Thread of the Silkworm (Revised)

This book tells the story of one of the most monumental blunders the United States committed during its shameful era of McCarthyism. It is the biography of a pioneer of the American space age who was mysteriously accused of being a Communist and deported to China, where he became -- to America's continuing chagrin -- the father of the Chinese missile program.

Dr. Tsien Hsue-shen was as important a figure to the birth of the space age as Alan Turing was to the birth of the computer age. At the height of his career, he held the Robert Goddard Chair of Jet Propulsion at Cal Tech and was featured in "Time" magazine and quoted extensively elsewhere. He helped lay the foundation for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Both during and after World War II, he worked on classified military projects for the U.S. government. Then suddenly he was put under a horrendous five-year house arrest and ultimately kicked out of the country in 1955. If his life had ended then, it would have been interesting but hardly extraordinary. But over the next few decades Tsien directed the development of the Dong Feng East Wind and Silkworm missiles in China -- in the process transforming a primitive military culture into one capable of delivering nuclear bombs intercontinentally.

Tsien's story made headlines around the world and continues to tantalize the scientific community. Was he a spy? "Thread of the Silkworm" explores this question. A compelling story of tragedy and triumph that spans more than eighty years of Chinese and American history, the book winds from the crumbling of a four-century-old dynasty in China to the terror of Japanese air raids over Shanghai, from the secretAmerican missile tests in southern California to the deadly concentration camp factories of the V-2 rocket in Germany, from Tsien's imprisonment on a small island in the United States to his conferences with the leaders of Russia and China. "Thread of the Silkworm" is the story of a scientist, aloof and shy, who tried to devote his life to science but who found himself on two continents at the vortex of the fickle, ever-shifting winds of world politics and war."Compelling. . . . Tsien Hsue-Shen deserves a place beside Sergei Korolev and Wernher von Braun in the pantheon of rocketry. But no historian possessed the unique technical and linguistic skills needed to attempt his biography until Iris Chang."--Walter A. McDougall, author of "The Heavens and the Earth"

"A captivating account . . . illustrates how the excesses of the McCarthy era drove talent from America to the benefit of another nation."--Arnold Kramish, Manhattan Project scientist and author of "The Griffin"