- Weinberger, Sharon.
The Imagineers of War.
New York: Vintage Books, 2017.
ISBN 978-0-8041-6972-1.
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Since its founding in 1958, as a reaction to the perceived
humiliation of the United States by the Soviet launch of
Sputnik, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA),
which over the years has dropped and restored
“Defense” on several occasions, being sometimes
known as ARPA, has been the central research organisation for
the U.S. military, working independently of the military
services, whose rivalry was considered one of the reasons for
the slow progress in development of missile and space
technology. Originally seen as a “space agency”, it
quickly saw that function assumed by NASA. DARPA, largely
unconstrained by Pentagon bureaucracy and scientific
peer-review, has often been “out there”, pushing
speculative technologies on (and sometimes beyond) the cutting
edge of the possible.
This book chronicles the world-changing successes of DARPA,
including ARPANET, which developed and demonstrated the
technologies upon which today's Internet is built, unmanned
vehicles, missile defense, and smart weapons. DARPA has also
had its share of failures, the inevitable result of trying to
push technologies beyond the state of the art. On occasion,
DARPA has veered into territory usually associated with mad
scientists and Bond villains, such as a scheme to power a
particle beam ballistic missile defense system by draining the
Great Lakes in fifteen minutes into caverns excavated by nuclear
bombs to power generators. This is a fascinating look behind
the curtain of what seems almost impossible: a government agency
which has, for more than six decades, remained agile in
pioneering speculative technologies on a modest budget.
May 2020 