NONFICTION - March 24, 1996

THREAD OF THE SILKWORM by Iris Chang (Basic Books: $27.50; 329 pp.). Imagine it’s 1991 and you’re a gunner aboard a U.S.-flagged destroyer in the Persian Gulf. You spot something hurtling toward your ship, and curse it--but also Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover, because you paid attention in the academy’s class on the history of ballistic warfare. The object is a Chinese-made missile, and as your ship’s Tomahawks fly toward it, you note the irony that the Silkworm might not exist were it not for McCarthy and Hoover; the climate of fear they helped create resulted in the 1955 deportation (on trumped-up charges of Communist Party membership) of Tsien Hsue-shen, then director of Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who would subsequently become the father of China’s missile program. Iris Chang, a freelance journalist, tells a fascinating tale in “Thread of the Silkworm,” and if the book is flawed--because it’s framed as a biography rather than political history and because Tsien, now in his 80s, won’t cooperate with biographers--it’s a page-turner nonetheless.