Feature for The Mathematical Intelligencer (draft 20. Jan.

2003)
Mathematics and War: an Invitation to Revisit
Physicists, chemists, and biologists have a tradition of discussing meta-aspects of their
subject among which the military use and misuse of the knowledge they produce. Similar
concerns are rare among mathematicians.
No rule without exceptions. During the Vietnam war, a number of appeals were circulated
among US mathematicians (with reverberations in particular in France and Japan and at the ICM
in Moscow in 1966 and Nice in 1970) not to engage in war-related work. One such appeal was
published in the Notices of the AMS in January 1968. Grothendieck's resigning from
mathematics was a consequence of this debate. [Godement 1978], no longer debate but politico-
economical analysis, was written from a mathematician's perspective even though it did not deal
with mathematical research in particular. [Gross 1978], also written by a mathematician, was
shorter but concentrated on mathematics.
In the new context of the euro-missile controversy of the early 1980s, military research
came into the focus in debate of universities of Western Germany. [Boo & Hyrup 1984] was
an offspring of this new discussion concentrated on mathematics; the broad discussion is
reflected in [Tschirner & Gbel (eds) 1990]. The Forum on Military Funding of Mathematics
published in the Mathematical Intelligencer 1987 no. 4 reflects problems arising for the US
1
mathematical community from the Strategic Defense Initiative in the same phase. Some more
publications followed, mainly with historical emphasis.

As warfare is now again becoming an all-too-obvious aspect of our world and a no less obvious
part of Western policies, time seemed ripe for taking up the issue anew. August 2931, 2002,
42 mathematicians, historians of mathematics, military historians and analysts, and philosophers
2
gathered in the historic military port of Karlskrona, to discuss four questions:
To what extent has the military played an active part throughout history, and in particular
since World War II, in shaping modern mathematics and the careers of mathematicians?

1
Cf. also [Davis 1989].
2
We use the opportunity to thank Maurice and Charlyne de Gosson and the Blekinge Institute of
Technology and its Mathematics Department for organizing splendidly this conference, supported by
Stig Andur Pedersen of The Danish Network for History and Philosophy of Mathematics (MATHNET)
and Reiner Braun of The International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility
(INES). From the conference, a kind of enlarged proceedings will appear as Bernhelm Boo-Bavnbek &
Jens Hyrup (eds), Mathematics and War. Basel & Boston: Birkhuser, 2003. Much of what is said in
the following draws on this volume. To the theme in general, see also [Boo & Hyrup 1984], [Epple &
Remmert 2000], [Godement 1994 and 2001], [Meigs 2002], and [The AMRC Papers 1973].

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Are mathematical thinking, mathematical methods, and mathematically supported
3
technology about to change the character and performance of modern warfare, and if so,
how does this influence the public and the military?
Which were, in times of war, the ethical choices of outstanding individuals like the
physicist Niels Bohr and the mathematician Alan Turing? To what extent can general
ethical discussions provide guidance for working mathematicians?
What was the role of mathematical thinking in shaping the modern international law of war
and peace? Can mathematical arguments support actual conflict solution?

