Of course, computing power has been central to warfare for the past half century, though the quantity of 1s and 0s that can be harnessed to support military systems is millions of times larger than decades earlier. What’s new today is that America now has a credible challenger. The Soviet Union could match the U.S. missile-for-missile but not byte-for-byte. China thinks it can do both. The fate of China’s semiconductor industry isn’t simply a question of commerce. Whichever country can produce more 1s and 0s will have a serious military advantage, too.
