Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines, and Wired Markets

12.2. Stupid Engineering Tricks

Engineers have had some great ideas. History's greatest technological advances are often cited as fire, the wheel, and storing instructions as data. The first is arguably a discovery, but the others are inventions. We can add a few more—the time value of money, the automobile, the transistor, and the World Wide Web. In the Introduction, the structure of Mutually Assured Survival (dreadfully mislabeled as Mutually Assured Destruction) was given high marks.

Not all military technology ideas had similar merit. In Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon's Scientific Underworld, Defense Technology International editor Sharon Weinberger tells the remarkable story of how tens of millions of dollars were spent on a crackpot idea for what amounted to a nuclear hand grenade, despite the efforts of the most senior Pentagon scientists to scuttle the project, and the dubious utility of such a weapon. Who would want to throw it? Does the world need a nuke that fits in a lunch bag?^[]

My personal favorite for a bad technology idea, now in second place after the models that helped create the financial meltdown (but only because it was never built), was described at a RAND Corporation seminar in the early 1980s by then Undersecretary of Defense Bill Perry (later Secretary of Defense in the Clinton years, and not to be confused with the Fridge of the Chicago Bears).

I asked him what the worst idea ever to cross his desk at the Pentagon was. Without hesitation, ...