Perspectives from mathematics

All mathematicians know the tales, reliable or not, about Archimedes and his defence of
Syracuse. They may also have heard about early Modern ballistics and fortification mathematics
and the importance of trigonometry for navigation. All these cases of mathematics being implied
in conquest, warfare or preparation of war have one thing in common: that which was combined
with technical and military knack was almost exclusively already existing mathematics. In this
respect such examples do not differ from the use of simple accounting mathematics in logistics
which after all is likely to have been much more important from the military point of view.
Mathematics served as a toolbox, and military officers may have been the largest group that
received some general mathematical training; but the involvement of mathematics as a general
endeavour with the military institution was not very intimate, and specifically military
applications had no independent role as a shaping force for mathematics. Tartaglia's composition
of straight lines and circles in ballistics was clearly inspired from gunnery and the war against
the Turks. When Galileo introduced the parabolic law this origin was already left behind, and the
theory was linked instead to the philosophical discussion of local movement and was largely
irrelevant for the firing of guns because of the influence of air resistance, as pointed out
explicitly be Galileo.
Even to this rule there is an exception. That part of the Sumero-Babylonian legacy which is
most spoken of in general histories of mathematics namely the invention and implementation
of the place value system may be a child of war. In c. 2074 BCE, king Shulgi organized a
military reform in the Sumerian Empire, and the next year an administrative reform which,
under the pretext of a state of emergency that became permanent, seems to have enrolled the
larger part of the working population in quasi-servile labour crews and made overseer scribes
1
accountable for the performance of their crews calculated in abstract units worth /60 of a
working day (12 minutes) and according to fixed norms. In the ensuing bookkeeping, all work
therefore had to be calculated precisely and converted, which asked for multiplications and

3
This broad concept of mathematics is the one that serves in the following; it also embraces computers
and computer science.

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division in huge numbers. Therefore, a place value system with base 60 was introduced for
4
intermediate calculations. Its functioning presupposed the use of tables of multiplication,
reciprocals and technical constants and the training of these in school; the implementation of a
system whose basic idea had been in the air for some centuries therefore asked for decisions
made at the level of the state and set through with great force. Then as in many later situations,
only war provided the opportunity for such social power of will.
Apart from that the conclusion stands that the involvement of mathematics as a general
endeavour with the military institution was not very intimate, and specifically military
applications had no independent role as a shaping force for mathematics until a century ago.
Since around 1500 BC, as already mentioned, the employment of fortification mathematicians
and the teaching of naval and artillery officers certainly played a social role for mathematics by
providing job opportunities and a market for mathematics text books (copiously decorated with
military symbols).

This we may regard as the past. The contemporary situation can be said to start around the First
World War, and to reach full development during the Second World War.
During World War I, two important new military technologies depended on mathematics in
the making: sonar, and aerodynamics. They were so impressive that Picard, in spite of his own
patriotism (which non-French cannot help seeing as pure chauvinism), regretted the perspective
that young mathematicians might opt in future for applied mathematics only [Proc. ... 1920:
xxviii]. In general, however, the immediate role of the pure sciences, mathematical and
otherwise, was that of providing manpower that could be converted into first-class creative
engineers not restricted to applying a set of standard rules but able to implement theoretical
knowledge and make it function in practice; this was also the role of most of the mathematicians
that were actually involved in the war effort (if they were not, as was the use in France, sent into
the trenches). Nobody will claim that mathematics was in any way decisive for the outcome of
the war, nor that WW-I applications of mathematics left important traces in the post-war world
(civil aviation still belonged to the future).
Picard's worries proved unfounded. Main-stream mathematics soon reverted to the pre-War
model, even more swiftly than the precariously erected organization of planned science was
dismantled. Aerodynamics of course survived, but only as a current among others.
All of this was different in World War II, either quantitatively or qualitatively: the
organization of science intended to support the war effort was a major concern of both Axis and
Allied powers; mathematical technologies (radar, sonar, the decipher computer, the bomb) can

4
Since it was a floating-point system with no indication of absolute place, it could only be used for
intermediate calculations just as the slide rule of engineers in quite recent times. Since intermediate
calculations have not survived, the exact dating of the implementation can only be determined from
indirect arguments. See, e.g., [Hyrup 2002: 314].

