, and ICBM programs - General Bernard Shriver, from his childhood right on through the most powerful positions in the Pentagon. He famously clashes with General Curtis LeMay over the direction and importance of ballistic missiles as opposed to Air Power and Nuclear Air Platform delivery systems.

What might have been dry reading came alive in Sheehan's adept hands. He dug into the backgrounds and personalities of the men involved and really conveyed their obsessions with the job and with the race to achieve Mutually Assured Destruction, which many believed to be the best outcome in the post-WWII era.

What's truly striking to me is the mindset of the arms race which has never abated. How many times do you have to kill a man before he's dead? A city? A Nation? An entire hemisphere? Maybe it's time to scale back the arms race and be satisfied that there is no farther one can go than total annihilation. Perhaps all that ingenuity and expertise can be used now for other pursuits related to improving quality of life rather than totality of death.

That arms race grew the military industrial complex into a behemoth and now I think it's time to starve the behemoth until it's slim and efficient. We have other priorities because the race is over and the results are still fully functional. history1 Ed333 33

I guess I am still a bit of a military nerd and so I loved this book and read it very quickly. But Sheehan wrote one of the seminal books about Vietnam A Bright Shining Lie and so this is a very interesting probing account of the Cold War through the lens of its main weapons programs. Told by someone who had used access to former Soviet archives by Russian historians to see how much irrational fear of Soviet expansionism existed, along with ignorance of just how evil Stalin had been in the 1930s. The Soviets were more wicked than was thought but also generally far more cautious.

This book is focused on a key figure in the nuclear arms race Bernie Schriever and manages to be gripping at the human level, extraordinarily well informed about the technology and political intrigue. Once again Curtis Le May architect of the fire bombing of Japan, comes over as an extraordinarily dangerous threat to the survival of the world. And utterly blinkered as the value of missiles over his beloved bombers. The man who would have caused catastrophe in the Cuban Missile Crisis if Kennedy had been weaker, was a menace to sensible weapons strategy too.

Ultimately though, the essential core of Bernie Schriever remains elusive and this book really has something of missing piece. Ultimately Schriever remains somewhat of an enigma.

As for contemporary relevance, most Cold War history presents lessons learned as to how to handle China. Probably the most telling from this book is the importance of really understanding your rival.

Also of interest is how relatively rational politics were in those days (if you allow for the essential nuttiness of mutually assured destruction strategy). This is a story of data driven engineers and the wisdom they acquired in the Depression and Second World War. This is a world of Eisenhower Republican rationalists and Democrat bi-partisans. How far this seems from Sarah Palin: a parallel universe.1 Andy106 5

Sheenan is a wonderful writer, but it’s not easy to draw out a compelling narrative from the biography of a military bureaucrat. Sheenan’s account begins with young Bernard Schriever paying his way through college by playing golf, and when a biography starts on the putting green, that’s a very troubling sign.

Thankfully, the story picks up when Schriever enlists in the military, quickly ascending to the rank of Air Force General, and the book really hits its stride during the later periods of Schriever’s career. In shepherding the development of the ICBM, Schriever struggled against Curtis LeMay, who vociferously defended his own bomber-based nuclear arsenal. The book concludes with the drama of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and while so much has already been said about this event, Sheenan’s account is still compellingly readable.

Sheenan describes plenty of missiles blowing up on the launch pad, but beyond that, he offers surprisingly few technical details about the development of the ICBM or the nuclear warheads they were designed to carry. Sheenan’s book is foremost a biography (in addition to Schriever’s bio, the book contains numerous mini-bios of other key figures) and, by a distant second, it is a book about the politics of the Cold War and the scientific accomplishments spurred on by this frenzied period.

With A Fiery Peace, Sheenan has proven that he can enliven a somewhat drab bio subject, so where will he turn next? I have one suggestion: Postmaster General.
1 Randy377

I picked this up because Sheehan's "A Bright Shining Lie" is the best book I've read about the Vietnam war. "A Fiery Peace" is a tougher read. It's the story of a process, the development of our short and long range missile capability which was the result of the arms race of the Cold War. He ties the story to the career of Bernard Schriever, a German immigrant who shepherded the missile program from it's beginning to end and retired as a four star general. Sheehan does a great job of giving mini biographies of the key players, most we've never heard of. Shriever, however, was a famous man, made the cover of Time Magazine, and was widely known when I was in the Air Force in the sixties. This is primarily and Air Force story with some great inside baseball kind of info for those of us who were on the fringes of this particular action. General Curtis LeMay features heavily in the book. When I was in the Air Force his reputation was so fearsome that even those of us who never saw him were afraid of him. Thankfully, LeMay wasn't able to start a nuclear war. The best scene in the book is a briefing of President Eisenhower. Having been a briefing officer I was quite impressed that Sheehan could make a briefing interesting, exciting and dramatic. I flipped through some pages pretty quickly regarding the technical stuff but still managed to learn much about the Cold War, the Berlin Airlift, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the development of ICBMs.1 Rick Saffery9

