The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, the by Sharon Weinberger

By Sharon Weinberger

Based on specific interviews with senior Pentagon officers and formerly unseen declassified records, this can be the definitive heritage of the safeguard complex examine initiatives Agency--the Pentagon organisation that has quietly formed struggle and know-how for almost sixty years.

Founded in 1958 according to the release of Sputnik, the agency’s unique challenge was once to create “the unimagined guns of the future.” Over the a long time, DARPA has been liable for numerous innovations and applied sciences that reach well past army know-how. Sharon Weinberger supplies us a riveting account of DARPA’s successes and screw ups, its notable thoughts, and its wild-eyed schemes. We see how the specter of nuclear Armageddon sparked funding in machine networking, resulting in the web, in addition to to an offer to energy a missile-destroying particle beam via draining the nice Lakes. We learn the way DARPA used to be accountable in the course of the Vietnam struggle for either Agent Orange and the advance of the world’s first armed drones, and the way after Sept. 11 the organization sparked a countrywide controversy over surveillance with its data-mining study. And we see how DARPA’s luck with self-driving automobiles was once via disappointing contributions to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

Weinberger has interviewed a couple of hundred former Pentagon officers and scientists considering DARPA’s projects—many of whom have by no means spoken publicly approximately their paintings with the agency—and pored over numerous declassified files from documents round the kingdom, files acquired below the liberty of knowledge Act, and particular fabrics supplied through assets. The Imagineers of War is a compelling and groundbreaking background during which technology, expertise, and politics collide.

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