Inventing Accuracy

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 649 InventingAccuracy:A HistoricalSociology ofNuclearMissile Guidance. By Donald MacKenzie. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990. Pp. xiii + 464; figures, notes, appendixes, index. $29.95. Inventing Accuracy is an ambitious primer into the counterintuitive world of military research and development from the perspective of a sociologist looking at technological change. It traces the develop­ ment of missile guidance systems in the divisively competitive postwar world in which procurement policy is dominated by many factors external to the technical capability, promise, or potential of the guidance and control systems themselves. Written for engineers as well as for historians, sociologists, and policy analysts, Inventing Accuracy pays close attention to technical issues that really do make up much of the core of the enterprise but shows as well how the technical effort is conducted within, and determined largely by, a shifting policy climate in which decisions are made, such as the creation of ballistic missile systems with countercity or counterforce accuracy (area targeting as opposed to the ability to destroy specific military targets) or systems capable of first-strike capability in distinction to those either preemptive or defensive in nature. Choosing among these alternatives in the past was neither a wholly technical nor a wholly political decision but an amalgam of the two, which leads Donald MacKenzie to argue that the two realms of politics and technology embodied in missile accuracy are really one and the same. As he concludes: “Technology in the nuclear world is not above politics as an autonomous determining factor, nor beneath it as a dependent effect, but part of it” (p. 412). The three major categories of guidance that competed in the postwar era were radio, inertial, and stellar inertial. The first em­ ployed telemetry between ground systems and the missile, and employed, among a number of methods, radio Doppler techniques to determine velocity and position. Inertial systems, wholly selfcontained “black boxes,” used combinations of integrating gyroscopes and accelerometers to know cumulatively at every moment of flight the missile’s location and heading. An inertial system could make corrections if it found itself off course from its preprogrammed trajectory. The third system used startrackers to establish position after launch to calibrate an otherwise preprogrammed inertial system. Each category had its promoters and detractors in a nested set of interlocking technical and political arenas, but inertial guidance quickly dominated; the real question was: What type of inertial systems should be built, and should they be purely inertial? MacKenzie traces the development of gyroscopic control since the late 19th century to show how that technical culture played a role in the evolution of ground-based (from Minuteman to the MX) and ocean-based (Polaris, Trident, Poseidon) missile guidance systems, 650 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE and demonstrates just how difficult it is to equate policy shifts within both services to the shaping of the technology. For instance, even though the navy suffered deep internal division over roles and missions for guided missiles, the evolution of its submarine-based systems appeared far smoother than for the air force, which was always comparatively clear about its need for delivery systems for nuclear warheads. Among many explanations, MacKenzie offers the idea that the navy operated underwater, whereas the air force systems had to operate where people live. Highlighting the central role played by Charles Stark Draper as the entrepreneurial heterogenous engineer who created an air force “guidance mafia” out of those officers who had tours of duty in his Massachusetts Institute of Technology Instrumentation Laboratory, MacKenzie explores how the intersecting threads that made up the development process could be manipulated into such a complex and formidable tapestry. He argues that such manipulations could make guidance appear to Draper’s partisan promoters (but not to the providers of the technology) as a world determined by a clearly delineated technological trajectory leading inexorably to the target of increased accuracy. MacKenzie tfien takes great pains to show that such a world simply does not exist and that technological trajectories do not live beyond the interests of their patrons: he argues that “for all its apparent naturalness, this [technological] trajectory is a con­ struct, a contingent product” (p. 237). As a result, MacKenzie seems

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