Author: Neil Sheehan 2009 480 pp
My rating: 4*
Started October 4 2009, Finished October 20 2009.
The story of the development of the US ICBM fleet, framed by the career of the air force officer who lead the program in its first decade, Bernard Schriever. While this book would be of particular interest to military hardware geeks, I strongly recommend it for those also interested in post-war politics and the back room workings of our government.
I felt the book’s strongest section was the one in which Sheehan describes the onset of the Cold War, depicting that standoff which was the dominant factor in world relations for 40 years, not as an inevitability, but as a result of constant misperception and miscalculation on both sides, resulting from Stalin’s paranoia on the one side and the intellectual arrogance of US leader’s and opinion shapers on the other. The book’s surprising dramatic highlight describes the months of bureaucratic maneuvering required to place a briefing about the nascent ICBM program on President Eisenhower’s schedule; the resulting presentation to the president and consequent fast track granted the program was likely the zenith of Schriever’s career if not his life.
One of the book's strengths is its character sketches of important players in the saga, particularly those of Air Force general Curtis LeMay and Presdient Eisenhower. LeMay went from been an open-ears innovator in World War II to a power corrupted nutjob as leader of SAC in the '50s, so over the top in his god-like delusions that was the model for the General Jack Ripper character in Dr Strangelove. Eisenhower comes across both as tough, reasonable, open-minded and fiscally conservative; the author depicts him as a remarkably effective president by recent standards.
For every American lost in the Second World War, approximately twenty-seven Soviet servicemen and women died: 11.285 million including the 2.7 million who died in German captivity. (77)
[Re Cold War leaders’ understanding of Soviet motives] The men of power were not interested in what the men of knowledge had to say. (106)
Their overall budget for each fiscal year also had be approved by, in turn, the budget committees of the ARDC and the Air Materiel Command, and then by the Air Staff, the Air Force Budget Advisory Committee, the Air Force Council, the secretary of the Air Force, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the Bureau of the Budget. (269)
… Bernard Schriever was without a doubt the handomest general in the United States Air Force.(295)
