Summary

How differing assessments of risk by physicists and computer scientists have influenced public debate over nuclear defense.

In a rapidly changing world, we rely upon experts to assess the promise and risks of new technology. But how do these experts make sense of a highly uncertain future? In Arguments that Count , Rebecca Slayton offers an important new perspective. Drawing on new historical documents and interviews as well as perspectives in science and technology studies, she provides an original account of how scientists came to terms with the unprecedented threat of nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). She compares how two different professional communities--physicists and computer scientists--constructed arguments about the risks of missile defense, and how these arguments changed over time. Slayton shows that our understanding of technological risks is shaped by disciplinary repertoires--the codified knowledge and mathematical rules that experts use to frame new challenges. And, significantly, a new repertoire can bring long-neglected risks into clear view.

In the 1950s, scientists recognized that high-speed computers would be needed to cope with the unprecedented speed of ICBMs. But the nation's elite science advisors had no way to analyze the risks of computers so used physics to assess what they could: radar and missile performance. Only decades later, after establishing computing as a science, were advisors able to analyze authoritatively the risks associated with complex software--most notably, the risk of a catastrophic failure. As we continue to confront new threats, including that of cyber attack, Slayton offers valuable insight into how different kinds of expertise can limit or expand our capacity to address novel technological risks.

Choice Review

Tracking the closely related origins of missile defense and computer science, the author of this interesting book identifies the roles played by the expectations produced by successful air defense, education in specific scientific and engineering disciplines, inter-service rivalry and bureaucratic politics, and the disconnection between political demand and technological possibility. As Slayton (Stanford Univ.) explains, decades of spending on research on missile defense may have generated an unimpressive capability to destroy launched ballistic missiles but did result in significant advances in computer science. That was the product of work on very complex problems of hardware-software systems. Among the products was COBOL, introduced in 1960, which was sponsored by the Pentagon. False hope, frustration, and either failure or very modest success characterize initial efforts to develop an "anti-missile-missile" in the late 1950s, the Safeguard Program in the 1960s, the Strategic Defense Initiative/Star Wars Program of the 1980s, and the combat performance of the Patriot missile system during the Gulf War. The same problems plaguing missile defense in the Cold War, such as distinguishing ballistic missiles from decoys or chaff, continue to plague it in the 21st century. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduate, graduate, research, and professional collections. J. C. Hickman Berry College