by Neil Sheehan
Chapter 24: Interviews with General Schriever and Ivan Getting; Curtis LeMay-Nathan Twining correspondence in the LeMay and Twining Papers in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress; Rhodes’s Dark Sun. On LeMay’s desire for a twenty-megaton hydrogen bomb, see Scientific Advisory Board to the Chief of Staff, USAF, Professor John von Neumann’s Report on Nuclear Weapons, October 21, 1953, in the archives of the USAF Historical Research Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama; for the bomber gap, see the USAF two-volume history, Winged Shield, Winged Sword; Fred Kaplan’s The Wizards of Armageddon; and T. A. Heppenheimer’s 1997 Countdown: A History of Space Flight.
Chapter 25: Research at the Rocket Museum in the Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul in St. Petersburg during a trip to Russia in 2002; James Harford’s 1997 biography of Sergei Korolev, the leading Soviet rocket designer, Korolev; Heppenheimer’s Countdown; official SAC history, The Development of Strategic Air Command.
Chapter 26: Interviews with General Schriever; Nathan Twining correspondence in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress; Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940, edited by Stephen Schwartz, 1998, pp. 123–26 and footnotes.
Chapter 27: Interviews with General Schriever; research at Rocket Museum in St. Petersburg; Frederick Ordway and Ronald Wakeford’s 1960 International Missile and Spacecraft Guide; Col. Benjamin “Paul” Blasingame remembered vividly Maxwell facing down LeMay.
Chapter 28: The description of the experimental heavy bomber that was never built is drawn from the memories of General Schriever and Colonel Blasingame. Both also recalled the offshoot benefits from the project, such as the turbofan engine and its effect on both military and commercial aviation. The specifications of the B-70 are taken from the USAF’s Winged Shield, Winged Sword; Marcelle Size Knaack’s authoritative 1988 Post-World War II Bombers; and the official SAC history, The Development of Strategic Air Command.
BOOK IV STARTING A RACE
Chapters 29–31: Schriever interviews; also interviews with Marina von Neumann Whitman and Françoise Ulam and their reminiscences at Hofstra University conference on von Neumann, May 29-June 3, 1988; interviews with Foster Evans and Jacob Wechsler; also Evans’s lecture, “Early Super Work,” published in the Los Alamos Historical Society’s 1996 Behind Tall Fences; interview with Nicholas Vonneuman and his unpublished biography of his brother, “The Legacy of John von Neumann”; John von Neumann Papers in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress; Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun; Herman Goldstine’s 1972 The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann; Stanislaw Ulam’s 1976 Adventures of a Mathematician; William Poundstone’s 1992 Prisoner’s Dilemma; Norman Macrae’s 1992 John von Neumann; and Kati Marton’s 2006 The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World.
Chapter 32: Interviews with General Schriever, Col. Vincent Ford, and Trevor Gardner, Jr.; Colonel Ford’s unpublished memoir on the building of the ICBM; Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers biography of Gardner.
Chapter 33: Interviews with Simon Ramo and General Schriever; Ramo’s 1988 autobiography, The Business of Science: Winning and Losing in the High-Tech Age; Col. Vincent Ford’s unpublished memoir.
Chapter 34: Interview with Simon Ramo; Col. Vincent Ford’s memoir; Ramo’s The Business of Space; John Chapman’s 1960 Atlas: The Story of a Missile, for Karel Bossart’s early experimental work; General Schriever’s papers for copies of the declassified original correspondence, membership, and recommendations of the Tea Pot Committee; see also Jacob Neufeld’s 1990 Ballistic Missiles in the United States Air Force, 1945–1960 for Tea Pot Committee proceedings. Sidney Graybeal, the CIA’s original specialist on Soviet guided missilery, helped explain how difficult it was to obtain reliable information in the early years. The hair-raising account of the attempt to conduct photoreconnaissance of the Soviet launching grounds at Kapustin Yar with an RAF Canberra in 1953 is recounted by R. Cargill Hall, an Air Force historian and an authority on spy overflights of the Soviet Union and satellite photographic reconnaissance, in the Spring 1997 issue of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History.
Chapter 35: Trevor Gardner’s March 11, 1954, memorandum to Secretary Harold Talbott and Gen. Nathan Twining; Col. Vincent Ford’s memoir; Schriever and Ford interviews; Neufeld, Ballistic Missiles in the United States Air Force, 1945–1960; interview with Col. Ray Soper, USAF (Ret.).