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be argued to have been war-decisive; computers, nuclear energy, jet propulsion all
mathematically constructed and computed for the war have changed our world beyond
5
recognition after 1945. All of these build on pre-War theoretical insights; some of them
(computers, jet motors) were not only in the air before the war but functioned as prototypes;
but in all cases the war, by making available huge means without counting costs and benefits,
6
made it possible to boost a development which otherwise might have taken decades and
perhaps, in cases like the proliferation of DDT and atomic reactors, might have been stopped at
an early moment when the problems they create became visible.
During the War, mathematicians in large numbers were recruited, many of them to teach
sailors and air-crew members basic trigonometry (etc.), but many also to serve as best-level
creative engineers. Afterwards, the latter have often tended to regard what they did dismissively
(I did not write one line that was publishable), perhaps because puzzle-solving with no further
theoretical impact did not look important in the mathematician's hindsight; this assessment
notwithstanding, what was done depended critically on mathematical ingenuity and training. A
striking example is O. R. Frisch and R. Peierls' mathematical formulation of the essential
questions surrounding the construction of a uranium bomb in March 1940 and their back-of-an-
7
envelope discovery that its critical mass was so small that military use was feasible.
In some cases, of course, the solving of problems defined by the war did have important
theoretical impact we all know about the emergence of computer science, information theory,
Monte Carlo simulation, operations research, and statistical quality control.
This time, nothing was dismantled after the War (many mathematicians, of course, hurried
away from military research) the Cold War was already on. In the slightly longer run (a decade
or so), civil re-application of the new mathematical war techniques caused profound
transformation of these and violent acceleration of their development: only the war effort had
allowed the creation of the first costly computers, but only commercial use allowed mass

5
At times fully detached from every technical application; N. Wiener and E. Hopf had calculated the
radiation equilibrium at stellar surfaces, but their theory could be applied to the expanding surface of the
exploding bomb [Wiener 1964: 142f]; A. A. Markov had investigated his eponymous processes as pure
mathematics and illustrated the applicability of the concept on linguistic material [A. A. Youschkevitch
1974: 129]; in the Manhattan Project they turned out to be relevant for solving diffusion equations and
for describing nuclear branching processes.
6
The parallel to the invention of the place value system in Sumer is striking. In that case, parallel
processes not furthered by a military government indeed asked for much longer time: in China the
unfolding took more than a millennium, in India it never really took place before the Indian system
was brought back from abroad.
7
See [Gowing 1964: 4043, 389393] and [Dalitz & Peierls 1997: 277282]. This latter volume presents
Peierls as a physicist, but his actual chair was in applied mathematics; even a broad concept of
mathematics does not free us from delimitation problems.

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production, open competition, intensive development efforts and reduction of costs. We may add
that only the freeing from the pressure of immediate applicability (better a fairly satisfactory
answer now than the really good answer two years after defeat) gave space for fruitful
interaction between theoretical understanding and applications in for instance computer science.

When discussing mathematical research for military purposes, both during World War II
and in recent decades, we should differentiate several situations and problems.
Firstly, we must distinguish the application (sometimes creative, sometimes repetitive) of
existing tools within the military institution itself (ballistic computation, modelling, ...)
from creative mathematical research outside this institution but directed toward military
goals.
Secondly, we should remember that mathematical research consists in more than the
production of theorems of presumed military use. Several institutions (Sss's original
planning of the German Oberwolfach Institute in 1944, the American Mathematics
Research Center in Wisconsin) exemplify an efficient model, a two-way chain, which
8
grosso modo works as follows: A core group of highly skilled mathematicians familiar
with the direct problems of the military employer (efficiency of bombing, controlled spread
of bacteriological agents, better radar detection and avoidance of enemy detection, or
whatever it may be) find out which of these can be approached mathematically, undertake
an initial translation, and direct the translated problems to other experienced
mathematicians who are well-informed about and centrally located within the whole
mathematical milieu; these parcel out the questions into problems which colleagues may
take up as mathematically interesting, perhaps even without knowing that they enter into a
network of military relevance; once such questions have been answered, the same chain
functions backwards, reassembling the answers and channelling the global solution to the
employer (only the availability of large amounts of money distinguishes this from how
mathematics of civilian relevance can be created).

