A fiery peace in a cold war: Bernard Schriever and the ultimate weapon

A rite of succession

Book I. Becoming an American : Ellis Island and a tragedy in Texas ; A benefactor and the house on the twelfth green ; The virtues of golf ; White silk scarves and open cockpits ; Entering the brotherhood ; A fiasco and reform ; Staying the course ; A fork in the road ; "Let's dive-bomb the bastards" ; The text on war

Book II. Inheriting a different world : Atomic diplomacy ; Spies inside the barbed wire ; "The balance has been destroyed" ; The state that was Stalin ; A confrontation and a misreading ; Containing the menace ; Neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet, nor fog ; Stalin gets his bomb ; The consequences of delusion ; Good intentions gone awry

Book III. The perils of an apprenticeship : Hap Arnold's legacy ; Getting organized ; Bomber leader ; Into the lion's den ; Moscow opts for rockets ; A nuclear reactor in the sky ; Low-level tactics and the flying boom ; The last tangle and an ambush

Book IV. Starting a race : Seeking scientific validation ; When Hungary was Mars ; A fascination with explosions ; Finding an ally ; Marshaling the expertise ; The tea pot committee ; Getting started ; "Okay, Bennie, it's a deal.

Book V. Winning a president : A schoolhouse and a radical new approach ; The guru of rockets ; A problem with Tommy Power ; How greed corrupts ; An assault from an unexpected quarter ; A sense of adventure ; No time for family ; Getting to Ike ; A difficult dialogue at Geneva ; Dazzling the monarch ; No more nitpicking ; A radar in Turkey

Book VI. Building the unstoppable : A competitor ; The team of Mettler and Thiel ; John Bruce Medaris and Wernher von Brawn ; The Cape of the Canebrake vs. "Moose" Mathison ; A few grains of sand ; Medaris goes for the ICBM ; The reluctant rescuer ; Thor vs. Jupiter ; Sputnik ; Thor readies for England ; Jamie Wallace's Thor show ; The biggest airlift since Berlin ; "Roy ... I want you to get me Camp Cooke" ; A tie ; Black Saturday ; The trials of Atlas and a Christmas surprise ; Whose missile gap? ; A victory despite the bugs ; Minuteman: Ed Hall's triumph ; "You couldn't keep him in that job"

Book VII. A spy in orbit and a game of nuclear dice : A would-be spy in the sky goes away ; Mathison snatches the prize ; Discoverer goes "black" into Corona ; A harebrained scheme ; Palm tree disguises ; Keeping the military on the leash"Use 'em or lose 'em" ; LeMay and Tommy Power as the wild cards ; Avoiding Götterdämmerung ; Buying time for the empire to implode

Epilogue. The Schriever luck : Johnny von Neumann finds faith but not peace ; "The slowest old Trev has ever gone in a Cadillac" ; Losing it all and forgiving a brother ; "Only in America" ; A reunion with Hap.