On January 17 1991, American stealth bombers flew from Saudi Arabia to Iraq where they destroyed the telephone exchange building in Baghdad with laser-guided bombs. Moments later, US navy ships launched 116 Tomahawk cruise missiles at targets around the Iraqi capital, starting the first Gulf war.
The awesome firepower unleashed during Operation Desert Storm was instrumental in driving Saddam Hussein’s army out of Kuwait. But it also sent a powerful signal to the Soviet Union about American military power and the growing importance of semiconductors.
In one of many fascinating facts in Chip War, a riveting history of the semiconductor by Chris Miller, a historian at Tufts University describes how the Soviet, and later Russian, chip industry was so far behind the US despite the best efforts of the KGB that one production plant was “producing tiny chips for McDonald’s Happy Meal toys”. Soviet military leaders had credited America’s computing prowess as a decisive factor in winning the cold war.