Wisdom from the Cold War
A Fiery Peace in a Cold War
When we think about how America won the cold war, our attention tends to fasten on grand, public moments of presidential leadership, like Truman’s decision to resist Stalin’s designs on Europe, Kennedy’s settlement of the Cuban missile crisis or Reagan’s realization that he could “do business” with Mikhail Gorbachev.
“A Fiery Peace in a Cold War,” Neil Sheehan’s deeply researched, compulsively readable and important book, is about one of those decisions. As Sheehan shows us almost cinematically, this was particularly true in the 1950s, when American leaders had to decide whether to keep resisting Soviet power mostly with strategic bombers, or to build an awe-inspiring force of nuclear-tipped missiles.
In the early 1950s, the champion of strategic bombers in the United States was the famous, truculent, imperious Gen. Curtis LeMay, the chief of the Strategic Air Command, who, during the last months of World War II, had tried to break Japan’s will and avert the necessity of an American invasion by dropping 150,000 tons of firebombs on Japanese cities. After the war, LeMay built a bomber force that for years ensured American military pre-eminence. LeMay even argued that the United States should “cease stockpiling of conventional weapons,” which he considered “obsolete,” and go all-nuclear, because America should “always use the best weapons available in either general or limited war” - a view that made many Americans ridicule and fear him when he publicly expressed it as George Wallace’s independent-party running mate in 1968.
In the Pentagon of the 1950s, LeMay was “king of the mountain,” as one colleague put it, known for pulverizing those few men who tried to stand in his way. Fortunately for us all, he met his match in the hero of Sheehan’s book, Gen. Bernard Schriever. Sheehan calls him “the handsomest general in the United States Air Force.” Born in 1910 in northern Germany, Schriever was brought by his mother to the United States in 1916 in order to reunite with his father, an engineering officer for German passenger liners, who had been stranded at the start of World War I. After studying at Texas A & M, Schriever began his career in the Army Air Corps.
Lacking LeMay’s blinders, Bennie Schriever realized that the Soviets planned to rest their future defense not on bombers but on intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of striking the United States with only 15 minutes of advance warning. The Kremlin was also fast improving batteries of surface-to-air missiles that could knock LeMay’s beloved bombers out of the sky. Schriever feared that unless the Pentagon immediately shifted its ambitions from bombers to missiles, the Kremlin would within just a few years be able to threaten the world. Despite LeMay’s brutish efforts to marginalize him, Schriever became, as Sheehan writes, “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.”
Schriever’s new way of thinking began in 1953, when he was still a colonel. During a briefing on intermediate-range bombers at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, he had a fateful conversation with the legendary refugee scientists Edward Teller and John von Neumann. They predicted that by 1960, the United States would be creating hydrogen bombs so lightweight that missiles could carry them.
“Most impressive!” Ike declared. “There is no question this weapon will have a profound impact on all aspects of human life . . . in every corner of the globe - military, sociological, political.” One of Schriever’s colleagues observed that they had “introduced the president . . . to the nuclear missile age.” Eisenhower secretly ordered the Pentagon to build ICBMs with “maximum urgency.” That same summer, Schriever learned from intelligence sources how little time they had: the Soviets were already testing intermediate-range ballistic missiles.
Sheehan describes Schriever’s buccaneering techniques, his many bureaucratic struggles and shrewd collaboration with von Neumann and other scientists like Wernher von Braun, his public emergence (a 1957 Time magazine cover story called him “Missileman Schriever”) and his coolheaded reaction to the troubling “left punch” of the early misfires at Cape Canaveral. This was at the time of Sputnik, when Nelson Rockefeller, John Kennedy and other politicians were making wrongheaded claims that the United States was suffering from a “missile gap.” Schriever’s ultimate success can be counted in weaponry: by December 1962, the United States could boast 132 Atlas ICBMs to defend it against the Soviet Union. By then, too, four stars gleamed from Schriever’s shoulder. By that time, as Sheehan writes, “no Soviet statesman with a vestige of sanity could risk a surprise attack.” “We beat them to the draw,” Schriever later said.
Although he is mainly interested in his protagonist, Sheehan brings the other characters to life as well, and fully sets Schriever’s career in the historical context of the early years of American-Soviet confrontation.
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