This is only one among several models. We know that it was planned to function in World
War II Germany but was implemented too late to become efficient; we know that it has
functioned in the US. We know less about the organization of military mathematical research in
the late Soviet Union, but it appears that here, as in production and research in general, the civil
and military domains were more efficiently separated than in the West.

Rounding off what can be said in the perspective from mathematics we may make some

8
Concerning the Oberwolfach Institute, this structure follows from analysis of the material presented by
Gericke [1984], cf. [Hyrup 1985]; on the same institution, see also [Remmert 1999]. For the Wisconsin
Institute, see [The AMRC Papers, 1973].

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general observations.
Mathematical war research has resulted in certain fundamental theoretical innovations. It is
striking, however, that all of these appear to depend on an exceptional mathematician. The
names of Turing, von Neumann, Shannon, Wald, and Pontryagin must suffice to make the
point.
However, the utility of mathematics for the treatment of military problems does not depend
critically on the presence of an exceptional mathematician. Mathematicians in large
numbers have proved themselves unexpectedly able to function as creative mathematical
engineers, in the sense explained above.
This ability has largely depended on their ability to become familiar with methods and
approaches of various mathematical disciplines and to synthesize these. The still persistent
unity of mathematics is thus demonstrated ad oculos, if not in the mathematical journals
then in the uses.
It should not be forgotten that the traditional application of the toolbox of already existing
mathematics goes on, now at the level created by recent mathematical research.

Military perspectives
At the conference, the point was strongly made by Colonel Svend Bergstein that actual war
cannot be calculated, no more today than in Clausewitz's times; not only too many unpredictable
external factors are involved, also the aspects of human behaviour that are most atavistic and
contrary to reason.
Nevertheless, and as a matter of fact, mathematics that is, mathematical thinking,
mathematical methods, and mathematics-based technology has become an integral and even
essential part of modern warfare. (This does not mean that mathematics has become the major
expense of the military apparatus mathematics and what goes with it is a cheap way to use
expensive resources more efficiently.)
Once more, we may list various aspects of this role and utility of mathematics as discussed
9
at the conference and in other contexts.
Mathematics serves in managing the institution. Purchases of weapons systems are planned,
war-games and logistics are calculated.
Weapons and weapons systems are optimized and their efficiency during action enhanced.
This regards munitions (including missiles and bombs provided with guidance systems);
delivery systems (including for instance aeroplanes provided with electronic
countermeasure circuitry); the reconnaissance, control and communication interface (to

9
Evidently it is difficult to find any technology which has been created during the last decades which is
not somehow driven by mathematics. The list discusses such facets of the matter as go beyond what
holds for any practice that involves computers or microelectronics.

-6-
ensure that the right forces are at the right spot at the right moment, and with the right
information about the enemy Svend Bergstein); and, across all of these, high-speed
cryptography. The improvement of data transmission technologies is of general importance
for many of these questions, but the creation of data is not only a presupposition for their
transmission but also filed which nowadays makes use of even more sophisticated
10
mathematics.
Similarly, the strategic planning of the possible use of the weapons systems depends on
mathematical calculation; even the dismantlement of weapons systems without the risk of
destabilizing disequilibrium in the SALT negotiations was analyzed mathematically.
Perhaps unexpected by civilians but emphasized by military analysts, simple accounting
mathematics performed by mathematically trained independent personnel and not by the
active warriors is mandatory if strategic gains and losses are to be assessed realistically
leading officers, like all of us, are easy victims of self-deceiving optimism and pessimism
according to circumstances.
At the opposite end of the scale, mathematics may also be an indispensable tool. Thus,
when the effect of fragmentation bombs on human bodies was to be predicted but
humanitarian concerns prohibited testing on pigs, mathematical simulation was put into
play.
Ideologically, the waging of war is made more acceptable to the public by the presentation
of warfare as a question of mathematical calculation, and thus of war as more rational and
clean. Whereas Hitler preached German invincibility by presenting the Wehrmacht as
Fast as German greyhounds, tough as German Lederhosen, hard as Krupp steel,
mathematics presents modern warfare as fast by avionics, precise by GPS, safe by
mathematically optimized operations planning.
Similarly, certain uses of mathematical representations of the task to be performed may
serve to make the agent see it as a normal manipulation of symbols and thus to eliminate
the need for appeals to atavistic instincts say, seeing a village to be bombed as triangles
similar to those of a computer game may facilitate the killing. (Evidently, being at a height
of 5 kilometres already has much the same effect).

