The new technology of radar quickly became invaluable in World War II, not only for finding enemy aircraft and ships but also for navigating and for making proximity fuses on antiaircraft and artillery shells that turned near misses into hits. As Peter Westwick notes in his elegant “Stealth: The Secret Contest to Invent Invisible Aircraft,” U.S. wartime radar research was “bigger than the Manhattan Project.” Though “the atomic bomb may have ended World War II,” he writes, “radar won it.”
As World War II gave way to the Cold War, jet engines and nuclear weapons increased the importance of radar and the strategic significance of countering it. Mr. Westwick fast-forwards through early, tentative attempts to do so, taking the reader to Southern California in the 1970s, where two defense contractors—Lockheed and Northrop—competed to develop modern stealth aircraft. Lockheed would win the first big prize with the F-117 stealth fighter. Northrop, 20 miles away, later won the even larger contract to build the B-2 stealth bomber.
