Abstract
The Imagineers of War is the story of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Created in 1958 in response to the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, DARPA would pioneer research in various fields ranging from space exploration to counterinsurgency. The symbiosis of politics and science would bequeath to future generations such productive legacies as seismology and the Internet, and disastrous ones such as lethal chemical weapons and datamining aimed at finding collective patterns of human behaviour by scrutinising their personal data. Going through a tremendous body of declassified documents and conducting many interviews with DARPA officials, Sharon Weinberger deals with these issues in meticulous detail. This is Weinberger’s third book. Her previous two were A Nuclear Family Vacation (2008); and Imaginary Weapons: A Journey through the Pentagon’s Scientific Underworld (2006).