Mushroom Cloud

The books in the First Strike series trace the life of Dr. Caleb Young, a fictional character who is a composite of our scientific community during the early years of the Cold War. He was born in 1920 in Berkeley, California, to physicist parents who had migrated from Central Europe to escape the Magyarization process in Hungary. Caleb takes the SAT test the first year it is offered, aces it, and is one of the first affirmative action, non-blue bloods without boarding school credentials to be admitted to Princeton in 1936. He passes all his undergraduate courses in the space of a year and a half and enters Dr. Eugene Wigner’s doctoral program. He is defending his thesis, and critics are becoming vocal when a thundering voice (Einstein’s) from the back of the auditorium speaks: “Caleb is correct.” Caleb was awarded his doctorate at the age of eighteen and a half. He goes on to become a staff scientist for the U.S. State Department in 1940 and works with other Hungarian-born scientists on the Manhattan Project until 1945. In late 1947, he becomes the chief science officer for the newly minted CIA. Dean Acheson (a blue blood) became a close friend of Dr. Young’s while they were both at the State Department. Caleb, upon Acheson’s recommendation, becomes President Truman’s main advisor for nuclear matters, sitting in on most National Security Council (NSC) meetings.

​Truman’s administration is critical that the Soviets respect the United States’ nuclear deterrent because the Western Allies had largely disbanded their conventional forces and the Soviets were becoming more aggressive in Central Europe. Caleb proposes two top secret CIA operations—Shellgame and Anaconda—to make the Soviets fear US nuclear bombers. Similarly, he later advises President Eisenhower that the United States needs a high-altitude reconnaissance plane because everyone in the country is fearful of another Pearl Harbor. Caleb (unmarried except to science) had gone to the Catholic University in DC and learned enough to help Lockheed’s chief engineer, Kelly Johnson, and his Skunk Works team design the U-2, which flew twenty-four missions over Soviet territory before being shot down on May 1, 1960.