Chapter 36: Schriever interviews; Col. Vincent Ford’s memoir.
BOOK V WINNING A PRESIDENT
Chapter 37: Schriever and Simon Ramo interviews; Schriever diary; Col. Vincent Ford’s memoir; Jacob Neufeld’s Ballistic Missiles in the United States Air Force, 1945–1960, for Secretary Quarles’s suggestion that the Ramo-Wooldridge team be integrated with Schriever’s WDD organization.
Chapter 38: Edward Hall interviews; interview with Edith Shawcross Hall; Hall’s unpublished autobiography; his entire military record, a copy of which was kindly obtained for me, with Hall’s permission, by his daughter, Sheila Hall. Interview with Col. Sidney Greene on the $2 million diverted from Convair for a prototype ICBM rocket engine.
Chapter 39: Schriever interviews and Schriever diary—memo on July 17, 1954, meeting with Tommy Power.
Chapter 40: Schriever interviews and diary; background on Joseph McNarney from Air Force histories and Web site. Thomas Lanphier, Jr.’s, role in shooting down the bomber carrying Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto is taken from Toland’s The Rising Sun. General Power’s efficiency reports on Schriever from Schriever’s service record.
Chapter 41: Schriever interviews and diary; Ramo’s autobiography, The Business of Science; the circumstances of Harold Talbott’s resignation are recounted in George M. Watson, Jr.’s, 1992 The Office of the Secretary of the Air Force, 1947–1965.
Chapter 42: Schriever interviews and diary.
Chapter 43: Interview with Dodie Schriever Moeller.
Chapter 44: Schriever interviews and diary; Col. Vincent Ford interviews and his memoir; an unpublished 1996 Ph.D. thesis by U.S. Army historian John Clayton Lonnquest, “The Face of Atlas: General Bernard Schriever and the Development of the Atlas Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, 1953–1960,” sheds considerable light on this episode. Dr. Lonnquest, chief, Office of History, Headquarters, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, most kindly shared his thesis with me.
Chapter 45: Dwight Eisenhower’s 1963 Mandate for Change: 1953–1956; Charles Bohlen’s 1973 Witness to History: 1929–1969; William Taubman’s 2003 Khrushchev: The Man and His Era; Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War; and Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad and The Road to Berlin, on Stalin’s attitude toward Marshal Georgi Zhukov.
Chapter 46: Schriever interviews and diary; Col. Vincent Ford interviews and memoir.
Chapter 47: Schriever interviews and diary; the structure of the Gillette Procedures is explained well in Jacob Neufeld’s Ballistic Missiles in the United States Air Force, 1945–1960.
Chapter 48: Interview with Burton Brown. Sidney Graybeal and Dr. Albert Wheelon, an original member of the Ramo-Wooldridge team who later became the CIA’s first deputy director for science and technology, were very helpful in laying out the subsequently intense and largely successful program to track Soviet missile progress.
BOOK VI BUILDING THE UNSTOPPABLE
Chapter 49: Schriever interviews; Neufeld, Ballistic Missiles in the United States Air Force, 1945–1960; Nathan Twining Papers for excerpt from Gen. Maxwell Taylor’s testimony before the Stuart Symington subcommittee.
Chapter 50: Interviews with Dr. Ruben Mettler and Adolf Thiel. Julian Hartt’s 1961 The Mighty Thor: Missile in Readiness was also of assistance in the writing of this and subsequent sections on Thor. An unpublished July 31, 1972, monograph by W. M. Arms for McDonnell Douglas, “Thor: The Workhorse of Space—A Narrative History,” was similarly helpful.
Chapter 51: The portrait of Maj. Gen. John Bruce Medaris is drawn from the observations of a number of people who worked with him, inclu
ding his deputy, Maj. Gen. John Zierdt, USA (Ret.); Brig. Gen. William Fiorentino, USA (Ret.), project manager for the Army’s Pershing II cruise missile; and Michael Baker, command historian at the U.S. Army Missile Command at Alabama’s Redstone Arsenal. Current Biography 1958 provided further biographical details. The profile of Wernher von Braun is drawn from a variety of sources, including his 1951 interview with Daniel Lang in The New Yorker magazine; Army Ordnance Satellite Program, unpublished November 1, 1958, historical monograph on the Army Ballistic Missile Agency by Paul Satterfield and David Akens; Ernst Stuhlinger and Frederick Ordway III’s 1994 Wernher von Braun: Crusader for Space, and Michael Neufeld’s definitive 2007 biography, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War.
