A Fiery Peace In A Cold War Part 10

PALM TREE DISGUISES.

At the end of May, a high-level Soviet delegation flew to Cuba on a clandestine visit to obtain Castro's a.s.sent. He had reservations but would not object if the Soviet leaders wanted to "b.u.t.tress the defensive power of the entire socialist camp." One member of the delegation was Marshal Sergei Biryuzov, who had succeeded the unfortunate Nedelin as commander of the Strategic Rocket Forces. Attired in civilian clothes and carrying a false pa.s.sport that identified him as Engineer Petrov, Biryuzov, who, according to Mikoyan, "wasn't very bright," scouted the island for likely missile sites. On the delegation's return to Moscow, he told Khrushchev that there wouldn't be any problem concealing them from American aerial reconnaissance. The missiles, he said, could be disguised as palm trees. Mikoyan ridiculed Biryuzov's leafy stratagem. Missile sites are extremely difficult to hide from aerial surveillance. Approach roads have to be cut out of the landscape, more earthmoving and the emplacement of a large concrete slab are required for the launcher, and the site is populated by a shelter tent for the missile, rows of tanker trucks with liquid oxygen and the Russian version of RP-1 rocket fuel, sundry other vehicles and equipment, and electrical cables running here and there. Mikoyan's a.s.sessment of Biryuzov's powers of intellect may have been correct, or Biryuzov may have decided to tell Khrushchev what Khrushchev wanted to hear. In any case, Khrushchev once more brushed aside Mikoyan's warning and serious planning for his Cuban adventure began.

At the time, the Soviet Union lacked an oceangoing fleet like the U.S. Navy, but the best was made of what it had. Between July and October, eighty-five freighters and pa.s.senger s.h.i.+ps shuttled the thousands of miles, including 150 round-trips, between Soviet ports and Cuba with the missiles and with the men and the panoply of an elaborate task force to protect the rockets. Four motorized rifle regiments were dispatched, each with 2,500 men, thirty-four tanks, and a.s.sociated arms and transport; three regiments of MK-6 surface-to-air missiles, the weapon that had brought down Francis Gary Powers's U-2 in 1960, arrived to ring the island with 144 launchers to s.h.i.+eld the missile sites against air attack; a regiment of thirty-three helicopters; a squadron of seventeen Il-28 light bombers, seven equipped to drop atomic bombs, an eleven-plane transport and communications squadron, and much else also came. Altogether 41,902 Soviet officers and men were dispatched to Cuba before the crisis broke. The voyages took eighteen to twenty days in the stifling holds of the freighters, the men allowed up on deck only at night in small groups. All thirty-six of the R-12 IRBMs arrived, along with their twenty-four launchers, and the nuclear warheads for them. Just as ominously, so did the tactical nuclear weapons with which Khrushchev armed the task force: two FKR cruise missile regiments wielding thirty-six missiles with a range of one hundred miles and warheads of 5.6 to 12 kilotons, the equivalent of the Hiros.h.i.+ma blast, each capable of wiping out an entire American invasion fleet; twelve Luna missiles with a range of thirty-one miles and a two-kiloton warhead to obliterate a beachhead of landing troops; and eight atomic bombs for the Il-28s. Khrushchev reserved permission to fire the IRBMs to himself, but he gave his commanding general in Cuba, Issa Pliyev, a cavalryman who had served with him during the Second World War, leave to employ the tactical weapons at Pliyev's discretion against an American invading force.

It is astounding in retrospect that the movement of so many men and so much armament all the way from Russia to an island in the Caribbean went undetected. One reason was the pathetic state of the CIA spy network in Cuba, if network it can be called. This had already been demonstrated the previous year during the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs fiasco. The agency had predicted that a revolt would break out in the interior of the island as soon as the brigade of anti-Castro Cuban exiles it had trained landed there. Instead, nothing happened inland and all of the exiles were ringed around on the beach and captured by Castro. Since enduring the shame of that failure, John Kennedy and his brother and attorney general, Robert, had been exerting relentless pressure on the agency to do whatever was necessary to eliminate Castro. The Mafia was enlisted to a.s.sa.s.sinate him and there was a poisoning plot, all to no avail. The Soviets also took stringent security precautions. The officers and men were issued civilian trousers and plaid s.h.i.+rts. The Cuban population, which was not fooled, was told they were agricultural specialists. Radio silence was maintained, not only between Pliyev's headquarters and Moscow but also between it and units on the island. Messages had to be hand-carried to and from the countryside.

Another and critical reason for American ignorance was the temporary blinding of aerial reconnaissance. A U-2 on a routine twice-a-month spying mission at the end of August had photographed eight MK-6 surface-to-air missile batteries under construction in western Cuba. The presence of SAMs in Cuba was not in itself alarming. The Soviets had already given the antiaircraft missiles to allies like Na.s.ser's Egypt, Sukarno's Indonesia, and Mao's China. But in early September a U-2 strayed accidentally into Soviet airs.p.a.ce and a second U-2 being flown by a Taiwanese pilot was shot down over China. To avoid another incident, the administration banned U-2 flights over the island for five weeks in September and October. The president; Robert Kennedy; McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser; and a number of others at the top also simply did not believe that Khrushchev would be irrational enough to mount long-range missiles in Cuba.

KEEPING THE MILITARY ON THE LEASH.

Finally, Khrushchev got caught. A mounting controversy in Was.h.i.+ngton over precisely what the Soviets were doing in Cuba had reached the point where the administration had to authorize a resumption of flights by the U-2s, which had just been transferred from CIA control to that of SAC. On Sunday, October 14, a U-2 piloted by Air Force major Richard Heyser made a twelve-minute camera run over western Cuba and the game was up. The 4,000 feet of film his cameras took was delivered the next morning in eight cans to the CIA's National Photographic Intelligence Center in the top four floors of a nondescript office building in downtown Was.h.i.+ngton. Every missile, by its measurements and other characteristics and the equipment needed to fire it, makes its own distinct fingerprint on the earth. From previous aerial photos of R-12 sites in Russia, the CIA photo interpreters knew exactly what they were looking at. Kennedy, who had been out of town, got the news on the morning of the 16th, when he was shown the photographs at the White House and they were interpreted for him. "He can't do that to me!" he exclaimed in his rage at Khrushchev. According to Max Frankel in his first-rate account of the drama, High Noon in the Cold War: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Cuban Missile Crisis High Noon in the Cold War: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, Robert Kennedy's reaction was more earthy. "Oh s.h.i.+t! s.h.i.+t! s.h.i.+t! Those sons of b.i.t.c.hes Russians."