Utility is one thing, possible backfiring that must be taken into account is another. Firstly,
seeing war as more rational and clean may affect (and often appears to affect) not only the
public but also the political planners. This is pernicious, not only for the victims but already for

10
Interestingly, the analysis of the damages of the intestine of a wounded solider by magnetic resonance
imaging (MRI) and the localization of enemy ground forces by synthetic aperture radar (SAR) build on
the same mathematics both, indeed, squeeze out of a short antenna as much information by
systematic repeated use as could be gained from an extended antenna without advanced mathematics
[Schempp 1998: 44 and passim].

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the planners themselves who may engage recklessly their armed forces in operations and wars
that are less easily won than predicted by the machine-rational perception of the character of war.
Less dangerous for planners but just as much for victims is the relative inexpensiveness of
present-day mathematically supported asymmetric warfare for the attackers if the subjugation
of Serbia in the Kosovo war cost only 7 billion US $, that is, 700 $ per Yugoslav capita, the
temptation is great to solve all similar problems in a similar way. (In the moment such a war
turns out as things develop to involve the use of ground forces, costs of course explode, and we
are brought back to the situation discussed in the previous paragraph).
Another feature of the mathematization of warfare, also contributing to the ongoing
militarization of our world but not restricted to the field of easy asymmetric wars and punitive
operations, is the transformation of the Krupp model into an infinite Krupp model. War and
prepared war is always between two (possibly more) parts Clausewitz would speak of a
Zweikampf, a duel, which has now become a duel of systems. In the nineteenth century,
Friedrich Krupp would first develop nickel-steel armour that could resist existing shells, then
chrome-steel shells that could pierce this armour, then high-carbon armour plate that resisted
these, then cap-shot shells that could break this plate and that was the end of it. In the duel
between soil-air missiles and aeroplanes, no physical limit prevents an ongoing sophistication
and ensuing arms race. Cap-shots shells were and remained extremely expensive; so are stealth
bombers and fighters, but such measures as depend solely on sophistication of soft- and
hardware have neither budgetary nor intellectual definitive bounds. Processes depending on
physics and chemistry may have definitive natural boundaries. Those depending solely on
mathematics seem to have none. The ensuing virtual absence of limits enhances the stress on
both sides, and thus the speed and instability of such a race.

Ethics
Mathematics, according to a familiar view, is a neutral tool. As once formulated by Jerry
Neyman, I prove theorems, they are published, and after that I don't know what happens to
them.
This is certainly an important feature of the mathematical endeavour, and does not only
hold for theorems and theorem production. Also the teaching of mathematics, the production of
high-level general mathematical competence in the population, is a precondition not only for the
waging of modern war but also for the functioning of our whole technological society (quite
apart from its cultural value).
But the title mathematics and war implies ethical dilemmas. In order to avoid having the
ethical discussion end up in I feel.../but I feel, we may start by looking at the actual ethical
choices of some well-known figures.
Laurent Schwartz used his high academic prestige to make his resistance to the French and
American wars in Algeria and Vietnam more efficacious; he saw no connection between his
work in mathematics and his political commitment (and as far as his own theoretical

