The Making of the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the Military-Intellectual Complex

Abstract

The Soviet detonation of an atomic device in August 1949 sharpened U.S. apprehensions concerning the nation's lack of a viable system of defense against enemy bombers. An imaginative young engineer, Jay Forrester, and his colleagues in the Digital Computer Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (mit) sent a paper to the Research and Development Board in Washington proposing the possible military use of Whirlwind, a computer they were currently developing. This was the seed that grew into a multimillion-dollar, decade-long air defense project. Probably the most important insight to be derived from this book is the detailed play-byplay account of just how Jay Forrester and his cochair, Robert Everett, went about the problem of conceptualizing the development of Whirlwind to cope with the demands of air defense while inspiring large numbers of engineers to solve the many technical problems encountered. To this end they established elaborate systems of record keeping and information exchange to ensure that all were kept abreast of progress in perfecting means for storing both information and the programs for processing that information, in order to achieve the necessary reliability and speed at reasonable cost. In those pre-transistor days, Whirlwind had to rely on thousands of vacuum tubes to deal with an estimated fifty thousand arithmetic and switching operations per second.