The president quickly got his anger against Khrushchev under control. He was also able to put himself in Khrushchev's place and see the situation from the Soviet leader's perspective. In the opening sessions of the ad hoc Executive Committee of the National Security Council, or ExCom as it came to be known, which he convened in secret session, he said it was clear that the sixteen Jupiters in Turkey would have to be one of the bargaining chips in any deal they made with the Soviet dictator to lever his missiles out of Cuba. He refused a unanimous recommendation from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, including his favorite general, Maxwell Taylor of the Army (Kennedy had brought him back on active duty as chairman of the JCS), and initially Robert McNamara as well, for immediate air strikes to take out the missile sites before the IRBMs could be erected on their launchers and nuclear warheads mounted. (McNamara conceded that the planes would miss at least 10 percent of the installations.) Kennedy reasoned that as a great power, the Soviet Union could not accept having Russian missile crews killed without retaliating. That retaliation, he feared, would come in a move against isolated and vulnerable West Berlin, which Khrushchev had been repeatedly menacing. Even after the perceived danger of the Soviet missiles grew at midweek as CIA interpreters, going over now constant U-2 photography, detected evidence of sites under construction for the 2,500-mile R-14s, which could reach Canada and virtually the entire continental United States, Kennedy maintained his sangfroid. (As it turned out, the R-14s never got to Cuba. They were still aboard s.h.i.+p hundreds of miles away when the crisis broke.) He decided on a naval blockade to turn around any s.h.i.+p carrying missiles or other military equipment to Cuba. It was to be carefully controlled and selective, referred to as a "quarantine" in public to avoid having to invoke formal blockade rules, and only gradually tightened into a full blockade of the island should Khrushchev not respond. He intended to announce the quarantine in a nationally televised speech the forthcoming Monday, October 22. He would sound as menacing as possible to spook the Russians, threatening ultimate military action if the missiles were not removed, but set no timetable. What he would be setting was a table for a bargain.

When he met with his military chieftains on Friday to tell them of his decision, the meeting turned into a confrontation. They now wanted to hit the island with 1,000 air strikes by Air Force and Navy jets and to follow up the air a.s.saults with a full-scale invasion by the Army and the Marine Corps. They scoffed at Kennedy's blockade and negotiations strategy as just "political action" and "talk." LeMay, who had succeeded to chief of staff after White's retirement in June 1961, was particularly belligerent. He took a directly opposing position to Kennedy's reasoning on Berlin. "If we don't do anything to Cuba," he said, "then they're going to push on Berlin and push real hard because they've got us on the run." He accused Kennedy of being another Neville Chamberlain, in short, a moral coward who, by his weakness, would bring on the war he was seeking to avoid. "This blockade and political action, I see leading into war.... It will lead right into war," LeMay argued. "This is almost as bad as the appeas.e.m.e.nt [of Hitler] at Munich." Kennedy responded that if the United States acted precipitately, "we'd be regarded as the trigger-happy Americans who lost Berlin." LeMay was undeterred. "You're in a pretty bad fix, Mr. President," he said as the argument continued. Kennedy asked him to repeat what he had said and seemed amused at LeMay's description of his predicament.

The president held fast. Generals and admirals, even those as bullying as LeMay could be, did not intimidate John Kennedy. He had proven his courage in battle as the skipper of a fast torpedo boat in the South Pacific. He was worried about Berlin and he was also worried about inadvertently triggering a chain reaction that would end in nuclear war. He had been reading The Guns of August The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman's cautionary tale on how the statesmen and generals of Europe had b.u.mbled their way into the First World War, and did not intend to become a central character in The Missiles of October. The Missiles of October. He had antic.i.p.ated the reaction of his military leaders. Shortly before the meeting he remarked to his longtime retainer and political aide Kenneth O'Donnell that "these bra.s.s hats have one great advantage in their favor. If we listen to them, and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong." He had antic.i.p.ated the reaction of his military leaders. Shortly before the meeting he remarked to his longtime retainer and political aide Kenneth O'Donnell that "these bra.s.s hats have one great advantage in their favor. If we listen to them, and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong."

"USE 'EM OR LOSE 'EM"

Kennedy was more foresighted than he could know at the time. Had he displayed less strength of character and wisdom in this crisis and given in to his military, the world might well be a different place. The CIA and the military intelligence services believed that there were about 10,000 Russians on the island. They had no idea that the number was virtually four times that. It was a.s.sumed that the nuclear warheads for the missiles had arrived with the rockets, but the photo interpreters were unable to determine their location. It turned out that they were sitting in vans parked at the R-12 sites for quick mating to the rockets. No one on the U.S. side suspected the presence of the tactical nuclear weapons or knew that Khrushchev had given Pliyev authority to fire them at an American invasion force. (The secret would not come out until years later.) On October 18, Khrushchev restricted permission to fire the two-kiloton Lunas to "an extreme situation," such as when communication with Moscow was impossible, and then, on October 22, the day of Kennedy's blockade speech, when he had grown more alarmed, he ordered Pliyev not to resort to any nuclear weapons without his personal consent.

Khrushchev was still thinking in a crack-brained mode. He had committed the incredibly reckless act of placing a Soviet task force armed with nuclear weapons in a position of potentially extreme peril more than 6,500 miles from Moscow, with no hope of support or sustenance if attacked. Had the island been invaded, he would have lost control over the nuclear weapons and everything else he had in Cuba soon after the preliminary air bombardment began. Military communications in the early 1960s were not nearly as dependable as the s.p.a.ce satellite relay systems that were to follow. They were mainly reliant on radio and so subject to atmospherics and blackouts. And among the first targets the planes would have struck, in addition to the missile sites, would have been suspected Soviet communications centers. (These can easily be located once they begin to transmit, if they have not already been spotted by the antennas at the sites.) With the horrendous destruction from the bombs of a thousand sorties cras.h.i.+ng on his troops and installations, and Air Force and Navy fighter-bombers shooting up every vehicle caught out on a road, Pliyev in turn would probably have lost contact with many or most of his units. In the confusion, subordinate commanders would have been left to make their own decisions.

These were the officers and men of a proud army, the Red Army that had destroyed the mightiest host the vaunted German nation had ever fielded. However hopeless their position, it is unlikely they would have laid down their weapons meekly and trudged off to prison camps. With 42,000 of them on the island, they would have put up a fight. Regardless of what Khrushchev might ordain from the safety of Moscow, there is an old adage about soldiers resorting to any weapon they can get their hands on in the hair-trigger emotions of battle: "Use 'em or lose 'em," the saying goes. Years later, General Anatoly Gribkov, a senior General Staff officer detailed at the time to draw up the plans for the expedition, described the trepidation with which he had done so: "Would a desperate group of Soviet defenders, with or without an order from above, have been able to arm and fire even one Luna warhead ... or one of the more powerful [cruise missile] charges? If such a rocket had hit U.S. troops or s.h.i.+ps, if thousands of Americans had died in the atomic blast, would that have been the last shot of the Cuban crisis or the first of global nuclear war?"

LEMAY AND TOMMY POWER AS THE WILD CARDS.