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production is concerned it may be difficult to find any immediate and direct link).
Niels Bohr, when becoming aware of the German nuclear bomb project, supported the
competing Anglo-American project; when discovering the dangers that were to arise from
the success of the latter, he issued warnings to responsible politicians (Churchill, Roosevelt)
and to the public (the Open letter) using his prestige as an originator of the underlying
theory and as a collaborator (and arguably overrating the impact his interventions might
have).
Alan Turing, quite sceptical of British society (for political as well as personal reasons), put
his outstanding abilities in the service of war with total loyalty when he felt it was needed;
unlike Bohr, he did so without ever putting himself into focus.
Kinnosuke Ogura had been a strong promoter of (Marxist-inspired) democratic
modernization of Japan, and had opposed Japanese policies as being parallel to German and
Italian Fascism. After the beginning of the aggression against China in 1937, however,
patriotism and the project to use war as a way to modernization urged him to play a central
role in the organization of Japanese mathematics in the service of the military state. After
the war he regretted, without specifying too directly what he had done.
John von Neumann, like Turing, applied his outstanding abilities in war research. Neumann
did so both during World War II and in the early Cold War; whereas Turing had been a loyal
participant about whose personal attitudes in the matter we know nothing, Neumann made
the creation of the H-bomb a personal project which (well served by Stanislaw Ulam) he
did all he could to promote his aim being to make possible a preemptive first strike.
Lev S. Pontryagin gave up an extremely fruitful research line in algebraic topology and
created control theory. In hindsight this appears to have been caused by a will to serve his
socialist country by solving the problems of guiding intercontinental ballistic missiles thus
making impossible the first strike.
Decades before, G. S. Hardy had tried to avoid that usefulness of his science which consists
in accentuat[ing] the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly
promot[ing] the destruction of human life by concentrating on supposedly useless number
theory. Ironically, he repeated this phrase in 1940, when number theory was soon to become
a cryptographic resource.
The radical pacifist Lewis Fry Richardson published his path-breaking Weather Prediction
by Numerical Process in 1922 after having made sure that 64000 computers (human
beings furnished with desk calculators) would need more than one day to predict the
weather one day ahead. This he saw as a guarantee that numerical weather prediction could
not be put to military use.

To what extent can these serve as exemplars and role models? Firstly, they show that two
fundamentally different situations must be distinguished. One is that of Laurent Schwartz and
Hardy: deep scepticism towards their own society, or aspects of that society as a warring power.

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The other is that of the remaining examples: they accepted their own society and its warfare or
armament policies, either in general or under actual circumstances certainly with different
degrees of identification.
In the second situation, the ethical dilemmas are few. Obviously, one will see no objections
to doing his best. Certainly, dilemmas are not totally absent: one may still, like von Neumann,
give an extra push; one may, like Turing, be fully loyal but leave the political decisions to those
who are officially entitled to take them (whether politicians, citizens in general, or military men);
or one may, like Bohr, use one's particular standing and insight and moderate, warn, or point to
alternative options.
The situation of the sceptic is less clear-cut. Very few of us are in a situation (the situation,
say, of von Neumann and Pontryagin) where nobody else could do what we are doing; these few
may influence matters directly by deciding to cooperate or not to cooperate.
Most mathematicians, if they chose not to cooperate in mathematics research and teaching,
will have little effect, and little of what most mathematicians do in research as well as teaching is
directed toward a specific application. Deciding to abstain from working with a particular
discipline because it seems corrupt is mostly futile. Giving up mathematics is not only giving
up military applications but anything mathematics can be used for and whatever cultural value
we may ascribe to mathematics.
However, the practice of the mathematician consists in more than the abstract production
and dissemination of theorems. Any mathematician is in a particular situation, and in any
particular situation there are specific conditions and a specific room for decisions. One may, for
instance, widen one's own insight and global understanding of the role of mathematics, and try to
share it with students, colleagues and the public or one may chose to remain and leave as blind
as comfortable. One may be a teacher in one or the other position, teaching within a highly
stratified or a more egalitarian education system; one may organize the research of an institution,
one may be a prestigious researcher, or one may be the newly appointed young colleague. One
may be in the top of the AMRC chain, one may be in its periphery knowing or not knowing to
belong there, or perhaps be wholly outside it. In each situation, the scope of ethical choices is
different, and no general ethical rules or advice can be issued (a somewhat less abstract
discussion of the matter can be found, however, in [Boo & Hyrup 1984]). What can be said in
general is that the neutrality of mathematics per se does not entail the neutrality of these ethical
choices.

