View from Washington: Chip War
There have been surprisingly few comprehensive histories of the semiconductor industry, so the arrival of Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology by American academic Chris Miller is welcome. With the US and China at loggerheads over silicon, it is also timely. But while Miller, a professor of international history at Tufts University, addresses that rivalry directly at the end of his excellent book, he originally came to the topic when he discovered how the importance of chips has long tended to be buried away within the things they enable. “The book was going to be about the history of missiles in the Cold War. And the more I dug into missile technology, the more I realised that the interesting part was the guidance computers. And the more I learned about them, the…