Had Soviet action been limited to firing its tactical nuclear weapons to destroy an invasion fleet, it is probable that the American side, in shock and fury, would have reacted by escalating to its own tactical nuclear weapons and incinerating much of Cuba and its inhabitants and would-be Russian defenders. But far worse might have ensued because LeMay and Power would have become wild cards in the crisis. To exert maximum psychological pressure on Khrushchev, right after Kennedy's blockade speech on Monday, the 22nd, Army and Marine divisions were started on the move to a.s.sembly points in the Southern United States; a fleet, including eight aircraft carriers, began gathering in the Caribbean; and the president ordered SAC into Defense Condition 3 (DEFCON 3), two steps short of war. To ratchet up the pressure, he raised the alert to DEFCON 2, a single step short of all-out nuclear conflict, on Wednesday, October 24. Tommy Power announced the escalation himself in the clear over the radio circuits to be certain that the Russians monitoring them would hear it. All of SAC went to the highest possible state of readiness. Sixty-six of its B-52s, fully loaded with hydrogen bombs, took off in an airborne alert of unprecedented scale. They flew north to circle over Canada and the Arctic and east across the Mediterranean on the southern attack route to the Adriatic coast of Greece and Yugoslavia, holding just short of their points of no return, awaiting the go code to roar for their targets. When a B-52 had been on station for twenty-four hours and the crew was deemed exhausted, it returned to base to be replaced by a fresh bomber. The rest of SAC's 639 B-52s were put on strip alert, bombs aboard, planes c.o.c.ked for takeoff. The 1,102 B-47 and B-58 medium bombers, also with bombs loaded, were dispersed to forty airfields, a lot of them civilian, across the United States to guard against loss should the Soviets attempt a surprise strike against regular SAC bases. Their crews alternated between strip alert and necessary rest periods. Counting the Atlas, t.i.tan, and Minuteman ICBMs, also now under Power's command and likewise at full readiness, SAC had approximately 2,800 megatons, 224,000 equivalents of the Hiros.h.i.+ma bomb, to launch at the Soviet Union, at Russian targets such as air bases in its East European possessions, and at Mao's China. The targeting scheme, the Single Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP, estimated that 175 million persons would be killed outright.

Despite claims that he was an outlaw militarist, LeMay had always remained subordinate to civilian authority. Accusations that he had ordered reconnaissance flights over Soviet territory in violation of presidential restrictions were untrue. The flights had been secretly authorized by Truman and then by Eisenhower. Nor was he an advocate of preventive war like John von Neumann. But he was a firm believer in preemptive war. While commander-in-chief of SAC, he had said that if he was persuaded the Soviets were about to attack, he would strike first. Whether he would check to make sure the president agreed with him, LeMay did not say. If the Russian garrison on Cuba obliterated a beachhead with a two-kiloton Luna or the whole invasion fleet with a twelve-kiloton FKR cruise missile, these acts might have enraged him but not convinced him that the Soviets were preparing to a.s.sault the United States itself. If, however, amidst the mayhem, one of the Russian R-12 crews had decided to take as many of their opponents as possible with them into eternity, mounted a nuclear warhead on their IRBM, and fired it at an American city, one can say with some certainty that he would have been pushed over the edge. So would Power, who shared LeMay's mind-set on this issue.

One of the president's military aides carried a briefcase containing the go codes (it was called "the football" in a bit of gallows humor) wherever the chief executive went because, under the Const.i.tution, he alone as commander-in-chief had the legal authority to decide on an act of such momentous consequences for the nation and humanity. But the generals had the ability to act on their own. That alternative had to exist in case the president was incapacitated or beyond reach. Knowing the characters of LeMay and Power, one can again conclude that had an order to launch not been quickly forthcoming from the White House, they would not have waited. They would have turned everything loose and, in their ignorance of atmospheric radioactive fallout, nuclear winter, and the other doomsday aftereffects of nuclear war, destroyed the entire Northern Hemisphere.

The recollection of a Russian officer who served in Cuba was that, if attacked, he and his comrades would have given LeMay and Power their opportunity. In October 1962, Viktor Yesin, who subsequently rose to colonel general and chief of staff of the Soviet Union's Strategic Rocket Forces, was an engineer lieutenant with an R-12 missile regiment stationed near Calabazar de Sagua, about 160 miles east of Havana. The regiment was armed with eight launchers and twelve missiles, for an initial barrage of eight rockets followed by four reloads. Its position was the optimal launching point for America's East Coast cities. Each night, when darkness hid them from the cameras of the U-2 spy planes, the crews would practice removing the one-megaton warheads from nearby vans, mounting them on the rockets, then transferring the nuclear-armed missiles to concrete launching pads and raising them into firing angle. Before dawn, all would be dismounted and hidden away. The crews knew what they wanted to hit. They had been issued targeting data for Was.h.i.+ngton and New York and other Eastern urban centers.

Decades later, Michael Dobbs interviewed Yesin in Moscow for his startlingly detailed account of the crisis, One Minute to Midnight. One Minute to Midnight. He asked Yesin how the Soviet missile regiment would have reacted had the United States suddenly launched the air a.s.sault the Joint Chiefs were proposing as the opening blow of an invasion. "You have to understand the psychology of the military person," Yesin replied. "If you are being attacked, why shouldn't you reciprocate?" He asked Yesin how the Soviet missile regiment would have reacted had the United States suddenly launched the air a.s.sault the Joint Chiefs were proposing as the opening blow of an invasion. "You have to understand the psychology of the military person," Yesin replied. "If you are being attacked, why shouldn't you reciprocate?"

AVOIDING GoTTERDaMMERUNG.

To his credit, Khrushchev reversed course as soon as he realized his folly. By Thursday, October 25, he had made up his mind to remove the missiles from Cuba. "Once you begin shooting, you can't stop," he told his son Sergei. Humiliation was inevitable. What remained was to negotiate the most face-saving exit he could obtain from Kennedy. This turned out to be a public pledge by the president not to invade Cuba and a secret promise, conveyed by Robert Kennedy to the Soviet amba.s.sador in Was.h.i.+ngton, Anatoly Dobrynin, to remove the Jupiters from Turkey within four to five months. Secretary of State Dean Rusk had warned the president that a public swap of the Jupiters for the IRBMs in Cuba would appear a betrayal of an ally, as Turkey was a member of NATO, and undermine the alliance. The Kennedy brothers were careful not to commit any mention of it to paper and Dobrynin was told that continued secrecy was a condition of its fulfillment, a stipulation Khrushchev scrupulously observed.

