Review: The Gulf Tanker War: Iran and Iraq's Maritime Swordplay by Nadia El-Sayed El-Shazly

Trump’s Iran war convinced me to go back and read multiple articles and books about the disastrous history of the Persian Gulf following the events in 1953 and then the revolution in 1979. In August 1953, the CIA alongside Britain’s MI6, orchestrated a covert coup d'état code-named Operation Ajax to overthrow Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. The U.S. and Britain were angry after Mossadegh nationalized the country’s oil industry, stripping control away from the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later BP). Fearing a total British oil embargo would collapse Iran's economy and push Mossadegh into a communist alliance with the neighboring Soviet Union, the U.S. stepped in. The CIA bribed military officers, paid mobs to stage violent anti-government riots, and weaponized the press to create artificial chaos in Tehran. Ultimately, Mossadegh was arrested, and the monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was restored to absolute power as a loyal, autocratic ally of the West—an intervention that successfully secured Western oil interests for the next quarter-century but sowed deep anti-American resentment that would explode during the 1979 revolution leading to Carter’s downfall during the hostage crisis and Reagan’s ascendancy. But that’s another story. The current mess in the Strait of Hormuz and the ascendency of Iran as the real power in the Persian Gulf has its origins many decades ago and one of those events was the infamous Tanker War which, I, to my shame, had either ignored at the time or totally forgotten.

The Gulf Tanker War: Iran and Iraq's Maritime Swordplay by Nadia El-Sayed El-Shazly pretty much is the definitive user manual if you want to know how a localized ground brawl escalates into an international naval free-for-all. First published in 1998, the book provides a microscopic view of the 1984-1988 phase of the Iran-Iraq war, when the conflict spilled over into the vital shipping lanes of the Persian Gulf. El-Shazly does not see the whole mess as a random series of maritime skirmishes, but as a deliberate strategic calculation by a desperate Iraqi regime trying to break a bloody stalemate.

What makes her story so compelling is the combination of high-stakes strategic theory and raw data. She employs the classic military heavyweights, such as Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, to explain why Saddam Hussein chose to weaponize the sky above the Gulf. Iraq couldn't match Iran's massive manpower pool or its geographical depth on land, but they had a serious edge in airpower. Baghdad hoped to choke Iran's oil economy with a campaign against commercial shipping, engineer international intervention and force a reluctant Ayatollah Khomeini to the negotiating table. It was pretty much a textbook case of attempting to use military leverage to force a diplomatic solution when the ground war went sideways. Sound familiar? This book is a stark reminder that the ocean is never insulated from the politics of the land, and commerce often follows its own rules even when missiles fly.

The entire study rests on the incredible data that El-Shazly was able to pull together. She secured specialist access to Lloyd’s Register of Shipping records, the equivalent of the Holy Grail for tracking merchant ship casualties. In these records she compiles a painstaking, month-by-month ledger of the conflict that shows up some hilarious, if tragic, ironies of wartime commerce.

Her data, for example, shows how economic self-interest regularly overrode political loyalties. You had tankers owned by Iraq’s supposedly staunch Arab allies casually cruising into Iranian ports to lift crude oil because the profit margins were just too good to pass up. Her work reveals the exact anatomy of the attacks, showing that Iraq actually fired most of the anti-shipping strikes using French-supplied Exocet missiles, while Iran used asymmetrical tactics such as speedboats, mines, and shore-based Silkworm missiles after they began to retaliate. Deja Vu all over again.

El-Shazly comes up with an overall total that shows Iraqi forces fired more individual strikes against commercial vessels than the Iranians, thus blowing the current Western media spin that Iran was the only aggressor on the water.

The data tracks the weird mayhem of identification errors – Iraqi pilots bombed friendly vessels or vessels carrying oil belonging to their own backers because it’s easier said than done to fly through a chaotic combat zone in the dark.
It tells of the exact moment Kuwait got worried enough to ask the great superpowers to step in, leading to the iconic re-flagging operation where the US Navy started escorting merchant ships flying the American flag.

The figures given by El-Shazly perfectly illustrate the slow-motion panic of the Iraqi command. The strategy was an escalatory gamble born of pure anxiety. They had to make the war somebody else's problem, so the international community would intervene and stop it, and that was exactly what happened when the US military footprint in the Gulf reached a point of no return.

