Even the most ardent free-marketeers understood that planning for a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union was too important to be left to market forces. As the nuclear arms race gathered pace, the Pentagon chose centrally to finance the design and construction of a network of decentralised computers. Its single purpose? To work out how to make different silos housing nuclear weapons communicate with each other, and all of them with Washington, without a central hub that a Soviet nuclear bomb could take out in
