Space balls.

• Author: Thompson, Nicholas
• Position: Book Review

SECRET EMPIRE: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden Story of America's Space Espionage by Philip Taubman Simon & Schuster, $27.00

FOR ALL THE SUCCESS OF ITS battle plan in Iraq and the laser-guided missiles that obliterated their targets in Baghdad, it's hard not to think that America wins wars today as much because of the depth of its pockets as the sharpness of its minds. Iraq's annual gross national product is about $50 billion and our annual military budget is $400 billion. We spent about as much money destroying Iraq as that country spent building itself.

Most major defense projects of the past two decades have come in late, over-budget, or both. Worse, our biggest outlays haven't gone for technologies that are maximally useful in conflicts against the terrorists and rogue and hapless states that smart people have long considered our biggest post-Soviet enemy.

We still spend vastly more on fighter jets suitable for scrambling against hostile air forces that don't exist than we do on surveillance drones suitable for tracking terrorist networks that do. The biggest, grandest, military project--missile defense--has drained hundreds of billions of dollars without either working or showing the potential to defend against the weapons that future enemies will likely employ.

It's thus helpful to hear the story of a time when the country showed the ability to quickly and smoothly create weapons and tools that mirrored national needs. A longtime New York Times reporter, now editorial page editor, Philip Taubman's central message is that the military-industrial complex really worked for a brief period in the 1950s. We knew very little about the Soviet Union's military strength or intentions. Infiltrating the Kremlin high command wasn't easy and the Soviets regularly shot down the spy planes we occasionally sent hurtling over the country with cameras stuck in' their bomb bays. So, we had no real sense of whether the Soviets were planning to attack us or who would win if they did.

But we came up with a solution: high atmospheric and space spying that would keep the cameras out of range of Soviet fire. The scientific and bureaucratic obstacles were fierce. But the country's best minds achieved it, largely ahead of schedule and under budget.

The first major section of Taubman's book describes the birth of the wildly successful U2 project. Originally conceived by a set of dreamers scattered around the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica and various...