On Sunday, October 28, a week of excruciating tension ended when Khrushchev sent Kennedy a letter, broadcast over Radio Moscow so that no time would be wasted in transmission, signaling acceptance of all terms. An enraged Castro, who, as the crisis neared its climax, had urged Khrushchev to make the suicidal leap of a full-scale nuclear attack against the United States if the island was invaded, was not interested in mitigating his would-be protector's humiliation. He refused to allow United Nations inspectors on Cuban soil to either verify the dismantling of the missiles at the sites or the loading of dismantled missiles on board s.h.i.+ps at dockside. The administration had demanded some form of verification and the United Nations had seemed the least offensive agency. Khrushchev was reduced to having the missiles loaded as deck cargo and then uncovered at sea so that they could be photographed by U.S. planes and helicopters. It was a moment of intense shame for the Soviet military. The scores of MK-6 surface-to-air missile batteries, the regiment of helicopters, and most of the men of the four motorized rifle regiments with their tanks and artillery and other accoutrements went home too. Kennedy lifted the quarantine on November 20, after Khrushchev also promised to remove the Il-28 light bombers within a month. Castro tried to hang on to some of the tactical nuclear weapons, but the Russians refused to hand them over and secreted them out of Cuba. All that was left behind of the 42,000-man task force was a lone brigade of 3,000 men. Its presence, a kind of protective trip wire, was meant to say that if the pledge not to attack the island was dishonored, the United States would have to contend with the Soviet Union. It became a forgotten brigade. Seventeen years later the administration of President Jimmy Carter discovered to its amazement that a brigade of the Red Army was still on duty in Cuba.

Khrushchev actually gained little for an ungrateful Castro with the no-invasion pledge. As desperate as the Kennedy brothers were to get rid of Castro, they drew the line at invading the island, fearful that Castro would take refuge in the mountains and American troops would get tied down in a guerrilla war. Khrushchev also gained nothing he would not have soon gotten anyway from the clandestine commitment to take the Jupiters out of Turkey within four to five months. The deployment of Atlas and t.i.tan and the fast coming on of Minute-man had made the Thors and Jupiters superfluous and the United States had already intended to remove them. McNamara had informed the British in May 1962 that the United States would cease logistic support for Thor when the basing agreement between the two countries expired in November 1964. As a result, the British decided to act sooner and the last Thor in England went off alert at RAF North Luffenham in the English Midlands on August 15, 1963. The Thors had by 1963 served their useful time. They had remained on fifteen-minute alert, 18.2 minutes' flight from their targets, for more than three years. The old bomber fields that hosted them became ghosts once again.

The day after the crisis ended, on Monday, October 29, 1962, McNamara did something he would have done in the near future in any case, but which he did now to keep the promise to Khrushchev. He signed a directive ordering the removal of the Jupiters from both Turkey and Italy by April 1, 1963. The deadline was more or less met for Italy. The thirty Jupiters there were all disa.s.sembled by April 23, 1963. In Turkey the dismantling went more slowly and the last of the sixteen there did not depart until July 26, 1963. What Khrushchev did salvage from his Cuban misadventure was the preservation of the Soviet Union from nuclear destruction and he owed that to John Kennedy, as the peoples of the Northern Hemisphere also owed their salvation to him.

BUYING TIME FOR THE EMPIRE TO IMPLODE.

The most intractable problems of the Cold War, such as the division of Germany, the uncertain status of a splintered Berlin, and Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and the Baltic states, could not be solved as long as a strong Soviet Union existed. Although no one could have foreseen it when Bernard Schriever a.s.sembled his small band at the Schoolhouse in Inglewood in the summer of 1954, their greatest achievement and that of all those who were to labor with them was to help buy the time needed for the Soviet Union to collapse of its own internal contradictions. Time was the only solution. A nuclear war was certainly not the answer. And until the coming of Mikhail Gorbachev, whose attempts at reform hastened the collapse, the leaders of the Soviet state regarded the post-Second World War status quo as nonnegotiable. But they could not evade the c.u.mulative effects of time.

The Soviet society that Joseph Stalin fas.h.i.+oned was not sustainable. The three pillars of the state-the Communist Party, the military, and the secret police-were costly to maintain. The precise figure is difficult to arrive at, but a high percentage of total production went to the military. To urbanize and feed the workers in his new heavy industries, Stalin had utterly destroyed initiative in Soviet agriculture with his forced draft system of collective and state farms. Russia, once the breadbasket of Europe through its possession of Ukraine, no longer grew enough food to feed itself. Khrushchev's effort to revitalize agriculture, constrained as it was by this straitjacket of state control and centralized planning, failed, and he began the imports of American corn and wheat that were to continue under his successor, Leonid Brezhnev. The system produced no products that could be sold abroad to renew wealth that would offset such imports and help pay the costs of maintaining this expensive state. The Soviet Union's only exports were raw materials, such as petroleum and natural gas. Much of the latter two were wasted providing cheap energy to its East European possessions to try to keep their restive populations from rising as the Hungarians had in 1956, and in subsidizing client states like Fidel Castro's Cuba, which had its own unworkable Marxist economy. Once a source of power and prestige, the empire had become a costly burden.

The Soviet Union, as heir to czarist Russia, was the last of the great multinational empires. The restiveness of its many peoples extended from Ukraine in the west through Kazakhstan and the other former khanates of Central Asia in the east that the czarist army had sabered into submission. Stalin kept the ethnic tensions under control through terror, but his successors were less hard men and tensions grew with the years. The rot fully set in after Brezhnev's overthrow of Khrushchev in 1964. He and his a.s.sociates were stand-still men who wanted to enjoy their perquisites, in Brezhnev's case young mistresses, a tame form of wild boar shooting, and a collection of expensive foreign cars.

"All that stuff about Communism is a tall tale for popular consumption. After all, we can't leave the people with no faith," he once said to his brother, Yakov, shocking his sibling, who was a firm believer in the Party line. One would have thought Brezhnev might have learned something from watching the American debacle in Vietnam. He did not. Instead, he demoralized his own army by sending it into a fruitless war in Afghanistan in 1979 to rescue Afghan Communist proteges who had seized power and provoked tradition-bound Muslim tribesmen into revolt against unbelievers. The Soviet empire was like a house whose beams have been consumed by powderpost beetles. From the outside, the beams appear st.u.r.dy. Yet when the point of a knife is thrust into one, the thin crust cracks open to reveal nothing but the powdered wood residue the beetles have left inside. Gorbachev's endeavors at reform during the latter half of the 1980s brought civil liberties, but also wrought a plunge in the already marginal living conditions of ordinary Russians as his tinkering made the sclerotic economic system worse. In 1989, in his desperate attempt to hold the Soviet Union together, he let Eastern Europe go and the Berlin Wall was torn down. Enraged, the old guard of the Party attempted to overthrow him in August 1991, in a coup that failed. Boris Yeltsin then led the Russian Republic out of the Soviet state and the empire that so many had for so long thought invincible broke into fragments.

