A Cold War Story

Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie (1988), a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Vietnam War, examined that flawed American commitment by entering the world of one of our flawed heroes, the officer John Paul Vann. It is a fine book, and I have assigned it in my own teaching about the war. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War uses the same strategy. Looking at the career of Air Force general Bernard Schriever, who oversaw the creation of the U.S. nuclear ballistic deterrent in the 1950s and 1960s, Sheehan hopes to uncover the history of American national security in a crucial era. This time, however, the tale is not one of disaster and hubris but of prudence and good sense in the struggle with the old Soviet Union.

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon

Neil Sheehan (Author)

Random House Books for Young Readers

560 pages

$9.99

Schriever hardly appears in the initial one third of the book. The first 170 pages cover the early years of the Cold War, from the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945 until the Korean War of 1950-53, when Schriever was making his way as a junior officer. Sheehan guides us deftly through the complicated diplomacy of the era, showing how the United States and the USSR were jointly responsible for the Cold War. Recognizing the exceptionally nasty nature of the Russian regime, the author nonetheless sees that each country contributed to the arms race. Sheehan notes that the invention and use of nuclear weapons by the United States in World War II justifiably provoked the Soviet Union—the existence of the bomb suggested that America might impose a postwar settlement hostile to Russia, and so the Soviets felt compelled to make their own weapon. “The confrontation was … inevitable,” writes Sheehan, “because both sides were ignorant of or misunderstood the real motivations of the other.” While not underplaying the horrible character of the Russian leader, Joseph Stalin, Sheehan also makes clear how a paranoid style gripped leaders in the United States and led to preposterous planning by the armed services. Sheehan writes of “the oversimplification and distortion of American thinking,” its “exaggeration,” and “illusion.” This first part of the book, which sets up Schriever’s story, is also the best part.

The second part is the most empirically meaty and has the richest story lines. It covers the period 1953 to 1963. With some flair and effectiveness, Sheehan describes how the Air Force leadership was forced to give up its reliance on great bombers to deliver nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union. Younger officers like Schriever effectively urged the development of missiles, and missile defense was implemented. However, except for Schriever’s attitudes toward women, to which Sheehan pays little attention, Schriever is not a compelling figure, and neither are the generals-in-the-making around him. This part of the book is not a history of international statecraft in the 1950s but of military bureaucrats, defense contractors, and experts, all of whom disputed over payloads, circular error probability, and design flaws. Sheehan makes his account readable, and is a good expositor of the basic rocket science, but the exposition is not gripping; nor does he lay out the story in a way that highlights its significance for global affairs.

To the extent that Sheehan clarifies this significance, he does so in the final part of the book, which chronicles how the engineering triumphs involved in building intercontinental missiles fit into foreign policy. For Sheehan, the missiles constructed by each side in the early 1960s initiated a stand-off that lasted for a quarter-century and brought a fragile but durable peace between the two superpowers. Moreover, the know-how that went into Schriever’s effort led to the exploration of space and the growth of satellite and communications technology.

This survey sounds incomplete, because the last part of the book incompletely makes the case for Schriever’s importance. Sheehan says that Schriever was “the indispensable man in the creation of the intercontinental ballistic missile and … [in] America’s penetration of space and [in] an unspoken but permanent truce of mutual deterrence with the Soviet Union.” Schriever built “the first weapon in the history of warfare that was meant to deter.” He wanted to prevent “the Soviet Union from acquiring an overwhelming nuclear superiority that could tempt Soviet leaders into international blackmail and adventurism with calamitous results for human civilization.”

Heavy claims, these. But they are not defended or cashed out. Sheehan, for example, makes no attempt to show that Schriever was indispensable. Of greater importance, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War often contradicts its line that Schriever acted with intelligent caution. Sheehan himself tells us that “Stalin had no intention” of “military adventurism.” Over and over again the author reminds us that the United States had strategic superiority in rocketry. That is, Americans usually had something like a 10 to 1 advantage in bombs and missiles. Indeed, in Sheehan’s summary, “moral corruption … had become endemic to U.S. military industry as … the Cold War … demand[ed], year, upon year, upon year … new weaponry.” To put the best face on it, we are dealing not with reality, but with counterfeit American beliefs about the reality of international conflict.

These contradictions within the text sit beside mistaken analyses by Sheehan. For the author, President Dwight Eisenhower had a dread of a Soviet sneak attack, and so legitimated Schriever’s view that the United States must assemble missiles. In fact, Eisenhower—a very uncommon old soldier—deprecated the beliefs of those convinced of the serious possibility of a surprise attack, and never thought the Russians were interested in nuclear coercion. While the president could not control the atomic diplomacy of the late 1950s, he did whatever he could to counter the sort of thinking Schriever epitomized.

This is not at all to say that Americans simply made up the Soviet menace to sustain a profitable economy erected on the threat of war. It is to say that the foreign policy of 1953-1963 held great complexity. Each side misperceived the other, and mutual fears drove a contest to amass enough arms to frighten off the adversary. Schriever was a good soldier in this cause. Indeed, we should not find it at all surprising that military men easily legitimate the existence of enemies, think in black-and-white terms, and self-righteously argue for the absolute need for the latest weapons. The generals are trained to function this way, sometimes to our good fortune. Eisenhower unexpectedly kept his cool throughout this period, and often put himself at odds with the more aggressive brass, less sophisticated than he in their understanding of the Cold War.

In the first part of the book, where Sheehan has engaged a deep scholarly literature, he has no trouble expounding on the ambiguity of international affairs. I think he does not see the complication of the period of Schriever’s prime because the author has eschewed archival research and even reading much of the secondary literature. Instead, Sheehan has relied on a cascade of interviews with Schriever and his friends and associates. We get a narrow view emphasizing the way things looked to those closely connected to the American Department of Defense and even just to the Air Force, but little sense of the high politics of the period. That is why, I believe, Sheehan gets Eisenhower’s attitude flat wrong.

More: Every undergraduate who takes a course in the American foreign policy of this period learns about Dwight Eisenhower’s remarkable farewell address of 1961. Leaving his office, the president lamented that he had not brought peace but had so far only avoided war. He made the American people aware of two interest groups. The more famous was the military-industrial complex; the other was a scientific-technological élite. Together they had defended America but also propelled the arms race and fear-mongering over war. Eisenhower wanted the nation to know that he worried about their influence. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War does not mention this address, and the omission exemplifies Sheehan’s lack of discussion of the wider fundamentals of great power politics of the 1950s and early 1960s.

I wish Eisenhower had gotten the attention of Neil Sheehan. If he had had a better sense of the president and what troubled him, this book would have been more adequate. Bernard Schriever was no hero; he was a general who managed a garden-variety if dangerous arms race.

Bruce Kuklick is professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania. Among his recent books are Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger (Princeton Univ. Press) and A Political History of the USA: One Nation Under God, just published by Palgrave Macmillan.