At least, that’s the way Chris Miller tells it in Chip War The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, his best-selling but not always convincing story of the computer chip and how it “changed the world”. It seems that in 1977, Silicon Valley entrepreneur William Perry was brought in to serve as undersecretary of…
Tag: Cold War
Reply to Fred
Fred Kaplan, who writes for Slate and whom I sometimes praise and sometimes ridicule, has a new post, with the disappointing subhead “America’s retreat from the world under Trump has shown why we’re still the indispensable nation”, causing me to post a long comment, which was so eloquent, and so unlikely to read by anyone,…
The Cold War: A Tale of Two Joes
I’ve been reading Norwegian historian Odd Arne Westad’s vastly ambitious and very largely successful The Cold War A World History.1 One of the great advantages of reading a European’s take is that he has a much more nuanced understanding of what was happening in Europe during the Cold War than an American historian would. He’s…
New York Times Obituary Department now wholly owned subsidiary of Rockwell International and U.S. Air Force
Sam Iacobellis, father of the B-1 bomber, the plane that won the Cold War, is dead. Well, that’s what NYT obit dude Sam Roberts tells us, in a stunning outburst of chest-beating Reaganite nonsense. Sam is dead (I guess), so that part of the obit is true, but the rest of it, I strongly suggest,…
John Lewis Gaddis—“They Really Believed That Shit!”
Way back in 1978, a dude named John Lewis Gaddis started in his academic career by publishing Russia, the Soviet Union and the United States: An Interpretive History (America & the World), which looked at U.S./Russian relationships from the time of Catherine the Great to Jimmy and Leonid. John probably expected to spend his life…