Cut to today in 2026 and the reverberations of this maritime swordplay are louder than ever in international diplomacy. If you look at current flashpoints, from the regular disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz to the broader maritime chokepoints in the Middle East, the playbook being used today was written during the Tanker War.

The most obvious legacy is the template for asymmetric naval warfare. In the 1980s, Iran recognized that it did not require a large conventional blue-water navy to confront Western superpowers. They discovered that a combination of cheap sea mines, fast attack craft and shore-to-ship missiles could do as good a job as well. This creates a constant nervous deterrent in diplomatic venues today. Western diplomats cannot simply threaten naval blockades or freedom of navigation operations without reckoning with the massive insurance hikes and economic fallout that El-Shazly meticulously detailed decades ago.

Moreover, the Tanker War changed the perception of outside protection of the regional states for ever. The re-flagging of Kuwaiti ships established a precedent that the flow of oil was ultimately guaranteed by global powers, a fact that still underlies the security architectures of the Gulf states today. This created a dynamic where maritime security is never simply a local issue but a global economic trigger. Reading El-Shazly’s book today is more than a nostalgic walk down memory lane. It’s a stark reminder that the rules of engagement, the vulnerabilities of merchant shipping, and the diplomatic brinkmanship playing out on modern waters are the same games these nations have been playing for forty years.

She touches briefly in the final chapter on the USS Stark incident as well the tragedy of the Iranian passenger plane. On July 3, 1988, the high-tech Aegis air defense cruiser USS Vincennes—affectionately dubbed "Robocruiser" by its own crew for its captain’s aggressive swagger—managed to mistake a massive, slow-climbing civilian Airbus A300 for a rapidly descending supersonic F-14 Tomcat. Despite the Iranian passenger jet squawking a perfectly civilian transponder code and flying precisely within its designated commercial corridor, the American warship fired two surface-to-air missiles, instantly vaporizing 290 innocent people. In a masterclass of geopolitical gaslighting, the U.S. Navy initially blamed the civilian pilots for not radioing back on military frequencies they couldn't hear, while President George H.W. Bush later famously declared he would "never apologize for the United States of America, ever, I don't care what the facts are." Naturally, the ship's crew returned home to a hero's welcome, complete with combat ribbons, and the captain was awarded the Legion of Merit for his "exceptionally meritorious conduct"—proving that in the theater of modern warfare, blowing up an airliner full of families is just another day of stellar resume-building.  

Review: Mayday: The U-2 Affair by Michael R. Beschloss

 Mayday is a gripping, thoroughly researched account of one of the most perilous moments of the Cold War. Here is a political history written like a thriller, reconstructing the events surrounding the 1960 downing of an American U-2 spy plane and the international crisis that ensued. What makes Beschloss’s work so powerful is the way he shows how one covert operation, meant to protect national security, ultimately undermined diplomacy at a crucial moment.

In the last year of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency, there were real signs that tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union might start to thaw. Both Eisenhower and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had reasons for wanting detente. Eisenhower wanted to diminish the threat of nuclear war and Khrushchev wanted to reallocate Soviet resources from heavy military spending to improving life in the Soviet Union. Ironically, the U-2 program had already demonstrated that fears of a “missile gap” were misplaced, and that the Soviet Union was falling behind the United States in military capability. However, just before a scheduled summit with Khrushchev, Eisenhower reluctantly consented to one final reconnaissance flight, taking the CIA's assurances that the aircraft could not be shot down at face value.

 That assumption turned out to be a disaster. Not only did the Soviets shoot the plane down, they captured pilot Francis Gary Powers alive, along with plenty of physical evidence of American espionage. Eisenhower first went along with a cover story that the plane was a weather aircraft because of bad intelligence. When the truth was revealed by the Soviets the United States was the victim of a public lie which seriously damaged the credibility of the United States. The incident effectively killed the Paris Summit, hopes for improved relations, and is an example of how intelligence operations could directly sabotage diplomatic efforts.