In doing so much to foster a nuclear stalemate, Schriever and his a.s.sociates contributed mightily to buying the time necessary for the Soviet Union to exhaust itself. By starting in the mid-1950s, before it was too late, and then winning the race for a practical ICBM, they warded off the possibility of blackmail that Trevor Gardner had so dreaded and also discouraged nuclear adventures by the Soviets. After Khrushchev's humiliation in the Cuban Missile Crisis, no Soviet statesman would ever again dare such a gamble. Nor could any Soviet leader hope to prevail in a surprise attack after the deployment of Minuteman in 1962 and the growing presence beneath the seas of the Navy's Polaris missile-firing submarines. The same dilemma applied to the United States once the Soviets reached parity with their own solid-fuel ICBMs and missile-firing submarines around 1970. No American leader could contemplate a first strike, as it was called, against the Soviet Union without knowing that enough of Russia's nuclear a.r.s.enal would survive intact to destroy the United States in turn. A nuclear stalemate was complete.

The strategists referred to the condition as Mutual a.s.sured Destruction, or MAD. There was nothing mad about the grim equation. It made perfect sense by enforcing a nuclear peace. The arms race should have ended there. It was senseless to go on, but go on it did on both sides at the cost of trillions. Technology was in the saddle of a horse named Fear in a race of human folly. Minuteman went through two transformations into missiles always bigger and better. Minute-man II, with its range of 7,021 miles, a more powerful warhead, and accuracy to within a mile, was succeeded in 1971 by Minuteman III. It could fly 8,083 miles and was the first ICBM to carry multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, called MIRVs. Its warhead was fitted with three MIRVs, each yielding 375 kilotons, the equivalent of thirty Hiros.h.i.+ma bombs, and each released at timed intervals onto a different target with an accuracy of 800 feet. The 1,000 of these third-generation Minutemen deployed by the United States thus became the equivalent of 3,000 rockets. The Soviets were always matching, and to humanity's ultimate good fortune always deepening the stalemate, until time could do its work.

Purchasing the time in which the Soviet Union could self-destruct was not the only accomplishment of Schriever and those he led. Their ICBMs became more than weapons, they became vehicles that opened the exploration of s.p.a.ce. John Glenn, the first American to circle the earth in February 1962 in NASA's Mercury program, was lofted on an Atlas rocket and orbited and returned to earth in a modification of the same Mark 2 hydrogen bomb reentry vehicle used on Thor. The technology that applied to bringing a bomb back into the atmosphere without burning the bomb up made it possible to do the same with a man. The second-generation t.i.tan ICBM, t.i.tan II, was the lifting horse in Gemini, NASA's 1965 follow-on program in its progress to the moon. With a booster stage thrust of 430,000 pounds, this ICBM was able to hoist into orbit a s.p.a.cecraft large enough for two men to perfect the rendezvous and docking operations in s.p.a.ce that were a necessary precursor to the moon voyage. The venture that had been forced to rely on Simon Ramo to round up the technogical expertise needed because the American aircraft industry was an aeros.p.a.ce desert in the mid-1950s generated a vast aeros.p.a.ce industry that would carry the United States into the twenty-first century as the world's sole superpower. The question became not the quant.i.ty and quality of American military power, but whether the leaders of the United States would wield it wisely or foolishly, as the war in Iraq would so aptly ill.u.s.trate.

Schriever was unable to obtain control of the s.p.a.ce photoreconnaissance system for the Air Force after Discoverer succeeded and became the covert Corona. Again on the advice of Killian and Kistiakowsky, as well as that of Edwin Land, Eisenhower established a new ultra-clandestine office to jointly manage reconnaissance satellites with the CIA. Under President Kennedy, it was named the National Reconnaissance Office and kept so hush-hush that its very existence was secret. The NRO dwelt within the Air Force, was chiefly manned by Air Force personnel, and its head was the undersecretary of the Air Force, but it was not of the of the Air Force. The undersecretary reported directly to the secretary of defense on NRO matters and Air Force officers a.s.signed to the NRO were forbidden to discuss anything they did with outsiders. The only Air Force officer who could be briefed on its activities was the chief of staff, and he could not tell anyone beneath him what he learned. Air Force. The undersecretary reported directly to the secretary of defense on NRO matters and Air Force officers a.s.signed to the NRO were forbidden to discuss anything they did with outsiders. The only Air Force officer who could be briefed on its activities was the chief of staff, and he could not tell anyone beneath him what he learned.

Robert McNamara, Kennedy's and then Johnson's secretary of defense, also canceled the manned s.p.a.ce programs Schriever initiated. Manned s.p.a.ce missions remained the sole prerogative of NASA. But the ICBM endeavor had led the Air Force to invest too much in the infrastructure of s.p.a.ce operations at Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg and to educate too many officers in guidance and astronautical engineering to suppress the impetus to use s.p.a.ce. And by the 1970s enough officers who were disciples of Schriever were attaining senior positions of influence to propel s.p.a.ce operations forward. Whole families of satellites came into being. Weather satellites were sent aloft, initially to avoid wasting reconnaissance satellite film by attempting to photograph targets in the Soviet Union when they were obscured by cloud cover, then for general prediction of weather to a.s.sist military operations. Communications satellites, free of the interference caused by weather and other factors within earth's atmosphere, began sailing in s.p.a.ce to provide command and control of ground forces, naval vessels, and aircraft. Intelligence satellites were developed that not only transmitted photographs but also eavesdropped on hostile communications. Midas, an early warning infrared satellite system first envisioned under the WS-117L program, circled the earth in a series known by the innocuous t.i.tle Defense Support Program (DSP). The sensors on the satellites would be able to detect the flame of a Soviet missile the moment it was fired. (During the 1991 war in the Persian Gulf over Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait the sensors picked up heat from the firing of one of his medium-range Scud ballistic missiles as soon as it was launched. The missile's course could then be quickly triangulated and people in the target area warned to take shelter.) The coming of Global Positioning System satellites has been an enormous boon to navigation and the accuracy of weapons. Whether it is a Tomahawk cruise missile fired over a 1,500-mile course or a 2,000-pound bomb dropped from a fighter-bomber overhead, a weapon can be guided either spot-on or to within one meter of the target, hardly a difference given the ensuing blast. As one of Schriever's professional descendants, Major General Franklin "Judd" Blaisdell, who began his career as a Minuteman missileer and rose to become the Air Force's director of s.p.a.ce operations and integration, put it this way: "s.p.a.ce is the ultimate high ground."

These military satellite systems inevitably evolved into like systems for civilian use in communications, navigation, television broadcasting, and other fruitful purposes. The communications satellites, relaying voice, data, and televised images throughout the world, made globalization possible. By 2007 approximately 6,600 satellites of all types, military and civilian, had been sent up over the years. Of these, 850 to 920 were in active use in 2007, 568 for communications. The most common orbit is along the line of the equator about 22,000 miles above the earth. It is called geosynchronous because the satellites are given an orbital speed synchronized with the rotation of the earth. Viewed from earth, they appear to be motionless. The satellites are, in effect, parked in s.p.a.ce at a point where they can most efficiently fulfill their function. So much that Schriever and his comrades pioneered would be taken for granted and go unremarked in daily life. For example, most people who slide their credit card into the electronic reader on a gas pump or an automated teller machine have no idea their card's validity is being checked via s.p.a.ce, because it is cheaper to rent access to a satellite than to a phone line. And they a.s.sume, correctly, that if they have a GPS instrument in their car, they won't get lost anymore.

