Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

by Chris Miller

Guided missiles would not only “offset” the USSR’s quantitative advantage, he reasoned. They’d force the Soviets to undertake a ruinously expensive anti-missile effort in response. Perry calculated Moscow would need five to ten years and $30 to $50 billion to defend against the three thousand American cruise missiles that the Pentagon planned to field—and even then, the Soviets could only destroy half the incoming missiles if they were all fired at the USSR. This was exactly the type of technology that Andrew Marshall had been looking for. Working with Jimmy Carter’s secretary of defense, Harold Brown, Perry and Marshall pushed the Pentagon to invest heavily in new technologies: a new generation of guided missiles that used integrated circuits, not vacuum tubes; a constellation of satellites that could beam location coordinates to any point on earth; and—most important—a new program to jump-start the next generation of chips, to ensure that the U.S. kept its technological edge. Led by Perry, the Pentagon poured money into new weapons systems that capitalized on America’s advantage in microelectronics.