Who is Brigadier General Warren A. Black from Fail Safe and what is their importance?

Brigadier General Warren A. Black is married with two children, twelve and fourteen. Born into a very wealthy San Francisco family, he went to college with the man who later became the current President. Black made the unusual choice of avoiding business and politics in favor of the military. He met his wife when he was a young colonel sent by the Air Force to take a university course in international relations. Intelligent and well-informed, Black long has been an opponent of such hawk-like notions as preemptive strikes and the arms escalation race of the Cold War, which makes him something of a pariah in Pentagon circles. He has a recurring dream of being a bull in a ring, his hide being flayed off in strips by an invisible matador, which Black knows is linked to the pressure of his job. He also knows he should resign but cannot bring himself to leave the Air Force. A devoted family man and a trusted friend of the President, he is the one who receives the terrible assignment of dropping nuclear bombs on New York City to prevent all-out war with Russia. Black's family and the President's wife are in New York at the time he carries out the order, knowing that the sacrifice of them and millions of others is the only way to avoid mutual assured destruction. Immediately after the bombing, Black takes a fatal dose of poison from his suicide kit, and the President recommends that he be posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.