EPILOGUE:.

THE SCHRIEVER.

LUCK.

JOHNNY VON NEUMANN FINDS FAITH BUT NOT PEACE.

The cruelty of John von Neumann's fate deprived him of seeing the fulfillment of his work. His left shoulder became painful in the summer of 1955 and that August he went to see an orthopedic surgeon at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. As a commissioner of the Atomic Energy Commission, he was ent.i.tled to government medical care. The surgeon X-rayed the shoulder and discovered what he described to von Neumann as a "giant cell" tumor. The tumor was probably benign, the doctor said, but surgery soon afterward revealed otherwise. Worse, the tumor itself was not the primary source of the malignancy. He had testicular cancer. The disease there had metastasized and the cancer was spreading throughout his system. At first, he continued going to his AEC office as usual, but it soon became apparent that this was no longer possible. He and his wife, Klari, disposed of their house in Georgetown and moved to an apartment at the Woodner, only a fifteen-minute drive to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Was.h.i.+ngton, where he went regularly for treatment and therapy. Their marriage had been a difficult one. She was given to depression and resentment over his neglect of her as a result of an obsession with his work and his absentmindedness and they had had ferocious rows. Yet once he became ill, she treated him with nothing but tenderness. The treatments did not help. His condition grew steadily worse. Cancer medicine was in its infancy in the mid-1950s. In April 1956, he entered Walter Reed as a full-time patient, never to emerge again, except by ambulance in a wheelchair, until his death.

Vince Ford was a.s.signed to watch over von Neumann and to be of what a.s.sistance he could to Klari. He was immensely kind and caring to both. That February, with Johnny already mostly bedridden at home, Ford arranged through Lewis Strauss, the chairman of the AEC, for Eisenhower to award von Neumann the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He had to accept the honor in a wheelchair in the Oval Office, the president bending over to pin the medal on the lapel of his suit jacket, but it is evident from the smile on his face caught by the White House photographer that he was pleased. "I wish I could be around long enough to deserve this honor," he said to the president. Eisenhower attempted to ignore the finality. "You will be with us a long time," he replied. "We need you." At Ford's suggestion, Strauss also saw to it that the AEC presented von Neumann with the prized Enrico Fermi Award. Von Neumann tried to stay game. Out of respect and affection for him, his colleagues on the ICBM Scientific Advisory Committee held one of their meetings at Walter Reed, so that Johnny could still chair it. Then he pa.s.sed the chairmans.h.i.+p to Clark Millikan of Caltech, but had himself driven by ambulance to the Pentagon where he attended meetings in his wheelchair until he was too weak to do even that. Again out of a unique respect, Millikan kept the word "acting" before his t.i.tle of chairman until Johnny was gone.

The confrontation with eternity forced von Neumann to answer finally the question that had pursued him for so many years: was he a Christian or a Jew? He decided he wanted to be a Christian. He asked Ford, who was a Catholic, to find a priest who could instruct him in the Roman faith, warning Vince he needed one who was sufficiently intellectual to be compatible. Ford located the right man at the Benedictine priory in Was.h.i.+ngton, a scholarly priest named Anselm Strittmatter. He and von Neumann had long conversations and when Father Strittmatter concluded that von Neumann was ready, Johnny affirmed his faith, confessed, and received Communion. There was no need for him to be baptized, because he had already received that sacrament back in 1935 when his daughter, Marina, was baptized.

Von Neumann's new faith brought him little consolation. He was frightened to die. The doctors would not sedate him heavily until the final months and he was in pain and had terrible nightmares. His screams and shouts disturbed the other patients on the ward. Ford went to Strauss once more and through his influence von Neumann was moved to a private suite on Walter Reed's third floor, the same suite in which General John "Black Jack" Pers.h.i.+ng, commander-in-chief of the American forces in France during the First World War and subsequent chief of staff of the Army, had spent his last years. The security people became concerned that his outbursts might reveal secrets to Soviet spies. The special phone installed in the suite to connect him with the AEC was disconnected. The other phones were monitored and the doctors, nurses, and corpsmen a.s.signed to care for him were vetted for reliability.

No one could know for certain, but from fragments of what von Neumann said in his agony, it appeared that his nightmares did not arise from any Roman Catholic vision of the fires of h.e.l.l or Purgatory. Rather, they seemed to be provoked by the realization that his extraordinary mind, which he valued so much, was going to cease to exist. Death was cheating him out of the years of achievement that should have been opening before him. He seemed to fear as well that what he had accomplished would not outlive him, that he would become a forgotten man.

He died on February 8, 1957, at the age of fifty-three, after Father Strittmatter, who subsequently said a funeral ma.s.s for him in the Walter Reed chapel, had given him the last rites of the Church. Von Neumann had asked to be buried at Princeton, where the Inst.i.tute for Advanced Study had been his home for so long. The bishop of Trenton refused him burial in consecrated ground there because he was a divorced man, despite the fact that it was his first wife, Mariette Kovesi, who had divorced him. The von Neumanns had previously purchased a family plot in a nondenominational cemetery at Princeton and on a clear, cold morning he was laid in it beside his mother and Klari's father, Charles Dan, who had committed suicide in despair after his exile from Hungary in 1939. Several of his former colleagues at the inst.i.tute came to the burial, including Robert Oppenheimer in his trademark porkpie hat, grateful for von Neumann's valiant defense of him against the unjust charges of disloyalty. Six years later, Klari was buried next to her Johnny. She had remarried and the new marriage seemed a comfortable arrangement, but one evening in November 1963, after a c.o.c.ktail party in La Jolla, California, she walked into the sea.

As the decades pa.s.sed, von Neumann was sometimes forgotten when he should not have been. In 2005, Thomas Sch.e.l.ling, a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, and Robert Aumann, also an emeritus professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, received a n.o.bel Prize for their achievements in applying game theory to the deterrence of nuclear war, labor negotiations, and other conflict situations. A lengthy article in The Was.h.i.+ngton Post The Was.h.i.+ngton Post reporting the award neglected to mention that von Neumann was the inventor of game theory. In general, he retained a modest if shrunken fame. A postage stamp was struck in his honor in 2005. The reporting the award neglected to mention that von Neumann was the inventor of game theory. In general, he retained a modest if shrunken fame. A postage stamp was struck in his honor in 2005. The New Columbia Encyclopedia New Columbia Encyclopedia and similar reference works carried short entries citing his invention of game theory and his work in quantum theory (also referred to as quantum mechanics) and in the development of high-speed electronic computers. The references usually do not mention his role in the building of the rockets and the consequences that flowed from their creation. The Air Force did not forget. In 1997, he was posthumously given the Air Force s.p.a.ce and Missile Pioneers Award and named to the Hall of Fame at s.p.a.ce Command Headquarters at Peterson Air Force Base at Colorado Springs. and similar reference works carried short entries citing his invention of game theory and his work in quantum theory (also referred to as quantum mechanics) and in the development of high-speed electronic computers. The references usually do not mention his role in the building of the rockets and the consequences that flowed from their creation. The Air Force did not forget. In 1997, he was posthumously given the Air Force s.p.a.ce and Missile Pioneers Award and named to the Hall of Fame at s.p.a.ce Command Headquarters at Peterson Air Force Base at Colorado Springs.

