Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance

This is an exhaustive account of the development of nuclear missile guidance technology in the US and the USSR. It is mostly dry, and (unless this is your area of interest) exceedingly detailed. However, the last couple of chapters are worth plowing through the details: MacKenzie explains, with solid data, how "the social" and "the technical" are part of the same web, how facts are constructed in science; and how institutions and the people that conform them navigate through political and technological issues.

This is a book that is, while very interesting, also incredibly dry. This was not a book that I eagerly anticipated opening up, yet I made sure to stick with it because it was so informative.

I am young enough that all of my historical memory is post-Cold War (although I was born before it ended, I didn't understand what was happening until well after the fall of the Berlin Wall). This book is therefore a fascinating look into nuclear politics and technology before the Cold War ended. The author has a short epilogue explaining that the Cold War ended pretty much as the book went to press.

The technology pre-MEMS and pre-really good GPS is fascinating. I found the interplay between accuracy and nuclear strategy fascinating (you can't take show more out a missile silo if you can't guarantee that an ICBM will actually hit within a mile or so of the silo). The book also emphasizes that politics cannot be disconnected from technology (something that I wish Enrico Fermi had understood before taking the genie out of the bottle, assuming that science for its own sake would be enough of a motivation to invent the nuclear weapon to begin with).

I would not recommend this book unless you find any of these topics very interesting, as the book takes a lot of effort to get through. It is very exhaustive, which is both its strength and its weakness. show less

This is a meticulously argued book, part of the canon of the field of STS.