This book was far more enjoyable than I ever could have imagined. I'm a fan of Mr.Sheehan. Based on his previous efforts, I presumed this book would continue my favorable impression of his writing. For the most part it did. As a veteran, I found comfort in the cold war past this book dredges up. To me the cold war is a comfortable pair of old slippers or a favorite pair of jeans. those clothing artifacts we know we should move on to something new, when the time comes. Yet,we stubbornly refuse! Especially in light of the so called war on terror and recent NDAA provisions codifying indefinite detention of Americans without presumption of guilt nor recourse through trial in an open court. Who could ever imagine missing the cold war days?

Mr. Sheehan does an admirable job of creating positive images of this bygone era and the generals that brought the era of Mutually Assured Destruction to being. I won't spoil the fun by sharing specifics here. Dive in to the book yourself.

I must warn readers, fans of Sheehan and newcomer a, the book as terrific as it is eventually falls flat. The first say 85% of the book follows a linear path with respect to time. Then, abruptly, it goes geometric,then fast-forwards at exponential pace towards contemporary time. I'm sure the author had his reasons for doing so. Regardless, I find the approach disconcerting to my sensibilities. Perhaps, I'm just overly sensitive on this singular aspect. Your impression will ly vary. 1 Kent Disch55 3

I got a copy of this book from the Goodreads "First Reads" program.

The book takes a look at a little known and even less talked about but highly important piece of the Cold War, the development and building of the ICBM.

The book claims to follow this particular storyline through the lens of Bernard "Bennie" Schriever. I say "claims" because throughout the book we get detailed bios and storylines on many of the key players, most of whom were just as important (if not more) than Schriever himself. I certainly did not get the feel that Schriever did this on his own or was even a singularly key player.

The book does an amazing job of delving deep into the pre-Cold War Air Force/Army Air Corp and even gives us an amazing look at the Soviet mindset and pursuit of their own missiles.

To me, this was the really good stuff in the book. The look at how the interactions between the Soviets and the US politicians set the stage for the massive technological spending and invention.

Without a doubt, this is a solid read for anyone interested in military history, Cold War buffs, military buffs and even political science fans.

1 John226 113 Want to read

I'm nearly half through this book about the US's development of the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). I am a great admirer of Neil Sheehan's writing, especially his masterpiece, "Bright Shining Lie." I can't say that "A Fiery Peace" is any less well researched, written, etc., etc., and I'm glad to be reading it. I'll be more glad when I finish it. It simply lacks the passion that reverberates through "Shining Lie" from first page to last. For one thing, there are no real heroes and there aren't as many villans in "Fiery Peace" as in "Shining Lie." There's Curtis LeMay, of course, and there was more than an ample sufficiency of villany in that monster. [I remember celebrating his demise.] But hardly enough to make me reach for a defibralator. After that there's the dogged progress that Bennie Schriever made from the inception of the program to the demonstration of the first successful launch of an ICBM.
Again, it's essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the Cold War, but did it have to be so dull? We can't ask Sheehan, who died just before/after this book was published, but I suspect that the answer is "yes."1 Bookmarks Magazine2,042 778

Critics considered General Schriever's story an important chapter in U.S. history but were somewhat disappointed that A Fiery Peace did not rise to the level of the award-winning A Bright Shining Lie. Some shortcomings are inherent in the subject matter, given that bureaucratic struggles lack the excitement of the battlefield. However, critics also questioned Sheehan's decision to center the larger history on a single character—a technique that served him well with the charismatic Lt. Col. John Paul Vann but that backfires with the drab Schriever. Fortunately, Schriever is surrounded by a colorful cast of secondary characters. Despite critics' complaints, Sheehan provides a vital framework for understanding the ensuing events of the Cold War, and all reviewers agreed that this story needs to be told. This is an excerpt of a review published in Bookmarks magazine.jan-feb-20101 Zach Thibodeau4 2

I enjoyed it, the journalistic writing style of Sheehan is well crafted, interesting, and an excellent example of narrative history. The story was good. Bernard Schreiver is a figure I had never heard of before reading this book, and I had no idea the impact of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. The world was so damn close to mutual destruction. The Cold War is an incredible subject, and I look forward to teaching it to my students and continuing to read about it.

On critical issue in the work was the amount of bureaucracy involved in a story this. If you need action, war, and explosions look elsewhere. Much of this book deals with the bureaucracy of the Air Force and the challenges that Schreiver accomplished.