"THE SLOWEST OLD TREV HAS EVER GONE IN A CADILLAC"

The Roman candle that was Trevor Gardner flared out before he could help guide to fruition the extraordinary enterprise he had done so much to initiate. In February 1956, just as the building of the Atlas was gathering momentum, he resigned as a.s.sistant secretary of the Air Force for research and development. His resentment at the administration's economies had been growing for some time. He also felt betrayed by Wilson's acquiescence in Eisenhower's decision at the end of 1955 to a.s.sign the IRBM joint priority with the ICBM. Gardner was convinced that the lesser intermediate-range missile would drain the resources needed to create the big one that the nation had to have to survive. Matters came to a head in the winter of 195556 when Gardner demanded increases in Air Force research and development funding. He drew up a new budget and got Twining, who was still chief of staff, White, then vice chief, and others in the Air Force hierarchy, along with Jimmy Doolittle, to sign off on it with him. Quarles rejected it as "juvenile" in view of the stringencies mandated by Eisenhower. Gardner told Quarles the official budget "would simply guarantee us the second best Air Force in the future" and said he was going to resign.

He went to see von Neumann in his apartment at the Woodner and told him that he could no longer work with Quarles. By now the two men had become comrades in a common endeavor. The day Eisenhower pinned the Presidential Medal of Freedom on von Neumann, he telephoned Gardner afterward and said, "Today, I received your medal." Von Neumann received Gardner in his wheelchair. He did his best to dissuade his impetuous friend from quitting. Gardner's best hope to influence events over the long haul lay from within government, von Neumann argued. Once he dropped out of the administration, his influence would depart with him. "One does not leave a position of strength if one wishes to win the campaign," von Neumann said. "And your position of strength is crucial to winning." Gardner listened and, to the sorrow of his friend, remained adamant. There was a last-minute meeting with Wilson aboard his yacht off Miami, where he was vacationing. Wilson also wanted Gardner to stay, but he would not concede Gardner's price of an increase in research and development. And so Gardner submitted his formal letter of resignation on February 10, 1956. Events were to prove how right von Neumann's admonition was that they were engaged in a marathon, not a sprint. Twenty months later Sputnik I's beep, beep, beep beep, beep, beep from s.p.a.ce as it circled the earth broke the padlocks on the budget coffers. from s.p.a.ce as it circled the earth broke the padlocks on the budget coffers.

As so often behind the curtain in human dramas, there was more to Gardner's resignation than policy disagreements. His personality was disintegrating. His drinking, always heavy, had grown much heavier. The alcohol and the womanizing to which he was p.r.o.ne were destroying his marriage. (It ended in divorce in 1958 and his wife, the former Helen Aldridge, committed suicide afterward.) Vince Ford noted sadly how erratic his judgment had become. With the resignation, Ford later said, Gardner "had just shot himself down in flames by his own hand." He returned to Pasadena to rebuild Hycon, his electronics firm there. Simultaneously, he began publis.h.i.+ng a series of articles in Life, Look Life, Look, and a semiofficial Air Force magazine contending that because of confusion, bungling, and false economies at the top of the Pentagon, the United States was losing the missile race to the Soviets. "With every tick of the clock, the Soviet Union is moving closer to ... knocking this country out. Intercontinental air power and missiles are the new double-edged sword of destruction, hanging by a hair over us all," Gardner wrote in one article. If the Russians obtained ICBMs first, and Gardner predicted that the Soviets might well have them by 1960, "Pearl Harbor could seem like child's play." The articles were the catalyst for the subsequent missile gap fright. Schriever tried to convince him that things were not that dire, that despite its problems the ICBM project was essentially on course. Gardner would not heed him. The articles made the task of rebuilding his business more difficult because they brought retaliation in the form of military contracts he should have been given but was denied. Luckily for Gardner, the retaliation was not severe enough to drive him out of business. His security clearance was suspended for a time as well, purportedly because of the drinking but probably also as a backhand for the articles. Then Gardner got ahold of himself. He stopped drinking. He did not go to Alcoholics Anonymous or any other organization that helps addicts. He just stopped cold. "Do you have any coffee?" he would ask one of the waiters during c.o.c.ktails after a meeting in Was.h.i.+ngton or elsewhere. Schriever kidded Gardner about his unaccustomed teetotaling. "Since you've been drinking that stuff, you're no d.a.m.n fun anymore," he would say with a glance at Gardner's cup full of coffee and smile. His business began recovering and a month after his divorce he married a Swedish woman, Carie Bjurling, whom he had met and apparently been courting during the divorce proceedings. With her, he started a new family. Schriever and Ford encouraged him to get back into government service. After Kennedy's election in 1960, he served on a pre inaugural s.p.a.ce commission chaired by Jerome Wiesner and the following year on an Air Force s.p.a.ce commission convened by Schriever. But he was barred from any position of substance. The problem was not that he had been a Republican. Schriever and Ford went to Wiesner, who was appointed Kennedy's special a.s.sistant for science and technology, and others within the new administration, urging that Gardner's talents not be wasted. The answer was always the same: "He's too controversial."

On the morning of September 28, 1963, while he was shaving at a second home he had established in Was.h.i.+ngton, he died of a ma.s.sive heart attack. He was forty-eight years old. Schriever, who had never lost his affection for the wild Welshman and his admiration for all that Gardner had done for the nation, knew that he would break down if he attempted to give the eulogy during the funeral service at the Andrews Air Force Base chapel. He delegated the task to Jacobson. Gardner's second wife, Carie, asked Schriever to ride with her in the back of the limousine behind the black Cadillac hea.r.s.e that then carried an urn with Gardner's ashes to a mausoleum at the Fort Lincoln Cemetery in Was.h.i.+ngton. Ford recalled the sight of Schriever on the rear seat of the limousine outside the Andrews chapel before the cortege started, his long frame leaning back, his hands folded in his lap, his eyes staring off without seeing, the tears running down his face. Later, when the cortege got moving, Schriever turned to Carie and said, "Well, this is the slowest old Trev has ever gone in a Cadillac." As with von Neumann, the Air Force remembered and in 1997, Gardner also joined the roster at the s.p.a.ce and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame at s.p.a.ce Command in Colorado.

