Chip War is an interesting book, but it has a lot of errors, which made it frustrating to read. For instance, it said that vacuum tube computers were hardly usable because they attracted moths, so they required constant debugging and were only used in specialized applications like cryptography. This is wrong in many ways. Most notably, Grace Hopper's story of the moth was in the Harvard Mark II computer, a relay computer. (I saw the actual moth yesterday, by the way.) Vacuum tube computers were highly popular, selling in the thousands for numerous general-purpose applications. And contrary to Chip War, ENIAC was not used to compute artillery tables during WWII, because it wasn't running until the war ended. This was just a half-page section in the book, but it messed up a lot of things.
Don't have it in front of me so I can't comment on the actual language, but wasn't ENIAC designed for the purpose of firing tables, but the time it was "completed" got used for e.g. H-bomb?
Yes. The statement in Chip War, like many others, is close to correct but still wrong. When a book gets many things wrong in an area that I know, it makes me worry about its accuracy in areas that I don't know. (See Gell-Mann Amnesia.)