As he did in A Bright Shining Lie, Neil Sheehan uses the story of one man to tell the story of an era, in this case, the Cold War arms race. With the skills of a superb reporter, Sheehan seizes on the life of German immigrant Bennie Schriever (who died in 2005 a four star Air Force general) to chronicle the shift of our country's post World War II arms deterrence from the Air Force's bomber fleet to long range missiles with nuclear warheads.

Like any good story, the cast of characters includes villains. At the grand policy level there were George Kennan, Dean Acheson and Paul Nitze, who promoted "containment" and the "domino theory" as strategies to deal with international communism. These flawed theories mislead the country through the Vietnam war. We also meet Schriever's foil, Curtis LeMay, the "bomb 'em back to the stone age" adherent of using nuclear bombs tactically, which were to be dropped by his increasingly vulnerable Air Force bomber fleet. The maneuverings (bureaucratic and otherwise) of LeMay, for his bombers, and Schriever, for his missiles, account for a large part of the book. President Eisenhower was the man to convince, and Schriever's one crucial briefing of Eisenhower and his aides is described with suspense and rich detail.

In addition to the well told political and human tales of the building of the missile arsenal, Sheehan does a great job of explaining the scientific and logistical hurdles that had to be overcome to accomplish that task.

Sheehan is a journalist writing about near-recent events, many of whose participants were alive at the time of his research and writing. Therefore, his main sources are interviews, with primary and secondary writings skillfully used as well.

A minor quarrel is with his overuse of lengthy biographic data for almost every player we meet, no matter how small a role they play in the proceedings. Similarly, I thought the death bed scenes of the major personages were unnecessary.

This book adds greatly to our uinderstanding of America's military in the Cold War and beyond.

It is a recurring surprise to me that Neil Sheehan and I have not met, given the number of miles we have each travelled over common ground as members of the boomer generation as well as individually. As a result, reading “A Fiery Peace” was a bit like sharing a travelogue from a family friend describing his visit to some familiar locales – but with the added pleasure provided by a knowledgeable and different set of eyes that noticed things you didn’t. In my own lifetime as I passed through the era discussed in this volume, I went from preparing to survive a Soviet nuclear missile strike from Cuba on defense plants and installations in the St. Louis area to participating in discussions with Yeltsin-Putin area Russian officials about nuclear disarmament and cooperation in missile defense. These experiences meant that almost every word of Sheehan’s resonated with recollections and memories of related experiences.

The heart of this book is Neil Sheehan’s recounting of the history of the Cold War and the story of the central contribution made to that struggle by Bernard Schriever. A career Air Force officer, Schriever was a key figure in the development of the emblem of the Cold War – the nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile. The author’s approach is a generally chronological narrative – with frequent diversions to bring the reader up to date on what was going on in the Soviet Union in the same period or to discuss important geo-political, technological, organizational, and/or industrial developments. The resulting work is more than a history of an era or a memoir or biography of an “important historical personage,” but rather a book that really does provide a glimpse of what it may have been like to actually live through the varied experiences and events that defined the Cold War.

Sheehan offers an easily readable account of the Cold War - its roots; its key personalities and decision makers; the technological developments that defined the era at its beginning, during, and its final outcome – and he does it successfully whether talking about rocket propulsion, aerial refueling, or the internal politics of the Stalinist Soviet Union or the Eisenhower Administration. The author based his work on interviews with more than a hundred individuals including many of the key figures included in the text as well as an extensive collection of archival material, published memoirs, and other histories of the Cold War and its cited incidents. A 9 page bibliography and some ten pages of notes on his sources and passages in the text more than satisfy my scholarly training. Although almost 500 pages in length, the book is organized in 7 books (each of multiple chapters) and an epilogue, a structure that reinforces the author’s writing style and makes the work easily accessible even to the general reader. ( )

"A Fiery Peace in a Cold War" by Neil Sheehan tells the story of the trials of bringing our military into the missile age. Mr. Sheehan tells the story through Bernard Schriever, the general tasked with this job. Sheehan weaves in many other short bio's of famous and not-so-famous people in the telling of this story. A very informative tale

Military men seldom become famous except through their exploits in war. However, perhaps the most important military “event” of the twentieth century was the one that didn’t happen—the nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Much has been written about the statesmen and politicians who helped avoid Armageddon, but very little has been written about the soldiers, scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs who developed the weapons, tactics, and strategy that made such a conflict unthinkable. Neil Sheehan’s A Fiery Peace in a Cold War is a tale of the people behind the evolution of the weapons and strategy that became Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), the doctrine that kept the Cold War cold until the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Sheehan himself is considered a “giant” among journalists: the reporter who obtained the Pentagon Papers for the New York Times, and the author of a Pulitzer Prize winning book on Vietnam, A Bright Shining Lie. This latest effort from Sheehan is another fascinating look at the background drama of a major act in American history.

