Race to a standoff

Neil Sheehan chronicles a more slow-motion near-disaster in his first major book since “A Bright Shining Lie,’’ which won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. (I was one of the National Book Award judges.) “A Fiery Peace in the Cold War’’ tells a neglected story: the race between the Soviet Union and the United States to field nuclear-armed ballistic missiles to forestall a potential nuclear Pearl Harbor by ensuring a wary standoff backed by the threat of nuclear retaliation. His new book is a mixed bag.

Using a familiar but effective narrative strategy, Sheehan threads his story through the exemplary life and work of a US Air Force officer, Bernard Schriever, a tall, handsome, inspired but methodical German-American test and bomber pilot and aeronautical engineer. Schriever worked at the center of the contentious effort within the 1950s US military to field a fleet of intercontinental ballistic missiles against the wishes of Curtis LeMay, the Strategic Air Command general who favored manned bombers.

Schriever, born in Bremen in 1910, grew up fatherless in Texas, golfed his way through engineering college, and won his wings as an Army Air Corps pilot at Randolph Field in 1933. After three years and three months in the Pacific during World War II, Schriever came home to a military air organization rewarded for its success with status as a separate branch of service, the US Air Force, and with a leader, Hap Arnold, determined to harness science to air power to improve the nation’s defense. An émigré Hungarian who contributed much to US military security in those years, Theodore von Kármán, wrote in a 1945 report Arnold had commissioned that “only a constant inquisitive attitude toward science and a ceaseless and swift adaptation to new developments can maintain the security of this nation through world air supremacy.’’ In January 1946, Arnold gave Schriever the job of following von Kármán’s dictum.

Schriever encountered the idea of an ICBM in 1953 in the persons of mathematician John von Neumann and physicist Edward Teller, who calculated the United States would be able by 1960 to shrink the newly-invented hydrogen bomb from 40 tons to a missile-deliverable weapon of less than a ton with a megaton yield. Schriever ran with the idea, selling it to Trevor Gardner, the dynamic special assistant to the secretary of the Air Force for research and development. Gardner set up a prestigious committee with von Neumann as its chairman and linked the project to the new California engineering firm Ramo and Wooldridge.

Schriever prevailed in the years to come in battles with LeMay and the bomber generals, in interservice rivalries with the Army, which wanted missiles of its own, and against stubborn engineering challenges associated with firing a steel launch vehicle full of explosive rocket fuel into near space without having it swerve off course or blow up and then ensuring that its warhead disconnects and hits within a mile of its target.

But did the ICBMs on both sides keep the peace, as Sheehan, echoing Schriever and his colleagues, seems to believe? The near-misses I mentioned earlier and the others still untold argue more for luck as our fickle protector than deterrence. Worse, deterrence was an all-or-nothing policy; had it failed, it would have failed catastrophically, and in the meantime it stood in the way of standing down, as it continues to do today. The nuclear arms race that resulted was an attempt at a military solution to a conflict that could only be resolved politically, as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev finally understood and acted upon.

Sheehan’s book is marred by basic technical errors. Rockets do not escape “the gravity pull of the earth’’ when they go into orbit; they fall around the earth as a bullet would if fired at sufficient velocity. The militarily significant difference between an atomic and a hydrogen bomb is that the fission chain reaction stops when the atomic bomb’s heavy metal core explosively disassembles, limiting the bomb’s yield to less than a megaton, while the heat-dependent fusion reaction in a hydrogen bomb can be made arbitrarily large by adding more hydrogen fuel. The 1948 Sandstone atomic bomb tests not only led to fission bombs of increased yield, as Sheehan notes, but by levitating the bomb cores to achieve more bang from less plutonium, they also effectively doubled US plutonium supply at a time when the nation’s production reactors were ailing and the Soviets were preparing to test their first atomic bomb.

I could add a dozen more examples to this list. They aren’t trivial; a US president, Ronald Reagan, spent billions of dollars imagining that his country could build a shield in space against incoming nuclear warheads because he didn’t understand the physical impossibility of his dream, and scientists like Teller were prepared to encourage his naïveté for reasons of their own.

Sheehan’s failure to master the elementary science behind his narrative or the larger paradoxes of the nuclear arms and missile race leaves me with mixed feelings about his book. Schriever’s part in the development of the ICBM is a story that needed to be told, however, and Sheehan tells it with enthusiasm.

Richard Rhodes is author of ”The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” “Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb,’’ and “Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race.’’