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I'm an airpower and Cold War aviation buff, and yet, like 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, like 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.
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, like 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.