Overview

On a moonless night in January 1991, a dozen U.S. aircraft appeared in the skies over Baghdad. To the Iraqi air defenses, the planes seemed to come from nowhere. Their angular shape, making them look like flying origami, rendered them virtually undetectable. Each aircraft was more than 60 feet in length and with a wingspan of 40 feet, yet its radar footprint was the size of a ball bearing. Here was the first extensive combat application of Stealth technology. And it was devastating.Peter Westwick's new book illuminates the story behind these aircraft, the F-117A, also known as the Stealth Fighter, and their close cousin the B-2, also known as the Stealth Bomber. The development of Stealth unfolded over decades. Radar has been in use since the 1930s and was essential to the Allies in World War Two, when American investment in radar exceeded that in the Manhattan Project. The atom bomb ended the war, conventional wisdom has it, but radar won it. That experience also raised a question: could a plane be developed that was invisible to radar? That question, and the seemingly impossible feat of physics and engineering behind it, took on increasing urgency during the Cold War, when the United States searched for a way both to defend its airspace and send a plane through Soviet skies undetected. Thus started the race for Stealth.At heart, Stealth is a tale of not just two aircraft but the two aerospace companies that made them, Lockheed and Northrop, guided by contrasting philosophies and outsized personalities. Beginning in the 1970s, the two firms entered into a fierce competition, one with high financial stakes and conducted at the highest levels of secrecy in the Cold War. They approached the problem of Stealth from different perspectives, one that pitted aeronautical designers against electrical engineers, those who relied on intuition against those who pursued computer algorithms. The two different approaches manifested in two very different solutions to Stealth, clearly evident in the aircraft themselves: the F-117 composed of flat facets, the B-2 of curves. For all their differences, Lockheed and Northrop were located twenty miles apart in the aerospace suburbs of Los Angeles, not far from Disneyland. This was no coincidence. The creative culture of postwar Southern California-unorthodox, ambitious, and future-oriented-played a key role in Stealth. Combining nail-biting narrative, incisive explanation of the science and technology involved, and indelible portraits of unforgettable characters, Stealth immerses readers in the story of an innovation with revolutionary implications for modern warfare.

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9780197627242

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A lucid and lively account of the achievement of what many thought impossible and resisted * sizable attack aircraft essentially invisible to radar. Westwick writes the story of the Stealth bombers on the expansive canvas of southern California, drawing in the security-veiled iconoclasm of the region's aerospace enterprise, the strategic thinking of its post-Vietnam military patrons, the innovations enabled by both computing and technical intuition, the passionate obsession of the physicists and engineers who envisioned the aircraft, and the differences in the technological cultures between Lockheed and Northrop, the ferociously competitive corporations where they turned their ideas into two divergent flight-ready realities. A rich, compelling, and eye-opening book. * As Peter Westwick notes in his elegant Stealth: The Secret Contest to Invent Invisible Aircraft, U.S. wartime radar research was bigger than the Manhattan Project. Westwick's stated goal is to write the story of the engineers and midlevel military officers who champion new military technologies history from the middle (a term he borrows from the historian Paul Kennedy ). Mr. Westwick pulls it off by balancing a modest level of technical detail with a keen eye for the people involved, drawing on extensive interviews and oral histories. The vividness Mr. Westwick achieves is all the more impressive given the secrecy of the stealth world. * Konstantin Kakaes, The Wall Street Journal * In his excellent new book, Stealth, Peter Westwick argues that the solution was the product of a host of special circumstances, fortuitous geography, and the aggregation of thousands of innovative and highly skilled individuals in Southern California. This concise, highly readable history of the creation, development, and application of one of the most important technologies of the Cold War brings clarity and a thorough understanding to this complex subject. * F. Robert van der Linden, Science Magazine *

Author Information

Peter Westwick teaches history at the University of Southern California and directs the Aerospace History Project at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. His books include Into the Black: JPL and the American Space Program, 1976-2004, which won prizes from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the American Astronautical Society.

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