A cheating scandal on no-fail proficiency exams in 2014 briefly exposed the American public to the secretive, isolated, tedious, zero-defect, and career-limiting field of nuclear missileers in the U.S. Air Force. David Bath's slim volume based upon his doctoral dissertation identifies the origins of many of those occupational cultures, conditions, and limitations at the inception of the career field in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Bath was an air force missileer at the end of the Cold War, and he insightfully and sympathetically draws upon official histories, memoirs, military periodicals, and oral histories. He demonstrates how missileers, once seen as the ultimate warriors entrusted with the responsibility to maintain and launch some of the most devastating weapons ever created, became balkanized outcasts who suffered from lower prestige, pay, and promotion opportunities. The antagonists here are the combat-experienced pilots of manned aircraft, initially of strategic bombers then of fighters. They first viewed nuclear ballistic missiles and those who operated them as threats to their budgets, prestige, and strategic significance. Later, combat-rated pilots came to see missileers as nonwarriors, who (thankfully) never performed their wartime mission as others engaged in decades of persistent limited warfare. Bath emphasizes how pilots dominated not only the top ranks of the air force but also the top missile commands despite rarely having any operational experience with nuclear missiles.