Beschloss does an excellent job of communicating the big picture political implications and human side of the crisis. The detailed description of Powers and the other U-2 pilots adds another dimension to the story. The pilots were flying delicate aircraft not meant for combat at altitudes of more than 70,000 feet and in extreme conditions. The book explains that one of the planes had previously fallen apart after being buffeted by the shock waves of nearby fighter jets , because they were so delicate . This fragility highlights the enormous risk each mission entailed.

The psychological pressure on the pilots was exemplified by chilling details such as the notorious "silver dollar". This hollowed out coin held a pin tipped with toxin for suicide in case of capture, a device reputed to cost a fortune to create. Pilots were not specifically told to use it, but were strongly encouraged to do so to avoid capture.  Also, each aircraft had a self-destruct mechanism designed to destroy sensitive equipment. But many pilots suspected the timing of the explosion would not allow them to escape, raising the possibility that activating the device could kill them, too. These points highlight the moral and personal dilemmas that those in the covert world have to face.

Beschloss also looks at the wider international implications of the U-2 program, beyond the pilots themselves. Allies of the U.S., like Norway, Pakistan and Iran, permitted their territory to be used as bases for these missions, thus exposing themselves to considerable political risk. They were told that if their part was discovered it would be denied, but the possibility of being found out left them uneasy. Cold War espionage was not just a game of the two superpowers, but also trapped smaller countries in dangerous geopolitical gamesmanship.

The fallout from the U-2 incident was extensive. The humiliation of the espionage disclosure meant that Khrushchev, who had been leaning toward lowering military tensions, was under more pressure to adopt a more confrontational stance. The failure of the summit led to increased mistrust between the two sides and helped usher in a more belligerent period of the Cold War. Beschloss suggests that the impact of this breakdown was felt long after 1960. Tensions increased, with consequences for later events such as the construction of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban missile crisis as each side sought to show its strength in an increasingly hostile environment.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Mayday is the examination of the relationship between intelligence gathering and diplomacy. The U-2 flights yielded intelligence of inestimable value—at one time, the bulk of U.S. intelligence on the Soviet Union—but their exposure showed how such operations could boomerang. Secrecy, deception and miscalculation, Beschloss shows, were not the background of the Cold War, but the central forces that shaped it. The book also shows how leaders were often operating with incomplete or misleading information, resulting in decisions with unforeseen consequences.

Written in 1986, before the Cold War ended, Mayday is still a valuable historical analysis. Beschloss may not have had access to all of the Soviet sources, but his use of Western documents, interviews, and archival materials makes for a comprehensive and objective account. He writes clearly and with verve, and makes complex political and military issues comprehensible without making them simple. The story’s mix of rigorous research and dramatic storytelling enables readers to appreciate both the immediate crisis and the long-term ramifications.  Beschloss makes a compelling argument that the failure of the U-2 mission was not simply a tactical misstep but a turning point in the Cold War. The book is a reminder of the close relationship between intelligence and diplomacy, and how their collision can have repercussions that reverberate for decades.

With the benefit of over half a century of hindsight I spent a little time looking for follow-up information on the incident. The 1960 U-2 incident has been discussed for decades, but thanks to newly declassified files, newer research has begun to peel back a few more layers, especially in terms of how badly things went wrong diplomatically and how much the U.S. intelligence community was really doing at the time. In a 2021 study, one historian, Adam Boon, took a look at the whole mess, focusing on Dwight D. Eisenhower’s final year in office. Eisenhower had been hoping to go out on a high note, even planning a big trip to the Soviet Union. But then the U-2 spy plane was shot down and that plan went out the window. Boon says Nikita Khrushchev felt burned; he’d been opening the door a little bit for better relations and then this happened. That sense of betrayal was not just political, it was personal, and it pretty much killed any chance that Eisenhower would leave a peaceful Cold War legacy.

