ICBM: The Making of the Weapon That Changed the World

From Library Journal\nStine, aerospace historian and engineer, has written the first comprehensive history of the ICBM. Uneven in coverage (too much data on the V-2 program and too little on the latest missile systems), the book still manages to present a fairly complete account of the development of most U.S. and Soviet ICBMs. The author has the ability to make technical material interesting and understandable. The text reads like a diary, with Stine offering vivid portrayals of the scientists and generals in the U.S. program, as well as personal insights into ways of avoiding future research and development problems. Previously unpublished material on the early Soviet ICBM program adds spice to the text. Did you know that early Soviet nose cones were made from such exotic materials as plywood? This clearly written volume provides the most complete, unclassified history of the ICBM in print. Recommended for public and high school libraries.
- Richard Nowicki, Emerson Vocational High Sch., Buffalo, N.Y.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.\nFrom Kirkus Reviews\nAn eyewitness history of the development of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, by former ICBM engineer and veteran author Stine (The Corporate Survivors, 1986, etc.). Subject to the pitfalls common to all ``big science'' projects (erratic funding, program alterations and other time-induced complications), Stine explains, the development of a missile that could deliver nuclear warheads anywhere on earth experienced its ups and downs since its inception among a group of German engineers in the early 1930's. Also as usual, actual demonstrations, when successful, proved most effective in raising development funds; Germany's WW II V-2 rocket inspired not only America's postwar importation of Wernher von Braun and company, but an array of programs that would eventually lead to the Polaris and Minuteman systems in the US and their counterparts in the USSR. Designed by idealistic scientists and engineers who often viewed their work as the only way to get into space, the ICBM program enormously outgrew its relatively puny offshoot, the Apollo program, drawing government funds into an ever-increasing arms competition between the Soviet Union and the US. Stine, who was fired from the ICBM program in 1957 after he discussed the military implications of the Soviets' Sputnik I satellite with a journalist, does not hesitate to assert here that the development of a defense against the ICBM, i.e., the Strategic Defense Initiative, is not only inevitable but imperative as ICBM technology trickles down to smaller, potentially less stable nations. A highly opinionated account in which debatable opinions are often intermingled with fact, but an intriguing look nonetheless at how weapon systems are developed. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.