LOSING IT ALL AND FORGIVING A BROTHER.

John Bruce Medaris, the das.h.i.+ng Army major general in riding boots with a guardsman's mustache, who had attempted to steal the ICBM program out from under Schriever, lost everything himself. First came the loss of Jupiter to the Air Force. Then, at the urging of Killian and Kistiakowsky, Eisenhower decided that manned s.p.a.ce flight should be for peaceful purposes and should be placed under a single civilian agency with the authority to levy manpower, expertise, and hardware from the military. Congress went along with his wishes and in the pa.s.sage of the National Aeronautics and s.p.a.ce Act of 1958, the National Aeronautics and s.p.a.ce Administration (NASA) was born. Medaris opposed the creation of NASA in Senate testimony, but his voice had no more resonance than a whisper in a cathedral.

In October 1959, with a decree from Eisenhower in his hand, NASA's first administrator, Dr. T. Keith Glennan, stripped Medaris of approximately 2,100 engineers and other specialists engaged in rocket and s.p.a.ce work at the Redstone a.r.s.enal, including von Braun and his entire team of German experts. Simultaneously, Glennan confiscated a project that Medaris had been overseeing with von Braun for a giant booster rocket named Saturn. It would be designed to produce 1.5 million pounds of thrust in order to place large manned satellites in orbit and conduct lunar exploration. Medaris was deprived of everything but the tactical rocket business. Von Braun was delighted with the takeover. He had been urging it for two years. In November 1957, he and his friend and senior a.s.sistant, Ernst Stuhlinger, had distributed a paper advocating a National s.p.a.ce Establishment, an organization virtually identical to NASA, to conduct "scientific exploration and eventual habitation of s.p.a.ce." Von Braun was appointed director of the George C. Marshall s.p.a.ce Flight Center, which NASA formed in nearby Huntsville, Alabama, and remained its chief until 1970. The ambition he had held while building V-2 vengeance rockets for Adolf Hitler had been realized happily at last. The huge Saturn V rocket that transported Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin to the moon in 1969, much changed and improved over the original model ten years earlier, was von Braun's masterpiece. Medaris left the Army, took holy orders, and spent his retirement years as an Episcopal priest.

Ed Hall forgave his younger brother, Ted, for committing treason. There was something exquisitely ironic about the coincidence that the man who gave birth to Minuteman, the most formidable of American rockets, had a sibling who was the second most important Soviet atomic spy at Los Alamos. Because the FBI had never approached him about his brother's treachery, Hall had known nothing about it until 1996 when, five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the National Security Agency released the Venona doc.u.ments, the decoded intercepts of the Second World War radio traffic between Moscow and the KGB spy center at the Soviet consulate in New York. One of the messages, instead of referring to Ted Hall by his code name, Vlad, Russian for "Youngster," had carelessly used his real name. Although he moved to England in 1962 to take a post as a biophysicist at the renowned Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University when he thought the FBI might be close to unmasking him, no move was ever made to prosecute him. The NSA did not want the Soviet Union to know that it had broken Moscow's wartime codes. (Thanks to information obtained from his CIA friends by the infamous Kim Philby, who was a Soviet spy during his entire and highly successful career in the British Secret Service, the Russians had known all along about the code breaking.) Ed confronted his brother about the spying during a visit he and Edith made to England in September 1997. The two men had not seen each other since Ted and his family had left the United States in 1962 and both were now looking at the setting sun. Ed was eighty-three at the time of the reunion. Ted was approaching seventy-two and had cancer, with only two years to live. He made no attempt to hide his spying from his brother. He said he had believed that in giving the Soviets the secrets of the bomb he was helping to preserve world peace, that if the Russians also possessed this most terrible of weapons, there would be a standoff and less likelihood of war. Ed Hall found he could not be angry at his brother's duplicity. Ted's motive had not been venal, nor had his intent been evil, and he ceased spying as soon as the Second World War was over. But Ed's lack of anger did not mean that he approved. "It was d.a.m.ned foolish," he said. He attributed his brother's espionage to youth's impetuousness and absence of wisdom. "It was idealism, misplaced idealism. He was only nineteen," Ed said.

Hall's capacity for forgiveness did not extend to Schriever for taking Minuteman away from him. He grew more bitter about it in his old age. But he knew cheerfulness and pride as well when, in 1999, he too was recognized with the Air Force s.p.a.ce and Missile Pioneers Award.

"ONLY IN AMERICA"

The post-ICBM years were an anticlimax for Bernard Schriever. He received the fourth star of a full general in July 1961 after he became responsible for shepherding all aircraft, missiles, and other weapons from research and development right into production as chief of the new Air Force Systems Command. Bennie and his younger brother, Gerry, had preserved their boyhood relations.h.i.+p down through the decades since San Antonio. Now they were united professionally. Schriever brought Gerry, who had retained the eagles of a full colonel that LeMay had awarded him on Iwo Jima in 1945, to work for him as his chief of personnel. There were no accusations of nepotism, but Schriever would not have paid any attention if there had been. He knew that he could count on his brother.

Four stars did not bring contentment. Schriever did not get along with Robert McNamara and the civilian "Whiz Kids" from the RAND Corporation whom McNamara brought into the Pentagon with him to organize a new Systems a.n.a.lysis Division. These self-styled experts on military affairs had no respect for experience and considered seasoned senior officers like Schriever dinosaurs who ought to quietly fade into extinction. They claimed to base their decisions on statistical a.n.a.lysis and other mathematical factors. To Schriever's mind they acted from preconceived and untried notions that they packaged in statistical wrapping. He found himself being constantly hara.s.sed and overruled.

LeMay, who had risen to chief of staff in June 1961, never put his hand out in peace to Schriever. The two men stalked around each other. In one sour encounter, LeMay glanced at the four stars on Bennie's shoulder tabs and said, "You realize if I had had my way, you wouldn't be wearing those." Schriever said he understood that. Having come so far he could not help aspiring to be appointed chief of staff when LeMay retired at the beginning of 1965, but the Vietnam War was on and the airplane drivers argued that an operational type was needed. General John McConnell, who had worked for both LeMay and Power at SAC, got the job. On August 31, 1966, two weeks before his fifty-sixth birthday, Schriever retired in an elaborate ceremony near his headquarters at Andrews Air Force Base. He had served thirty-three years as a commissioned officer and could have held on for two more years until the mandatory retirement limit of thirty-five years, but it seemed pointless.

He decided he did not want to trade on his prestige and get rich by accepting a high position in one of the military industries. Somehow that did not accord with his self-image. Instead, he formed a consulting firm in Was.h.i.+ngton with another retired general, William "Bozo" McKee, who had been the first head of the Air Force Logisitics Command, the other half of the Air Materiel Command after the reorganization in 1961. They naturally availed themselves of their connections and prospered, but not to an unseemly extent. Schriever also acce