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

[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!"