The United States enjoyed a brief monopoly of atomic bombs from 1945 until 1949, when the U.S.S.R. detonated its own uranium and plutonium bombs. Five-star Army General Hap Arnold, the head of the U.S. Air Force at the end of WWII, had the vision to recognize the importance of science and technology for driving the defensive strategy of the U.S. in the atomic age. He also recognized the talents of a colonel with an advanced degree in Aeronautical Engineering, Bernard “Bennie” Schriever, a German immigrant who fought with the U.S. in World War II. Arnold picked Schriever to head the development of the ultimate military weapon – one which would deter war rather than be used in war - the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) armed with a thermonuclear (hydrogen) bomb.

Sheehan’s writing is crisp and lucid. His description of the differences between uranium and plutonium bombs takes only one paragraph, yet it explains the reason why early production of the bombs was so meager [shortage of uranium, slow separation of U-235 from U-238 by gas diffusion] and the importance of the implosion concept for plutonium bombs [to avoid spontaneous fission from impurities].

Sheehan blames some of the frigidity of the early Cold War on a “misreading” of Stalin. Like the British Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher, he sees Stalin as a monster (on that, there is little to disagree about), but “he was not an expansionist monster in the likeness of Hitler,” as portrayed by George Kennan (an extremely influential American advisor on the Soviet Union). Where Kennan saw a “fanatical revolutionary,” Sheehan considers Stalin to have been a more complex mixture of genuine Marxist faith, cynicism, Realpolitik calculation, suspicion, and cruelty. In Sheehan's view, it was in part the psychological insecurity of some U.S. leaders that led to the country's distorted view of Stalin. Moreover, Sheehan characterizes Dean Acheson, Truman’s Secretary of State, as “and intellectual primitive” when it came to communism.

Once the Russians (likewise saddled with some influential but intellectually primitive careerists in its military and diplomatic corps) had their own atomic bomb and the Korean War had shown that at least some communists were expansionistic, the trillion dollar arms race between the two super powers began in earnest. The first key strategic decision for American military planners was to devise a method of delivering atomic bombs to Russia. By the early 1950’s, Hap Arnold had retired and his place was taken by the crewcut wearing, colorful, fanatic, and (some would say) evil Curtis LeMay, who was parodied so effectively by George C. Scott in the movie "Dr. Strangelove." (LeMay was known for such policies as the firebombing of Tokyo with napalm in World War II; “Operation Starvation” against the Japanese; and the policy “to bomb [North Vietnam] back into the Stone Age.”)

LeMay spearheaded the development of the monstrous B-36 (too slow to avoid jet interceptors), the B-47 (supersonic and beautiful, but too light and short ranged to carry atomic bombs to Moscow), and finally, the B-52 (there, that might do it). LeMay, however, was short-sighted in that he had no use for missiles, which he regarded as impractical. A former pilot, he thought “the bombers will always get through.”

Fortunately, others in the government and military saw the potential in guided missiles. Schriever becomes the ultimate hero of the narrative as he shepherds the development first of liquid fuel rockets and finally the highly reliable solid fuel Minuteman missile. [Minuteman was the name given to the second generation solid propellant ICBM.] He was aided by the genius of John von Neumann, the emigre physicist from Hungary who made important contributions to any scientific field he entered. Von Neumann was able to demonstrate that as the size of hydrogen bombs became smaller (less than 1500 pounds), practical improvements in existing rocket motors could result in missiles capable of flying from the continental U.S.A. to Russia. The ICBM could fly across continents at 16,000 miles per hour and reach its target in just 30 minutes. Mutual deterrence became the strategy of choice for rational political actors.

Sheehan traces the ferocious funding battles and turf wars among the armed service branches as well as the large aerospace contractors. He also reports on the struggle between design concepts—intermediate range (1500 miles) vs. intercontinental (6000+ miles) missiles. Eisenhower became convinced of the special importance of the ICBM (mostly thanks to von Neumann), and by the end of his term, the U.S. had far outstripped the Russians in missile technology. Eisenhower knew of the American advantage because of the U-2 spy plane flights made during his administration, but could not say so publicly without admitting violating Russian air space.

Thus, the evolution of four different technologies used by both Superpowers served to deter a catastrophic war: (1) reliable ICBM’s, (2) relatively small nuclear warheads, (3) powerful radar systems, and (4) spy satellites. With these in play, the nuclear stalemate called MAD became inevitable.

Evaluation: Highly readable, important contribution to Cold War scholarship which recognizes the personalities that developed basic strategy during the Cold War. Recommended for those interested in a new perspective on this complicated and exciting period in history. ( )

If ‘A Fiery Peace in a Cold War’ was being pitched as a movie I’d describe it as Tuchman’s ‘A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century’ reset to the 1950s with a large pinch of the ‘and this is interesting’ digressions of ‘The Histories’ of Herodotus.
The story centers, but does not merely focus on, Bernard Schriever and how he became head of the Air Force ICBM program and shepherded the Atlas, Titan and Minuteman ICBMs and the Thor IRBM in service. Much of the story also revolves around the people who inspired Schriever like Hap Arnold or helped found the ICBM program itself like John von Neumann or made the missiles possible like rocket engine specialist Edward Hall whose physicist brother ironically was a Soviet spy at Los Alamos or even competitors foreign and domestic (the Army Jupiter IRBM program).
‘A Fiery Peace in a Cold War’ is an interesting view of the times and people on both sides of the Iron Curtain as well as the story of how the ICBM came to be created. ( )