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When deployed in the skies above Germany, though, only 20 percent of American bombs fell within one thousand feet of their target. The war was decided by the quantity of bombs dropped and artillery shells fired, not by the knobs on the mechanical computers that tried and usually failed to guide them.
Every step of the process of making chips involved specialized knowledge that was rarely shared outside of a specific company. This type of know-how was often not even written down. Soviet spies were among the best in the business, but the semiconductor production process required more details and knowledge than even the most capable agent could steal.
Copying was literally hardwired into the Soviet semiconductor industry, with some chipmaking machinery using inches rather than centimeters to better replicate American designs, even though the rest of the USSR used the metric system.
The early bombing campaigns in Vietnam, like Operation Rolling Thunder, which stretched from 1965 to 1968, dropped over eight hundred thousand tons of bombs, more than was dropped in the Pacific Theater during all of World War II. This firepower had only a marginal impact on North Vietnam’s military, however, because most of the bombs missed their targets.
The U.S. spent five to ten times more on defense relative to the size of its economy. Japan focused on growing its economy, while America shouldered the burden of defending it.
“The United States has been busy creating lawyers,” Morita lectured, while Japan has “been busier creating engineers.”
These territories were defended from Communist incursions not only by military force but also by economic integration, as the electronics industry sucked the region’s peasants off farms—where rural poverty often inspired guerilla opposition—into good jobs assembling electronic devices for American consumption.
One popular Soviet joke from the 1980s recounted a Kremlin official who declared proudly, “Comrade, we have built the world’s biggest microprocessor!”
Mao plunged the country into the Cultural Revolution, arguing that expertise was a source of privilege that undermined socialist equality. Mao’s partisans waged war on the country’s educational system. Thousands of scientists and experts were sent to work as farmers in destitute villages.
So the text etched onto the back of each iPhone—“Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China”—is highly misleading. The iPhone’s most irreplaceable components are indeed designed in California and assembled in China. But they can only be made in Taiwan.
