Cover of Pieces of the Action

Pieces of the Action

Vannevar Bush

The operator’s account of mobilizing science for the state — radar, penicillin, the bomb.

Bush built the machinery that turned American science into wartime capability: the OSRD, the contracts, the labs, the coordination between government, universities, and industry. It is the clearest first-person manual on how research becomes state-scale execution — the same coordination problem any institution faces when it tries to turn ideas into infrastructure.