Chapter 52: Interview with Mark Cleary, command historian, 45th Space Wing, Patrick Air Force Base, and monograph he wrote on the history of Cape Canaveral; interview with Col. Charles “Moose” Mathison, USAF (Ret.), on the construction work for the test-launching of the missiles.
Chapter 53: Interviews with Dr. Ruben Mettler, Adolf Thiel, Simon Ramo, and Schriever.
Chapter 54: Interviews with Dr. Ruben Mettler and Adolf Thiel, Col. Richard Jacobson, USAF (Ret.), Schriever, Simon Ramo, Maj. Gen. John G. Zierdt; Michael Baker; September 25, 1957, memorandum with attachments from Maj. Gen. J. B. Medaris to W M. Holaday, Special Assistant for Guided Missiles to the Secretary of Defense, Subject: Recommendations on the Selection of a Land-Based IRBM System; unpublished November 1, 1958, monograph by Satterfield and Atkins; unpublished December 1959 monograph, “Jupiter Story,” from Major General Medaris to Secretary of the Army Wilber Brucker.
Chapter 55: Interviews with Col. Richard Jacobson and General Schriever.
Chapter 56: Interviews with Col. Richard Jacobson and Schriever; September 25, 1957, memorandum from Medaris to Holaday; October 8, 1957, memorandum from Holaday to Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson, October 8, 1957.
Chapter 57: Schriever interviews; Holloway’s Stalin and the Bomb; Walter McDougall’s 1985 The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age; Harford’s 1997 biography of Sergei Korolev, Korolev; Heppenheimer’s 1997 Countdown; research at Rocket Museum in St. Petersburg; Jacob Neufeld’s Ballistic Missiles in the United States Air Force, 1945–1960, for Donald Quarles’s “Poor Man’s” economies; Inquiry into Satellite and Missile Programs, Hearings Before the Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee of the Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate, Eighty-fifth Congress, First and Second Sessions, 1957–1958, for the testimony of Edward Teller and others before Lyndon Johnson’s subcommittee.
Chapter 58: For details of the test range in the Caribbean and the South Atlantic I owe much to my interview with Mark Cleary and his 1991 monograph The 6555th Missile and Space Launches Through 1970; Schriever interviews; interviews with Ruben Mettler, Adolf Thiel, Cols. Richard Jacobson and Charles Mathison, and Brig. Gen. Robert Duffy, USAF (Ret.).
Chapter 59: Interview with Lt. Col. Jamie Wallace, USAF (Ret.). Colonel Wallace also provided me with a number of photographs of the DEI inspection. Also interviews with General Schriever and Col. Richard Jacobson.
Chapter 60: Humphrey Wynn’s 1994 RAF Nuclear Deterrent Forces; Harford’s Korolev; interviews with Lt. Col. Jamie Wallace, Col. Richard Jacobson, General Schriever, and Squadron Leader H. Basil Williamson, RAF (Ret.). Air Marshal Sir Reginald Harland, RAF (Ret.), who spent several years in the United States as a liaison officer on missile development, working with Schriever’s organization, arranged my interview in England with Squadron Leader Williamson and was most informative on the British-American agreement on Thor and its deployment.
Chapter 61: Interviews with General Schriever; Col. Roy Ferguson, Jr., USAF (Ret.); Lt. Gen. Richard Henry, USAF (Ret.).
Chapter 62: Interviews with Squadron Leader Williamson, Air Marshal Harland, Col. Richard Jacobson, and Lt. Col. Jamie Wallace; Wynn’s RAF Nuclear Deterrent Forces; interview with Lt. Gen. Benjamin Bellis, USAF (Ret.); Neufeld, Ballistic Missiles in the United States Air Force, 1945–1960; Medaris’s “Jupiter Story” monograph.
Chapter 63: Neufeld, Ballistic Missiles in the United States Air Force, 1945–1960; Space and Missile Systems Organization: A Chronology, 1954–1979, monograph, Office of History (SAMSO was a successor to Schriever’s WDD); interview with Lt. Col. Charles Getz III, USAF (Ret.), for Black Saturday.
