Bennie Schriever invents and promotes Inter Continental Ballistic Missiles to assure the mutual destruction of the Soviet Union (and the world) in the event that country wants to make a nuclear first strike. Sheehan tracks Schreiver’s life from his early days as a pre-WW II pilot in the Air Force through the growing post-war strains between the Soviet Union and the US, a life central to the Cold War. Sheehan maintains a liberal perspective throughout — the U.S., he says, misread and overreacted to the communist threat. The book’s premise was interesting and the reviews when it came out were fine, but the book was so dense my mind wandered. Read instead, A Bright Shining Lie, by the same author about the Vietnam War. Now that was a great book.