Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology
Chris Miller
Scribner: 2022
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The title of Chris Miller’s meticulously researched and super timely book can be taken two ways. It could refer to the competitive struggle among the corporate giants of the semiconductor industry. It could also refer to the increasingly crucial role of semiconductors in actual warfare. In 2022, we were given a real-time demonstration of the latter.

The war in Ukraine has proven, much to the shock of Russian President Vladimir Putin, that America’s new generation of high-tech weaponry comfortably outmatches Russia’s superiority in troop numbers, tanks and twentieth-century vintage missiles. Miller could not have foreseen these developments but would not have been surprised. Indeed, he gives a fascinating account of the Soviet Union’s ill-fated attempt to create a semiconductor industry in a specially built town called Zelenograd.

Soviet scientists were top-notch, as were their industrial spies, and no less a person than President Nikita Khrushchev had given the project his personal stamp of approval. Nonetheless, it was doomed to stagnation and failure because the Soviets had no non-military market for semiconductors. Meanwhile, in the United States, the percentage of semiconductor production destined for military use was declining rapidly as huge new markets for calculators, electronic gizmos and personal computers appeared.

• Tags: Chris Miller, Issue 30, Peter Tasker