Interesting story.

[interstice]

I only ever knew about the Enigma and Colossus stuff. This is another technological battle from WWII - the writing is rather poor even for wikipedia, which is mostly sourced from Most Secret War: British Scientific Intelligence 1939–1945 (OoP everywhere; $44 here as a textbook, £8 as a "brilliant bestseller" over there) which I have of course not read.

The intersection of espionage; human psychology/guesswork and technical development is really chilling to me; in particular, the buried irony of how they got the right conclusion from the term Wotan, even though it turned out that their reasoning was not valid. But in the end, who cares and what does it matter if you are scientific about things, if you only ever do them once?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Beams

Comments

[hfwolfe.livejournal.com]

Funny you mention this now:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/24/bletchley_park_appeal/

[hfwolfe.livejournal.com]

>>But in the end, who cares and what does it matter if you are scientific about things, if you only ever do them once?<<

You mean like Nancy Reagan consulting astrologers as Ronnie succumbed to dementia during nuclear tensions? It matters a fuck lot, I tell you.

You can make philisophical arguments for strategy where the number of available plays times the bet is less than the variance, but that really doesnt apply in this context. Leaving a casino broke isn't the same risk as a civilization being destroyed.

[random-walker.livejournal.com]

By "unscientific" I did not mean "totally batshit". Beyond that, this following might annoy you.

I meant something more like "cunning", "unrepeatable" and "suboptimal". In the absence of perfect OR solutions, intuition can beat out attempted perfect reasoning simply because it has access to more data and can perform faster. It can also go horrible awry, yes. Then again, science is pretty popular at the moment because we have the luxuries of resource and time. This moment will pass.

Although I may comment: it's plausible to me that those stories were exaggerated to "psych out" our enemies at the time. This strategy for nuclear brinkmanship is damned dangerous and also quite scientific, so it seems that scientific thinking doesn't necessarily have much to do with avoiding the end of our world. Likewise from a scientific standpoint Enron was a useful experiment albeit with terrible controls. I still find it unnecessary.

[hfwolfe.livejournal.com]

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<<those stories were exaggerated to "psych out" our enemies at the time>>

It seems quite the opposite. After the war, the US/UK actively prevented public disclosure of ULTRA until the 70s. This is possibly <wiki> because they sold enigma machines to 3rd-world governments without telling them they could decrypt them.</wiki> Whether they covertly released it to the Soviets beforehand is also unlikely, because this would have been excellent "impirialist threat" rhetoric for the USSR to share with non-aligned nations.

One thing I loved reading was that <wiki>The Allies had to send conspicuous recon planes on fake missions to "spot" shipments and fleets that they would bomb, so that the Axis wouldn't know about ULTRA.</wiki>. The military at least seemed to believe that decryption was more beneficial than intimidation.

[random-walker.livejournal.com]

Regarding "psych out": I was referring to promoting abroad the idea that we had an astrologer connected to the Button.

I like the idea about (re-)selling Enigmas. I think this is referenced in a Gibson novel (Count Zero?) where a has-been legendary hacker realizes that the developing Africa is inheriting the obsolete computers and software he became legendary for attacking. Although he is never caught, in sober retrospect he realizes that he is personally responsible for millions of starvation deaths and spends the rest of his life wallowing morosely in this data.

[hfwolfe.livejournal.com]

This is why I quit doing quantum computing on the DARPA budget. In the early days of QC, only governments and multinationals will have access to the tech. I like that SSH is so accessable.

[hfwolfe.livejournal.com]

Oh wait, you mean the stories that both reagans were crazy? My bad. I doubt that. Brinkmanship and mutual assured destruction _requires_ rational opponnents.

[random-walker.livejournal.com]

Yes, MAD does. But we were playing with ideas to do "better" and allow limited asymmetric nuclear strikes. The idea is to restrict your opponent's rationality by forcing them to condition on ultimatums, like this (in principle):

US: Premier, you say that you would counterattack on any attack no matter what.
USSR: Da.
US: Well, our response to ANY counterattack would be to completely destroy you.
USSR: And likewise, so don't attack us.
US: Oh, and by the way, we're going to nuke this industrial city, but nothing else, no matter what you do or say. If you counterattack you lose everything.
USSR: ...
US: And we mean it because we're TOTALLY INSANE, at least as regards this one decision! CRAZY enough to take directions from an ASTROLOGER! Oogitty-boogitty.

[hfwolfe.livejournal.com]

Fair play. I think the strategy you are talking about though was first anylized in terms of Vietnam.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/25/politics/25nixon.html
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The documents reveal Mr. Kissinger's chilling insight that government budget-crunchers would prefer complete nuclear warfare because it was already planned for and would be cheaper than recasting American capabilities to permit limited strikes. "They believe in assured destruction because it guarantees the smallest expenditure."
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I've never seen the words "would prefer complete nuclear warefare" together before.

Fuck, yo then again, you'd have to be bat-shit to play chicken with Brezhnev. That's proof enough.

[random-walker.livejournal.com]

I love it! Recast the relatively safe MAD scenario as one of corrupt ghoulish bureaucracy saving their careers.

"Ve must have ze option of a controlled zlaughter of civilians! Anything else is MORALLY WRONG!"