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A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon. By Neil Sheehan. New York Random House, 2009. ISBN 978-0679-42284-6. Photographs. Source notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xix, 534. $32.00.
Twenty years ago, the journalist Neil Sheehan won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1988). Thus his authorship of another major work on the Cold War U.S. military counts as an event. Once again Sheehan has taken someone's biography and made it the connecting thread of a larger narrative, in this case, the development of ballistic missiles by the U.S. Air Force and their role in the establishment of a strategic nuclear "balance of terror." The central character is Bernard A. Schriever (1911-2005), a German immigrant who rose to become a four-star general and father of Air Force missile...