A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon (repost)
A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon By Neil Sheehan
Publisher: Vin ta ge 2010 | 576 Pages | ISBN: 0679745491 | EPUB | 5 MB
Publisher: Vin ta ge 2010 | 576 Pages | ISBN: 0679745491 | EPUB | 5 MB
The military-industrial complex proves an unlikely arena for plucky individualism in this history of the men who built America's intercontinental ballistic missile program in the 1950s and '60s. Sheehan paints air force Gen. Bernard Schriever and his colorful band of military aides, civilian patrons, defense intellectuals and aerospace entrepreneurs as a guerrilla insurgency fighting Pentagon red tape, and a hostile air force brass, led by Strategic Air Command honcho Curtis LeMay, who advocated megatonnage bomber planes over ICBMs. Sheehan gives a fascinating run-down of the engineering challenges posed by nuclear missiles, but the main action consists of bureaucratic intrigues, procurement innovations and epic briefings that catch the president's ear and open the funding spigots.