Inventing Accuracy
"Mackenzie has achieved a masterful synthesis of engrossing narrative, imaginative concepts, historical perspective, and social concern." Donald MacKenzie follows one line of technology—strategic ballistic missile guidance through a succession of weapons systems to reveal the workings of a world that is neither awesome nor unstoppable. He uncovers the parameters, the pressures, and the politics that make up the complex social construction of an equally complex technology.
Stats for nerds
9recommend
15mentions
10people
2016–2024years
87% recommend13% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Let me add "Inventing Accuracy" to your list of recommended reading. It's fascinating, and it's a powerful microscope to reveal the relationship between strategic need and technological development
- In my eyes they are. For what it is worth, with the exception of this recent period (Ukraine), both the US and Russia for the most part made pretty good-faith efforts to comply with what their diplomats signed. I'm sure there were undeclared vehicles that were not disclosed, but I imagine those are not that plentiful, and certainly not in the quantity that would make a strategic difference (thousands sitting spare, ready to fly, all it needs is a warhead mounted an hour before launch).
I view arms control as a reduction of the number of variables in play (launch vehicles, warheads, etc). Both sides will always retain their God-given right to unleash nuclear holocaust, but both sides also reason they don't need 10,000+ warheads to do that. They can accomplish that goal with far less nukes than war planning 40 - 50 years ago called for. Partly that is due to accuracy having increased rapidly since gen 1 ICBM. There is a great book about missile guidance and accuracy, it is called "Inventing Accuracy". If you can't find a local copy or can't afford it, the Internet Archive has a PDF you can check out and read. Really insightful as to the "why" we don't require 30,000 nukes (1965) -- we only require ~5000 today and the enhanced accuracy makes them even more potent than prior bomb designs (which had a much larger yield).
- The book to read is “Inventing Accuracy” by Donald Mackenzie
- Indeed, it's a complex topic. I was reading an article just the other day on nuclear targeting strategy(1); the thought that goes into this and how it interacts with the greater warfighting strategy, or arms control agreements, is daunting.
Suffice to say, the land-based fleet still has a role to play. Other powers still have or are expanding theirs(2). Arms control talks need to get back on track. But until then, a balance needs to be kept.
As an aside, I read the book "Inventing Accuracy" a while back; a really interesting look at the technology that goes into missile guidance and how it drove policy and strategy. Great read(3)
1: https://warontherocks.com/2023/11/two-myths-about-counterfor... 2: https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2021-09/news/new-chinese-mis... 3: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262631471/inventing-accuracy/
- Compared to the rest of the engineering, I don’t think the computation is all that hard. It doesn’t need to be that fast since you only need to do a correction maybe every 10-20 minutes or so. The math was innovative in that they invented the Kalman filter for these types of computations. You pick your star such that it’s by far the brightest one in its neighborhood. So the image processing is just finding the brightest pixel.
From what I’ve read (mostly the excellent book “Inventing Accuracy” the main challenge is very precisely aligning the telescope with the “stable member” in the gyroscope.
- > there was a lot of pushback inside the us military on investing in increasing the accuracy of naval ICBMs.
The book "Inventing Accuracy" covers this in detail. Fascinating historical perspective.