At the same time, recent documents from the National Security Archive and elsewhere show that the flights were not solely for the purpose of taking pictures from high altitudes. There was a whole other dimension to them: signals intelligence, or SIGINT, where the U.S. was picking up electronic communications and radar data. By the late ’50s, more than 250 of these missions alone had been undertaken, and historians are still trying to figure out just how big and ambitious that program really was. The repercussions of the incident were immediate, and fairly brutal. The big summit in Paris in 1960? Dead on arrival.  The prospect of easing of tensions or working towards disarmament disappeared overnight. Khrushchev had solid evidence on the Soviet side - documents and data that proved the flight wasn't some accident - and used it to publicly embarrass the U.S. on the world stage. To make matters worse, later U.S. records suggest that the Soviets may have shot the plane down while it was still in the air, possibly tampering with its self-destruct system. That meant they could salvage more of the wreckage—and more intelligence—than the Americans had ever hoped. More damage to an already disastrous situation.

All of these sources indicate that the effects of the event were twofold: a complete breakdown of trust at the executive level and a massive change in the way the U.S. conducted surveillance. The Russian documents, and later investigations show, reveal Khrushchev had indisputable proof that the flights were a systematic, long-term violation of sovereignty and not an accidental straying of a "weather plane." This led the U.S. to speed up its shift to satellite intelligence gathering.

Today historians tend to view the 1960 U-2 mess as more than a Cold War blunder. It was one of those game-changing moments. It didn't just blow up a summit or make Dwight D. Eisenhower the laughingstock of the world for a couple of weeks. It ended up changing the way countries think about spying, technology, and even the rules of the sky. Until all this, no one had really nailed down where a country’s airspace stopped and outer space started. Strangely enough, the whole debacle settled that. When Eisenhower admitted the US had been flying spy missions (something leaders almost never did), it forced everyone to face the reality of reconnaissance. And when the U.S. began employing satellites such as CORONA a little while later, the Soviets didn’t object nearly as much. It was as if everyone had already exhausted their outrage on the U-2, and satellite spying quietly became “okay” in a way airplane spying had not.

The episode also brought about technological change. The whole pathetic “weather plane” cover story fell apart so badly that it was crystal clear that putting a human pilot in a spy plane was a tremendous political risk. So the focus quickly shifted — from pilots to machines. Programs like CORONA -- Dudley Buck worked on this project - see my review in a previous post -- suddenly received increased funding and attention, and the U.S. doubled down on unmanned surveillance. At the same time, the fact that the U-2 could be shot down forced engineers to think out of the box. Which led to futuristic aircraft like the A-12 and the SR-71. They not only flew high, they flew really fast and they were hard to detect, so nothing like the Francis Gary Powers shoot-down would ever happen again.  Satellites soon made them obsolete.

The whole episode left a lasting damage to public trust at home. At first, the government tried to pass the whole thing off as a NASA weather plane that just wandered off course, until Nikita Khrushchev basically pulled out the receipts and proved that wasn’t true. Such a very public lie helped set the stage for what people later called the “credibility gap,” something that would only get worse during Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. And then Congress began demanding, at least a little more, to be kept in the loop about intelligence operations, and to not have the White House running risky spy missions in complete darkness.

On the Soviet side, the fallout created ripple effects of its own. In fact, Khrushchev had been trying to trim military spending somewhat and concentrate on the economy, but the U-2 incident made that a much tougher sell. It gave ammunition to hard-liners in Moscow who said the West clearly could not be trusted. So, there was a new push to beef up defenses, especially things like surface to air missiles. And this made the Cold War just a bit more tense and a lot more heavily armed . 

 James Reston wrote at the time, “What troubled Paris tonight was not primarily what President Eisenhower and Premier Khrushchev would do now, which nobody knows, but the realization that the two most powerful nations in the world are also the least experienced of the great powers—both subject to the element of accident, to the ingrained habits of the past and to the whims of personal pride and caprice.” This was “the conference that everyone lost.”

