Get Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology Of Nuclear Missile Guidance Penned By Donald Angus MacKenzie Presented As Mobi
is a book that is, while very interesting, also incredibly dry, This was not a book that I eagerly anticipated opening up, yet I made sure to stick with it because it was so informative.
I am young enough that all of my historical memory is postCold War although I was born before it ended, I didn't understand what was happening until well after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
This book is therefore a fascinating look into nuclear politics and technology before the Cold War ended, The author has a short epilogue explaining that the Cold War ended pretty much as the book went to press,
The technology preMEMS and prereally good GPS is fascinating, I found the interplay between accuracy and nuclear strategy fascinating you can't take out a missile silo if you can't guarantee that an ICBM will actually hit within a mile or so of the silo.
The book also
emphasizes that politics cannot be disconnected from technology something that I wish Enrico Fermi had understood before taking the genie out of the bottle, assuming that science for its own sake would be enough of a motivation to invent the nuclear weapon to begin with.
I would not recommend this book unless you find any of these topics very interesting, as the book takes a lot of effort to get through.
It is very exhaustive, which is both its strength and its weakness, I got about halfway through and gave in, It was not as dry or meticulous as you would think, the first chapter or two required some mathematics, I think I gave up because I never really looked forward to getting back to reading it, although I enjoyed it when I did.
The book is pretty gold, which makes it harder to enjoy, I also enjoyed the discussion of US government contracting, as I am recently a Contracting Officer's Representative, The way the government does business has changed significantly, Just because I didn't finish it, you may like it,
This is a tremendously wellresearched book about guidance systems, It takes the reader from the beginning steps of navigation to guiding a missile from an obscure part of the world to a target the size of a dinner plate.
A big part of the book centers around two massive obstacles politics and physics, From the political side, different departments and companies worked together while fighting like dogs, How accurate does it need to be A huge political question that goes far beyond rational thought into intimidating the enemy,
From a physical side, Donald discusses physics at a high level without getting into the mathematics or material sciences, In addition, the inventions occur at the dawn of modern computing, Of course, at this cutting edge, things did not work out as planned,
This is a great historical book that captures the broad history of navigation, guidance, computers, engineering, inventing and government, I learned a lot about an obscure topic that now touches every part of modern technology and society,
A fascinating book on politics and technology, examining the contingency of technological development through an analysis of the history of nuclear missile guidance until the end of thes.
Increased accuracy is not an inevitable or natural consequence of technical change, but rather the product of a complex process of conflict and cooperation between various social actors, such as technologists, laboratories and corporations, and political and military leaders.
The book provides a good antidote to technical and political determinisms, coupled with accessible explanations of relevant technical concepts, which are crucial for understanding how seemingly small "technicalities" become focal points in political disputes over visions of the future of certain technologies.
sitelink goodreads. com/searchqin An informative, if often longwinded history of the development of nuclear missile guidance, It gets caught up in the somewhat contrived sociological aspect of the story sometimes, but it balances this with excellent references to interviews.
I didn't enjoy this book as much as I had hoped to, I think I had expected it to be a more technical account of the gyro technology and its evolution, While it did provide some detail on this and some interesting anecdotes about the challenges with manufacturing, its main focus was the politics and societal factors that drove the development of the various technologies.
I shouldn't have been surprised by this fact given the title "A Historical Sociology, . . ", but I had hoped for a bit more technical detail,
Given that I've read a few books and articles about the development of rocket technology for the space program and for spy satellite launches, it was quite interesting to see the overlap with the technology developed for strategic nuclear missiles.
Some of the most interesting parts of this book for me were:
How little the fundamental gyro and accelerometer technology changed between the Vand modern ICBMs
The difficulty involved in knowing the initial location and orientation of the missile, and how this was addressed for various missile programs in the US and USSR for landstationary, landmobile, and subbased missiles
How much of an "art" there is to manufacturing inertial systems for strategic nuclear weapons, and the difficulties of scaling the labdeveloped systems to a deployable system.
The politics around ICBM accuracy both domestically and internationally the core focus of the book There is a prevalent belief that certain avenues of technological change are natural and inevitable, but for very expensive and difficult technologies this isn't necessarily true.
The last few pages of the book deals with nonproliferation the author claims that because there are no inevitable technologies that the elimination of nuclear weapons and the prevention of their redevelopment is very possible.
This book could really use an addendum with information learned after the collapse of the USSR, but I would guess that most information concerning missile guidance has stayed secret, and that since the West is no longer as concerned with Russian missiles that we have not learned much new information through other channels.
PageIslands of noncapitalism existing in places like Draper Labs not unlike the design bureaus of the Soviet Union, I'd extend this further to point out that every corporation or similar body exists to buffer it's employees against raw capitalism and if left unchecked this buffering cannibalizes the market through monopoly and reinvents central planning with all it's failings or even more failures, since at least the state that does central planning is responsible to its citizens, where the monopoly organization only has its shareholders.
It's theorized that the design bureaus were more isolated from each other and this lead to greater differences between say missile guidance and aviation guidance than what was seen in the US at the same time.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union large aerospace companies in the US have consolidated to the point of eliminating competition except at the international level, which may be a step inferior to having at least a handful of design bureaus with enforced separation.
PageThe Soviets were less trustful of software and used voting systems in their missiles while the US employed singlestring architectures.
This lead to the joke observation that the Soviets had a dictatorship domestically but democracy in their missiles while the US had dictatorship in their missiles but democracy domestically.
The possibility that a system or theory can be tested even if it is impractical to do so raises the reliability or stature of that versus one that cannot be tested.
This comes up when the book discusses the infrequency and limited nature of ICBM tests, I would apply this to Intelligent Design vs, evolution the fact that evolution as it occurs over millions of years can be tested by waiting around for those millions of years and observing the changes makes it a better theory than one where there is no expectation that we will observe in the future the activities of creator aliens/gods, because their creative acts may have been one time events.
The 'certainty trough' is an interesting model of faith in a system's capability: on the xaxis you have a measure of a person's knowledge of a system, on the other you have their certainty.
People who know little or nothing about the system and the organizations and technologies involved don't have much faith in it, the trough region is all those who have read the datasheet or marketing materials or equivalent and take it at face value, and finally on the end where uncertainty ramps up again there are those very intimately involved in the production of the system and are aware of the all the design flaws and past test failures.
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