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Review by Rich Jaroslovsky

Sept. 21 (Bloomberg) -- No weapon in history has done more to threaten humanity’s survival, and paradoxically to maintain it, than the intercontinental ballistic missile.

Starting in the mid-1950s, with the Soviet Union embarked on the same path, the U.S. launched a crash program to develop the ultimate weapon: rockets capable of delivering nuclear annihilation in a matter of minutes.

Leading the effort was Bernard Schriever, an Air Force officer who fought for and organized the missile’s development and deployment. His life’s work forms the engrossing core of “A Fiery Peace in a Cold War,” the first major book in 20 years from Neil Sheehan, who as a New York Times reporter revealed the existence of the Pentagon Papers and whose “A Bright Shining Lie” won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

Schriever, born in Germany four years before the outbreak of World War I, arrived in the U.S. with his family at age 6, settling in San Antonio. A year later, his engineer father was killed in an industrial accident. His formidable mother raised him to a young adulthood that included becoming a championship golfer.

Bennie Schriever’s skill on the links wasn’t incidental to his rise through the U.S. Army Air Corps, which eventually became the Air Force. At several important junctures, the desire of older men to play with the accomplished young golfer helped his upward trajectory.

So too did his keen interest in aeronautical engineering, his unflappability and ability to marshal other men -- whether scientific experts or political allies -- to prove the ICBM would work and get it built.

Military-Industrial Complex

“A Fiery Peace in a Cold War” offers an unparalleled look at the workings of what President Dwight D. Eisenhower memorably labeled the “military-industrial complex.” Schriever proved a skilled bureaucratic maneuverer, keeping his program from the clutches of the World War II-era aircraft manufacturers with their well-heeled lobbyists and friends in Congress, and promoting a new generation of technicians and engineers that gave birth to the modern aerospace industry.

Out of the race Schriever led came the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world teetered on the brink of destruction. But also came the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction -- MAD for short -- the balance of terror that held both sides’ nuclear weapons in check through the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, and holds them in check today.

Vacuum at the Center

If Sheehan’s book suffers anything, it is a bit of a vacuum at its center. For all the pages expended on Schriever’s thoughts and actions, he never fully comes alive: He’s more a vehicle than a character. The contrast is particularly stark with “A Bright Shining Lie,” Sheehan’s book about the former military officer John Paul Vann, whose personal shortcomings deepened his story and served as a metaphor for America’s motives in Vietnam.

If Schriever is a less than a completely compelling central figure, Sheehan compensates with sharply drawn depictions of many others. The German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who cast his lot with the U.S. after World War II, emerges as so amoral and enamored by the possible use of rockets for space travel that he looked the other way while his Nazi overseers put his technological advances to unspeakable uses.

Ed Hall becomes the Air Force’s chief rocketry guru after, unbeknownst to all, his physicist brother, Ted, had been the Soviets’ second-most-important spy at Los Alamos.

Hating Russians

Then there’s the Hungarian-born nuclear pioneer John von Neumann, whose brilliance as a mathematician was matched only by his fascination with explosions and his hatred of Russians. “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today?” he said. “If you say today at five o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?”

Schriever, who became a four-star general, died in 2005 at 94, having lived long enough to see a de-escalation of the arms race that had so dominated his life. He was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery amid honors normally reserved for a military chief of staff. Perhaps there should have been one more medal: a combat ribbon for the war that never had to be fought.

“A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon” is from Random House (534 pages, $32). To order this book in North America, click here.

(Rich Jaroslovsky is the technology columnist for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Rich Jaroslovsky in New York at rjaroslovsky@bloomberg.net.