References

Boon, A. (2021).  ‘A Dear and Hoped-For Guest’: Eisenhower’s Cancelled Visit to the Soviet Union and the Final Year of His Presidency. Diplomacy & Statecraft, 32(3), 509-530. https://doi.org/10.1080/09592296.2021.1961488  

CORONA Project: https://www.cia.gov/legacy/museum/exhibit/corona-americas-first-imaging-satellite-program/ 

The National Security Archive. 2 March 8, 2022. Collection of signals intelligence from U-2s, 1956-1960, CIA. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/intelligence-nuclear-vault/2022-03-08/cia-u-2-collection-signals-intelligence-1956

 

Comments: Fishman's new book on Chokepoints

In 2002, Noam Chomsky wrote the following:

 The term "globalization" has been appropriated by the powerful to refer to a specific form of international economic integration, one based on investor rights, with the interests of people incidental. That is why the business press, in its more honest moments, refers to the "free trade agreements" as "free investment agreements" (Wall St. Journal). Accordingly, advocates of other forms of globalization are described as "anti-globalization"; and some, unfortunately, even accept this term, though it is a term of propaganda  that should be dismissed with ridicule. No sane person is opposed to globalization, that is, international integration. Surely not the left and the workers movements, which were founded on the principle of international solidarity—that is, globalization in a form that attends to the rights of people, not private power systems. From the Wikipedia essay on anti-globalization.)

Well, it does help to define your terms in your own way before arguing for or against something.  The list of groups defined as anti-globalization ranges from the ant-war activists to Christian rightists to nationalists to MAGA etc., etc.

One thing is sure: globalization is already here and is integrated into everything we buy and say and do. Like everything else it comes with benefits and downsides and unintended, or at least unforeseen consequences.

Trump's ill-planned war on Iran has shown us the power of physical choke-points.  Some 80% of the world's trade travels by sea, and as we have now become too aware, the world's water-based choke-points, e.g., Hormuz, Malacca, Panama Canal, Bosporus, Bab El-Mandeb, Suez Canal, Gibraltar,  if controlled by one country, in spite of UN strictures, have the potential to massively affect economic trade and to completely disrupt local economies and alter international power structures. We can only hope that other nations who control straits and choke-points will not manipulate them in the same way to gain economic and political power and will not start stockpiling drones. Ukraine in the past year has shown how to completely control large stretches of land using drones.  Works for straits, too. [1]

But globalization has also had the unintended consequence of providing the United States with a financial choke-point as powerful as that of the Strait of Hormuz.

Historically, the world’s dominance and maritime trade has depended on physical “choke-points” such as canals and straits. “But hyper-globalization has given rise to a new, abstract form of economic warfare revolving around the digital circuitry of finance, as Edward Fishman details in his book Chokepoints. (I prefer to spell it with the hyphen.) Armed with the unique strength of the US dollar and American financial institutions, Washington began to exercise “weaponized interdependence” through asset freezes, embargoes and secondary sanctions to keep opponents out of global trade. What began as scattered efforts to change the behavior of rogue states evolved into an aggressive industrial policy to preserve America’s declining competitive advantage against a rapidly industrializing China.  Trump, in the MoU, has essentially eliminated all the finance restrictions that had been placed on Iran by Obama. I would argue that Trump's tariffs are intended to be a choke-point, but have not worked the way he intended. [2]

At first, officials in Washington were excited about the plan. They saw economic warfare as a way to play geopolitics without killing anyone. But in the end, it failed. Instead, one-sided bans and export controls, like those put in place against Huawei or Russia, have had terrible effects on people's lives and torn alliances apart. America's traditional Western friends are becoming more and more against its economic demands, which make them give up things they want in exchange for money. They see these demands as favors without benefits. At the same time, Fishman says, the strict use of "long-arm jurisdiction" has given competitors like China the slogans of free trade, which goes against the liberal capitalist ideals the US says it supports.

Wars and words. In the world we live in now, economic weapons are the middle ground. They are ways to put pressure on people that are stronger than talking things out but safer than going to war. The strength of the US dollar and control over the supply lines for semiconductors are tools used for this kind of statecraft. It's like going to another country without a ticket if you can't get to the dollar. A U-turn is needed for almost all cross-border transactions that go through the Clearing House Interbank Payments System (CHIPS) or Fedwire's wire transfer system. Because of a problem with the technology, transfers at a correspondent account in New York need to be put on hold for a short time. This makes it illegal for the US Treasury Department to do business with other countries' money. This book was obviously written before the Iran War (published early 2025) and one of problems with his analysis is that the Iranians were requiring that "toll payments" were required to be paid in cryptocurrency or the Chinese Yuan.  Until now oil has always been priced in Petrodollars, i.e. U.S. currency. Were a different currency to become the standard, the repercussions could be severe for the value of the dollar.

