The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency by Annie Jacobsen

The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

by Annie Jacobsen

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History & Foreign AffairsTech & Future

DARPA was a Cold War answer to Soviet technological advances, created under Eisenhower in 1958. Jacobsen follows it from hydrogen-bomb tests through Vietnam to drones, robotics and AI, and shows you how much weapons, surveillance and civilian technology started in one small agency.

Core ideas
  • Out of the agency: ARPANET, the forerunner of the internet, came out of DARPA, along with work on GPS, stealth aircraft and the electronic battlefield.
  • The Vietnam years: The war drew the agency into the M16 rifle, Agent Orange, the Strategic Hamlets program, RAND social-science research, and psychological warfare and interrogation.
  • Where it's headed: Directed-energy weapons, autonomous weapons and transhumanist research leave you with the question of where the agency's military science goes next.
Published2015
Pages560
ISBN9780316371766
ReadApr 2024

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