There is a scene in Terry Gilliam’s 1988 movie “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” where the intrepid band of heroes finds themselves talking with the Roman god Vulcan. He’s in the weapons manufacturing business and describes to them his greatest creation, the ICBM:
Here’s the relevant exchange:
Baron Munchausen: What does it do?
Vulcan: Do? Kills the enemy.
Baron Munchausen: All the enemy?
Vulcan: Aye, all of them. All their wives, and all their children, and all their sheep, and all their cattle, and all their cats and dogs. All of them. All of them gone for good.
That’s as good a starting point as any for understanding a device that Neil Sheehan, in the subtitle to his marvelous new book “A Fiery Peace in a Cold War”, describes simply as the “ultimate weapon”. That isn’t hyperbole. ICBMs are it. There is no defense against them and even the most ardent and irrational of missile defense advocates concede that countries with the resources of China or Russia could easily construct weapons of sufficient sophistication or quantity to overwhelm any defense, no matter how extravagantly funded. This is particularly scary when you consider that if even one of these things were to be actually used in a war would count as a one of the worst disasters in human history.
Told largely though the story of Bernard Schriever, an Air Force general and one of the men most responsible for the American missile program, “A Fiery Peace” documents the conception and construction of America’s missile forces. It is a tale masterfully told. Sheehan delves into the deep background of not only the geopolitical realities of the time, many of which are poorly remembered today as everything is lumped under the unchanging rubric of the “Cold War”, but also of the various technical, bureaucratic and military factors that enabled, and required, the construction of nuclear armed intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The context that necessitated and created so terrible a weapon is a tremendous story in and of itself and Sheehan does an excellent job of seeing both the forest and the trees. So when some of the Cold War’s greatest hits (the Berlin Airlift, Francis Gary Powers and the nonexistent “missile gap”, the Cuban Missile Crisis) make their appearance they are given just the right amount of attention. Important people that take center stage have their backgrounds and personalities described in detail, but not excessively so. Similarly, the book goes over the formation of the modern American military after World War II, including the creation of the Air Force as an independent branch of service, but it doesn’t get bogged down in unnecessary minutiae. Given the potential for topics like these to sprawl keeping things broad and still focused is a hell of a triumph all by itself. Sheehan’s previous book, “A Bright, Shining Lie”, was a good way for a lay reader, who doesn’t want to plow through a dozen or more books on the subject, to get a decent handle on just how fucked our Vietnam adventure was from the get go. “A Fiery Peace in a Cold War” serves much the same function for the weapons on which our strategic invulnerability is still based.
But the book isn’t a hagiographic history of the square jawed men who defended America and all the righteous things they did. Even in the heady and ideological days of the early Cold War less than scrupulous defense contractors threw fits and tossed up political roadblocks when their profits were threatened, whether or not their product was the one the military wanted or not. Bureaucratic infighting was as potent a derailment then as it is today. Personal likes and dislikes, both within the military and outside of it, had huge and lasting impacts. For example, Schriever was an excellent golfer and used that fact to greatly aid his career, but objectively speaking the ability to put a little white ball in a small hole with a crooked stick is unrelated to anything in the field of rocketry.
Ticks and quirks of that nature had enormous effects in the infancy of our Byzantine military procurement and development processes and they are very much on display here. The creation of a new industry, what we now call aerospace, was a necessary evil and not a pretty process, and it’s impossible not to read the stories of its birth without seeing the germ of today’s war crippled federal budget. Sheehan fights, mostly successfully, against nostalgia for bygone times, but it’s almost quaint to see the Defense Department having to routinely trim programs because of Eisenhower’s insistence on keeping costs down.
There is also an undeniable comfort that comes with reading about the Cold War, even if you set aside American triumphalism. After all, we, homo sapiens sapiens, survived it. Today we see that result as basically inevitable. Communism didn’t work and ideological differences that seemed war worthy sixty years ago look positively silly in hindsight. But the survival of the species was in genuine danger and those silly differences could’ve very easily murdered us all.
To take but one serious danger that was poorly understood at the time, there is the issue of fallout. When Vulcan described his new toy to the Baron he neglected to mention that using them in large quantity dooms the user as surely as the target. Sheehan makes chillingly understated reference to this a couple of times, but during the 1950s, when nuclear weapons were still largely a bomber-based, and therefore defeat-able, weapon, the idea of fallout was poorly understood by the men responsible for its use. They believed that waging an all out war on the Soviet Union was possible because they didn’t know, or didn’t care to know, that setting off that many bombs anywhere would likely have killed almost everyone in the US as well. It’s one thing for leaders to ignore unintended consequences in decisions about whether or not to go to war (certainly we’ve seen some examples of that these last few years), it’s quite another for one of those unintended consequences to include the end of civilization as we know it.
But we survived, and, like it or not, we did so at least in part because of the efforts of Schriever and others like him. There is an undeniable dissonance that comes with the idea of a weapon so terrible that its use cannot be seriously contemplated except in genuinely apocalyptic scenarios. Yet the existence of those weapons kept shooting wars between the two superpowers confined to the casualty and fallout free realm of fiction. Neil Sheehan has written a great book about their genesis.