This is a small part of The Cold War history, but a very critical issue. non-fiction-history1 Lucas278 41

Curtis LeMay is the villain in this book, but there wasn't a lot of closure to his character. Did he accept the supremacy of the ICBM over the strategic bomber eventually? I think his presence in the book is important- there's a common one-dimensional acceptance of whatever technology the most prominent hawk is promoting must be best for national defense, but the the missile gap would have been very real and dangerous for the U.S. if LeMay had been allowed to sideline the ICBM and IRBM projects and wasted the same resources on the impossible nuclear-powered supersonic strategic bomber.

I'd have d to see additional details of Soviet ICBM development, I'm sure there are good books on the subject but they most ly would lack the in-depth characterization Sheehan has.

aerospace audio history ...more1 Scott Martin1,854 17

This is a much a biography as history. From my perspective, I did learn a great deal about the role and importance of the ICBM to America's overall deterrence posture during the Cold War. Schriever is certainly a major player in the USAF, and even sorting through the overall positive review of his actions in the view of the author, Schriever was certainly as big a player in the USAF as LeMay (who is also a major player in this book, but as much a villan as a power player (LeMay was an advocate of the bomber and only as the success of the ICBMs became apparent did he get on board with the program)). As we try to refocus our efforts on nuclear deterrence, it is important to review our history and see what lessons men of past dealt with and what we need to do for the future. 1 Nate Huston111 6

Loved it. Great story of innovation in the Air Force and some important lessons to be learned. Technology is by no means an independent force, propelling the military down a path of innovation. Rather, as this book shows, a guiding hand is needed. Sheehan tells the story of that guiding hand, portraying Schriever as a highly-skilled systems engineer that provided the impetus behind the development of the ICBM.

The book is immensely readable, does not get too technical, and does a very nice job of providing backstory on a plethora of other individuals who were important to the development of the missile. Even in a biographical setting such as this, the author does a great job pointing out the myriad of individuals without whom the project would have never gotten off the ground.1 Dermot Nolan51 4

This is something of a lament for the Babyboomers and the Cold warriors. Which is something that is less apparent in a bright shining lie. I have to say whilst I enjoyed the book, it has fallen into the casual reading section of my library as it seems to be light reading and seems to lack a critical edge.

I think part of the problem here is that Sheehan in his research had become friends with Schriever. And this informality pervades the work. I feel however that it would make a useful starting point for anyone interested in this field, as it is not too taxing and full of characters and anecdotes. But for the serious student there is a massive lack of foot/endnoting which makes verifying source materials difficult.

1 John50

Very readable. Details the technical development of the USAF and SAC as well as the intense 1950s inter-service rivalries that were, at the time, counter-productive. Half way through it kicks up a bit with the development of the IRBM and ICBM, ending with the Minuteman system. Schriever comes across as the supremely skilled, personable and organizational minded genius who dialed the cold war up to 11 through his missile work, without even really considering the implications of it. LeMay comes across as a obsolete leader who blocks development at every turn and the notorious Tommy Power is portrayed as a man who finally understands the value of the missile to SAC and becomes one of Schriever's greatest supporters.

Good complement to Schlosser's Command and Control. 1 David67 32

I don't know what to say. This is the story of humanity's rapid acquisition of the ability to eliminate itself by the push of a button. To Sheehan, Bernard Schriever is the hero of this story. OK, whatever. For the computer scientist, the prominence of Johnny von Neumann as another hero may pique your interest. He is a perfervid advocate, lending his great mind and prestige to the cause. Moreover he wanted to let loose his destructive forces on the Soviet Union under the doctrine of "preventative war". He had no qualms with exterminating people by the millions, yet when his own death came he howled in fear. A coward among cowards, in my opinion.
1 Michael219 1 follower

This is a really well written history of the birth of the nuclear airforce from WWII until the end of the cold war. Sheehan tells the story of General Bernard Schriever, the man most responsible for the development of the ICBM, a weapon conceived to prevent nuclear war. Sheehan covers a lot of history, both on a personal level and a geopolitically. Some of the players on this stage: Eisenhower, Stalin, Khrushchev, Kennedy, and Castro. Anyone interested in the cold war, the start of the space race, the intrigues of inter-service rivalries should find this book worth reading.history1 Dan Ward148 2

A really fascinating history of how the ICBM was developed and how the race with the Russians was won. Starting from the close of World War II there was a furious race between the two super powers to effectively deploy nuclear weapons. Bennie Schriever sounds an absolutely amazing person with skills to manage an incredible effort this. The Minuteman missle system and its build in redundancy was fascinating to learn about.1 Jonathon28

Overall a great book. It provided a different prospective on the Cold War. It dealt with the fabled "missile gap" and how we had to beat the Soviets at all costs. Schiever was a genius and the father of the ICBM program we still use to this day. 1 Brian LaslieAuthor 6 books15

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