When it comes to technological choke-points, the Foreign Direct Product Rule mostly uses the same reasoning. These rules let the US control the sale of any item made anywhere in the world that uses US-made software or intellectual property. This tool proved to be very useful when it was used to hit Huawei and take away important high-end chips. In the real world, this move made a lot of difference. The UK lost £2 billion and three years trying to set up 5G, and partners in other countries had to cut the company off of their networks. These steps are made even stronger with secondary sanctions that take advantage of the fact that private financial companies are very risk-averse. "Banks tend to follow the rules more closely than the law requires because of the enormous fines or losing access to the New York correspondent banking system," he stated. These technological tools have been used by different presidential administrations to reach different world goals.

The way economic fighting was done was changed for the first time by Trump. It wasn't broad pressure from many countries; instead, it was aimed at very narrow, one-way goals. In order to get people to do what they want, non-state and individual players were emphasized as the main tools. Traditional alliance cooperation was often skipped in favor of quick tactical wins. This was a real shift in how American power worked. Instead of just changing how other governments behaved, economic weapons were changed into tools for industrial strategy to protect a losing competitive edge.

Along with going after companies, Trump  has also gone after people. For example, Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou was arrested for breaking sanctions, and judges at the International Criminal Court have been targeted one time. To make sure that sanctions were being followed, the government also tried to bring criminal charges against top Turkish bankers. With these steps, economic statecraft was used to force people to do things and keep businesses safe from competition. This wasn't unfair to one side like the international sanctions that were put on Russia in response to 2014 or the unified pressure that was put on Iran during the nuclear talks. But because these tools are used so often and by so many people, they have created structural risks that close the gap between short-term gains and long-term disconnects.

We need to stop treating sanctions differently for each situation if the US wants to keep its military strength in the future. Instead, it should follow a strict set of rules when applying sanctions. Someone once said that sanctions are like medicines for politics. They need to be carefully picked out and used the right way. They lose their power over time as you use them more, and resistance builds up. For the US's economic national security tools to keep working well, they need to be made more professional. They shouldn't try to catch up; instead, they should take the initiative and plan ahead, thinking about both the short-term effects and the long-term security of the structure.

Because these economic weapons have been used too much, they are less efficient and the United States is even more alone. The enemies we are focusing on have seen where America is weak and how quickly policy can change. They have used this information to get richer. China, Russia, and Iran have changed to fit the new system by setting up their own payment processors, storing gold, and using alternative networks like cryptocurrencies and transshipment hubs. By depending too much on digital financial tools and ignoring the way the world is shaped, the US has made both friends and enemies look for better options, which has reduced its impact on the world economy.

[1] Horowitz, Michael C. How Ukraine's Drone Innovation Reversed Russia's Momentum. June 12, 2026. https://www.cfr.org/articles/how-ukraines-drone-innovation-reversed-russias-momentum 

[2] https://www.bipc.com/u.s.-sanctions-on-iran-settlement-negotiations-and-status 

Review: The Cryotron Files: The Untold Story of Dudley Buck, Cold War Computer Scientist and Microchip Pioneer by Iain Dey

Dudley Buck was an American electrical engineer and inventor who worked at MIT. He served in the U.S. Navy and did scientific advising work for what would later become the National Security Agency (NSA) before joining MIT, where he contributed to the Whirlwind computer program. He invented a multitude of devices related to computer development. but he is perhaps best know for the Cryotron, a superconductive switching device that operated magnetically in liquid helium near absolute zero temperature (approximately 4 Kelvin or -452°F)

It used two superconducting wires with different critical temperatures (typically niobium and tantalum). One wire acted as a control element, while the other was the switch. When current flowed through the control wire, it created a magnetic field that drove the switch wire into its normal (non-superconducting) state, effectively turning the circuit "off"

Within two years of the initial concept (by 1955), Buck built practical cryotrons and demonstrated a wire-wound ring-oscillator circuit by 1954. Buck envisioned cryotrons as ultra-miniaturized, low-power logic elements that could replace bulky vacuum-tube systems. Until then, before the development of integrated circuits and the transistor (he also had his hand in these) computers had been huge and horribly expensive, but their value in processing large amounts of information rapidly was becoming clear. The cryotron promised very small computers and minimal power consumption, so the military was extremely interested.

