Arguments that Count

This well-researched, well-argued book provides insight into the history of American missile defense systems and the complex software that controls them. While this is an interesting and important topic in its own right, the book engages an even broader theme: how experts form judgments about complex technological solutions to societal problems, how they make their arguments politically persuasive, and what role these experts play in modern society. Historians and policy scholars of software, physics, and other complex technological systems will find much of interest in this volume.

William Aspray, Bill and Lewis Suit Professor of Information Technologies School of Information, University of Texas at Austin

Rebecca Slayton's comprehensive and well-researched history of the science—and politics—of missile defense sheds new and valuable light upon a consistently under-appreciated aspect of the challenge: computer software.

Gregg Herken, Emeritus Professor of History, University of California; author of Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Legacies of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller

Based on extensive new research, Slayton's groundbreaking book dissects the long-running debates over missile defense. Her analysis of how scientists make arguments persuasive and authoritative is important for understanding not just the history of today's military systems, but also the very ability of these systems to function at all.

Gabrielle Hecht, Professor of History, University of Michigan; author of Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade

Slayton finds an ingenious and novel way to tell the history of missile defense systems anew: as a stage on which physicists and computing experts—computer professionals? software engineers? this group's muddled identity is part of Slayton's point—performed for one another and for policy-makers and the public, while using those performances to forward the individual and community objectives.

Science

In addition to providing new insights into the debate over missile defense, Slayton raises valuable questions about the broader interaction between scientific expertise and advocacy.

Foreign Affairs

This complicated, fascinating, many-layered story is told with clarity, insight, and intelligence. For policy makers, it is a cautionary tale about the reliability of ballistic missile defense. For students of social science, it conveys insights that will prove useful to historians and sociologists of science and technology, students of American politics and security studies, and even anthropologists seeking to understand the curious culture of high-tech war in the space age.

Isis

Rebecca Slayton's book is an important addition to the literature on BMD, and also a significant and original contribution to how we think about and conceptualize the role and efficacy of advanced military systems....Fundamentally, Slayton's ability to bridge the gap between the computer science and political science literatures provides a much broader contribution to our thinking about how weapons systems and debates over national security are intrinsically socialized, and are therefore unpredictable and...'arbitrarily complex'.

International Affairs

Rebecca Slayton has given us a very informative and original study of the relationship between science and public policy in her book, Arguments that Count: Physics, Computing, and Missile Defense, 1949-2012....It should be of interest to academics in the field of national security studies as well as to those actively engaged in policy formulation and technology development related to missile defense.

H-Diplo

In her subtle and understated style, Slayton concludes that we must 'recognize that the risks we face can only partly be addressed by the physical ingenuity of America's top scientists and engineers'. She adds that all 'complex technological systems...can never be only physical, but...are simultaneously social and political to the core'.

Physics Today