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TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE VOICEon January 14, 2014
The main reason I was interested in "Arguments That Count" is because I worked on ballistic missile defense systems for much of my aerospace engineering career. My first job out of college was as a systems engineer on the Sprint program at Martin Marietta in Orlando, Florida. Sprint was a state-of-the-art, high-performance anti-ballistic-missile (ABM) missile designed to destroy incoming Soviet Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) warheads just a few seconds before they reached their U.S. targets. Sprint did so by--wait for it--exploding its own nuclear warhead in the atmosphere not very far above American territory. Only in the bizarre calculus of the Cold War arms race does the idea of detonating nuclear weapons above one's own homeland make sense as a way to blunt an attack by another nation. Talk about the cure being worse than the disease! Anyway, the Safeguard ABM system, comprising Sprint and its long-range counterpart Spartan along with control centers and phased-array radars, became bargaining chips in arms-control negotiations with the Soviet Union. The system was only operational for a few months at Grand Forks, North Dakota, before the U.S. traded it away for treaty concessions.
Later in my career, I worked on preliminary designs for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, a.k.a. "Star Wars") orbital ABM system, and on Patriot, the anti-aircraft missile that gained fame as an anti-Scud ABM in the Gulf Wars. As an engineer, I always found it hard to reconcile the objective realities of missile defense technology and operations, which enormously favor the attacker, with the "pie-in-the-sky" fantasies and physically impossible promises of politicians and company marketeers. With that said, however, my interest in the science, technology and politics of missile defense has remained strong over the years. I fully expected "Arguments That Count" to provide useful insights into the subject.
And it does. Dr. Rebecca Slayton weaves together the diverse strands of several factors involved in the early days of America's missile defense effort, concentrating on the period of maximum danger in the 1960s and '70s, when all-out war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union seemed very likely. Starting with the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) system, she surveys the status and evolution of computers, systems management, political debates and the burgeoning field of software engineering, which virtually no one at the time thought was very important. She also shows how the roles of Presidential scientist advisors evolved over the years, and how they guided and molded public policy in ways that sometimes were not in the Nation's best interests.
"Arguments That Count" focuses largely on how the perception of software and the management of its development have changed since the days of ENIAC. Dr. Slayton shows how engineers at first viewed the real-time software they needed to manage missile defense operations as simple, utterly reliable "black boxes" that always worked as designed. Instead, they learned the hard way that software is complicated, expensive and time-consuming to develop, and subject, at least as much if not more than electrical and mechanical systems, to catastrophic failure. With virtually every aspect of modern life dependent on real-time software, it is instructive to learn how far off the mark the pioneers were in their vision of the future.
Well-footnoted and quite readable considering the esoteric subject matter, "Arguments That Count" gives the reader a great appreciation for and understanding of perhaps one of the most difficult tasks any nation ever set itself to--defending its population from aerial nuclear attack. It may be a little too "scholarly" for the casual reader, but I enjoyed it a lot because of my experience in the field. You can't go wrong reading it if you're interested in the topic.
Later in my career, I worked on preliminary designs for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, a.k.a. "Star Wars") orbital ABM system, and on Patriot, the anti-aircraft missile that gained fame as an anti-Scud ABM in the Gulf Wars. As an engineer, I always found it hard to reconcile the objective realities of missile defense technology and operations, which enormously favor the attacker, with the "pie-in-the-sky" fantasies and physically impossible promises of politicians and company marketeers. With that said, however, my interest in the science, technology and politics of missile defense has remained strong over the years. I fully expected "Arguments That Count" to provide useful insights into the subject.
And it does. Dr. Rebecca Slayton weaves together the diverse strands of several factors involved in the early days of America's missile defense effort, concentrating on the period of maximum danger in the 1960s and '70s, when all-out war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union seemed very likely. Starting with the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) system, she surveys the status and evolution of computers, systems management, political debates and the burgeoning field of software engineering, which virtually no one at the time thought was very important. She also shows how the roles of Presidential scientist advisors evolved over the years, and how they guided and molded public policy in ways that sometimes were not in the Nation's best interests.
"Arguments That Count" focuses largely on how the perception of software and the management of its development have changed since the days of ENIAC. Dr. Slayton shows how engineers at first viewed the real-time software they needed to manage missile defense operations as simple, utterly reliable "black boxes" that always worked as designed. Instead, they learned the hard way that software is complicated, expensive and time-consuming to develop, and subject, at least as much if not more than electrical and mechanical systems, to catastrophic failure. With virtually every aspect of modern life dependent on real-time software, it is instructive to learn how far off the mark the pioneers were in their vision of the future.
Well-footnoted and quite readable considering the esoteric subject matter, "Arguments That Count" gives the reader a great appreciation for and understanding of perhaps one of the most difficult tasks any nation ever set itself to--defending its population from aerial nuclear attack. It may be a little too "scholarly" for the casual reader, but I enjoyed it a lot because of my experience in the field. You can't go wrong reading it if you're interested in the topic.
on August 17, 2014
Excellent review of events and people involved in the issue of missile defense from long past history. While the emphasis is on "software" as a major driver -- in my opinion this may be a little skewed. Nevertheless some good points and good examples are made. Book is not too technical, but that was not the intent.
