by Neil Sheehan
First published 2009
Neil Sheehan chronicles the untold story of the nuclear arms race through Air Force officer Bernard Schriever's mission to prevent Soviet atomic dominance. The author traces Schriever's journey from his 1917 arrival in Texas as a six-year-old German immigrant through his World War II service in the Pacific to his pivotal role in the postwar bipolar world. In 1954, Schriever launches an ambitious crusade to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the Soviet Union in thirty minutes. Sheehan weaves together biography and history to show how Schriever navigated bureaucratic obstacles and worked alongside figures like mathematician John von Neumann, rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, and bomber general Curtis LeMay. The narrative spans from Stalin's paranoid push for atomic weapons to Khrushchev's brinkmanship during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Sheehan demonstrates how Schriever's team endured explosive failures at Cape Canaveral before achieving success. The book reveals how the quest to build deterrent weapons rather than offensive ones ultimately opened space exploration for America while maintaining an uneasy peace during the Cold War's most dangerous years.
Genres: biography, history, 20th-century, 21st-century, military-history, american-history
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: biography, historical-fiction
Setting: Texas, Soviet Union, Cape Canaveral
Period: 1917, World War II, 1954, Cuban Missile Crisis
Kindle Edition · Random House