Chapter 64: Schriever interviews; Space and Missile Systems Organization; Neufeld, Ballistic Missiles in the United States Air Force, 1945–1960; John Chapman’s 1960 Atlas: The Story of a Missile; interviews with Dr. Ruben Mettler and Adolf Thiel on the faulty engine turbopump; interviews with Mettler and Brig. Gen. Maurice Cristadoro, USAF (Ret.), one of the Atlas project officers, on throwing an Atlas into orbit with a 1958 Christmas greeting from Eisenhower; interview with Col. Prentice Peabody, USAF (Ret.), for the X-17 rocket and the successful development of an ablative warhead.
Chapter 65: Schriever interviews; interviews with Sidney Graybeal and Albert Wheelon; William Taubman’s Khrushchev: The Man and His Era; Harford’s Korolev; Heppenheimer’s Countdown.
Chapter 66: Schriever interviews; Neufeld, Ballistic Missiles in the United States Air Force, 1945–1960; interview with Gen. Benjamin Bellis.
Chapter 67: Schriever and Edward Hall interviews; Edward Hall’s unpublished autobiography; interview with Lt. Gen. Charles Terhune, USAF (Ret.), Schriever’s deputy at WDD; Robert Piper’s 1962 unpublished monograph, “The Development of the SM-80 Minuteman,” a secret history of the Minuteman program, written for the Historical Office of the Deputy Commander for Aerospace Systems of the Air Force Systems Command and subsequently declassified, with attachments, was a source of important details and helped to correct lapses in the memories of Schriever and Hall; General Terhune confirmed Curtis LeMay’s positive reaction to Hall’s briefing at the Pentagon and his support for Hall during the subsequent briefing for Secretary Neil McElroy.
Chapter 68: Interviews with Schriever, Edward Hall, Lt. Gen. Charles Terhune, Sidney Greene, Col. Richard Jacobson; Air Force biographical sketch of Gen. Samuel Phillips; Roy Neal’s 1962 Ace in the Hole: The Story of the Minuteman Missile, which also provided more biographical information on General Phillips. Colonel Hall had preserved the telegram from Maj. John Hinds among his papers and gave me a copy.
BOOK VII A SPY IN ORBIT AND A GAME OF NUCLEAR DICE
Chapters 69–71: Schriever interviews; interviews with Col. Frederic “Fritz” Oder, USAF (Ret.), Lt. Gen. Forrest McCartney, USAF (Ret.), Colonel Charles Mathison, and Richard Leghorn; Space and Missile Systems Organization; The Corona Story, the official history of the Discoverer-Corona project, completed in 1987 by Colonel Oder, James E. Fitzpatrick, and Col. Paul Worthman, USAF (Ret.), and declassified by the National Reconnaissance Office in 2007. R. Cargill Hall, who served as historian at the NRO for a time, kindly obtained a copy for me. Also Forging the Shield: Eisenhower and National Security for the 21st Century, 2005, chapter by Cargill Hall entitled “Clandestine Victory: Eisenhower and Overhead Reconnaissance in the Cold War.”
Chapters 72–77: Neufeld, Ballistic Missiles in the United States Air Force, 1945–1960; Heppenheimer’s Countdown; Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War; Taubman’s Khrushchev; Robert Kennedy’s 1968 Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis; Fred Kaplan’s 1983 The Wizards of Armageddon; Anatoly Dobrynin’s 1995 In Confidence; Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali’s 1997 One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964; The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Ernest May and Philip Zelikow’s 1997 editing of the tapes of the White House meetings during the crisis; Max Frankel’s 2004 High Noon in the Cold War: Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Cuban Missile Crisis; Fursenko and Naftali’s 2006 Khrushchev’s Cold War; Michael Dobbs’s 2008 One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War; the official SAC history, The Development of Strategic Air Command; Wynn’s RAF Nuclear Deterrent Forces.
> Chapter 78: Leonid Brezhnev’s cynical remark to his brother is recounted in the 1995 memoir by his niece, Luba Brezhneva’s The World I Left Behind: Pieces of a Past.
EPILOGUE THE SCHRIEVER LUCK
Chapter 79: The John von Neumann Papers, Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress; Col. Vincent Ford’s memoir; Macrae’s John von Neumann; Pound-stone’s Prisoner’s Dilemma.
Chapter 80: Schriever interviews; Col. Vincent Ford’s memoir; interview with Trevor Gardner, Jr.
Chapter 81: November 1, 1968, historical monograph on Army Ballistic Missile Agency; Edward Hall interview.
Chapter 82: Schriever interviews; personal attendance at annual Oldtimers Reunions as an invitee; interviews with Joni James Schriever.
Chapter 83: Interviews with Joni James Schriever; personal attendance at funeral.
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