Buck partnered with A.D. Little's low-temperature laboratory to develop thin-film versions and explore integrated arrays. This research produced rare cryotron memory chips and contributed significantly to early superconducting digital electronics history.

The temperature of the Cold War was becoming ever frostier, and satellites were emerging as potential weapons, i.e. dropping bombs from space. Collier's magazine had run an article about that possibility with an editorial comment that they couldn't be installed soon enough!

Despite its initial hype, the cryotron faced insurmountable practical challenges. It required extreme cooling with liquid helium to function at temperatures near absolute zero, making it difficult to use in standard environments. Scientifically, it is now often viewed as a technological dead end because it was eventually outpaced by the development of the integrated circuit, which proved to be both faster and more versatile. Critics have noted that while the idea was ingenious, it was ultimately a failure that has been over-inflated in some historical accounts.

Buck, himself, knew the path of electronics would go in a different direction and he was already doing seminal work in the development of what we now know as integrated circuits, i.e. putting thousands, now millions, of transistors on silicon wafers. The Cold War was in full swing by this time and space was seen as the next war zone. The U-2 had revealed the value of intelligence (even if it wasn't used properly) but it also revealed its frailty after Gary Powers was shot down. Buck was an integral part of working on a satellite-based surveillance system, the CORONA Project, some of the details of which remain classified to this day. The U.S. was ahead of the Russians in this regard and the way they solved some of the problems was amusing. They had really good cameras that could provide excellent pictures from space. The problem was getting the film back to earth. They designed a box that would survive reentry into the atmosphere, but anticipating where the box would come down was not a precise science, and weird things coming from on high led to many UFO sightings. One even landed in the Arctic creating a rush to get there before the Russians. That event provided the plot for a book and a movie: Ice Station Zebra.

Buck remained tied to both the NSA and the Navy while teaching at MIT. In one amusing feat of bureaucratic silliness, Buck was denied a promotion by the Navy because he had failed to take a course in elementary electronics. Here was one of the world's per-eminent electronics engineers who had designed all sorts of stuff for both the Navy and NSA, teaching advanced courses at MIT being punished for not having taken a course he could have taught in his sleep.

The circumstances of Buck's death in 1959 remain a central mystery of the Cold War era. He died of a sudden pulmonary condition shortly after opening a package of chemical substances meant for his experiments and just four weeks after a visit from a group of the Soviet Union's top computer experts. The mystery is deepened by the fact that on the same day he died, his close colleague and fellow scientist Louis Ridenour was also found dead of similar causes. These coincidences, combined with Buck's sensitive intelligence work and missions abroad, have led his son (co-author of the book) and other investigators to spend decades searching for the true cause of his death, questioning whether it was an accident, a result of his own recklessness, or a targeted act of espionage.

Macron Trolls Trump

For anyone who missed the ultimate diplomatic troll of having Trump sign the MoU at Versailles, the historical subtext is razor-sharp. The Palace of Versailles is, most famously, where a defeated Germany signed the 1919 treaty ending World War I—an agreement that radically reframed the global order. Under those terms, Germany was forced to pay massive reparations; concurrently, Britain and France carved up the defunct Ottoman Empire, drawing the arbitrary Middle Eastern borders that persist today.

The parallels to the current MoU are striking. Under this new framework, the U.S. has agreed to clear a $300 billion regional fund for Iran and, in a move that completely reorders global trade, granted Tehran control over the Strait of Hormuz, even permitting them to levy transit tolls.

Before securing his signature, Macron brilliantly set the trap by exploiting the U.S. President's vanity and historical blind spots. He treated Trump to a tour of the palace's legendary, gold-encrusted halls—prompting Trump to gush to reporters that it was "the real deal"—a sharp contrast to the faux-gold aesthetic that defines so much of his personal branding. By playing to Trump’s obsession with opulence while counting on his ignorance of history, Macron coaxed him into signing a transformative geopolitical concession on the exact spot where the Germans once surrendered everything.