An enlightenment perspective???
The Enlightenment believed that reason might serve general progress; Rousseau and Swift
pointed out that too often reason is used in the service of purely technical rationality and for
purposes of sub-optimization, with morally and physically disfiguring effects. According to
Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Reason is the Substance and Original of the Mathematicks. Where
does that leave mathematics with regard to disfigurement and progress today?

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Much of what was said above concerning the utility of mathematics for the military points
rather to disfigurement. Most alarming of all are probably not the actual uses but the ideological
veil of rationality, cleanness and surgical accuracy which is derived from the mathematization of
warfare. By generalization one might claim that this applies not only to the military aspects of
our modern technical society but to the technically rational society as a whole.
However, one of the ways in which mathematics serves the military points in the opposite
direction: that sober-minded elimination of self-deceiving optimism and pessimism which can
be provided by mathematical reasoning and calculation. Mathematics-based reason at its best
should allow us also in larger scale to unlearn conventional wisdom, to undermine facile
indoctrination, to distinguish the possible from glib promises. It might help us, if not to find any
absolutely best way this is too much to expect from rational analysis then at least to evade
the worst. If reason is the Substance and Original of the Mathematicks, mathematics might
serve to make clear to us that war is fundamentally irrational and unreasonable not only in
commonplace ideological generality but in specific detail. Admittedly, technical rationality
prevails over reason for the moment, both concerning the general political situation and the uses
to which mathematics is put.
Just as mathematical theories, mathematics as a general undertaking is ethically neutral
or, better, ethically ambiguous: responsibility remains with its practitioners, disseminators, and
users.

References
Most mathematicians, if writing about mathematics and society, speak of a society without
war. None the less, a few works of relevance for the preceding can be listed. In alphabetic order:

Boo, Bernhelm, & Jens Hyrup, Von Mathematik und Krieg. ber die Bedeutung von Rstung
und militrischen Anforderungen fr die Entwicklung der Mathematik in Geschichte und
Gegenwart. (Schriftenreihe Wissenschaft und Frieden, Nr. 1). Marburg: Bund
demokratischer Wissenschaftler, 1984. Somewhat updated English translation as pp. 225
278, 343349 in Jens Hyrup, In Measure, Number, and Weight. Studies in Mathematics
and Culture. New York: State University of New York Press, 1994.
Dalitz, Richard H., & Sir Rudolf Ernst Peierls (eds), Selected Scientific Papers of Sir Rudolf
Peierls. With Commentary. Singapore and London: World Scientific Publishing, Imperial
College Press, 1997.
Davis, Chandler, A Hippocratic oath for mathematicians?, pp. 44-47 in Christine Keitel (ed.),
Mathematics, Education, and Society. Science and Technology Education. Document Series
No. 35, Paris: UNESCO, 1989.
Epple, Moritz, & Volker Remmert, `Eine ungeahnte Synthese zwischen reiner und angewandter
Mathematik': Kriegsrelevante mathematische Forschung in Deutschland whrend des II.
Weltkrieges, vol. I, pp. 258-295 in Doris Kaufmann (ed.), Geschichte der Kaiser-Wilhelm-

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Gesellschaft im Nationalsozialismus. Bestandsaufnahme und Perspektiven der Forschung.
Two volumes, Gttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2000. (The same authors have published a
number of other studies).
Gericke, 1984.
Godement, Roger, Aux sources du modle scientifique amricain I-III. La Pense 201
(Octobre 1978), 3369, 203 (Fvrier 1979), 95122, 204 (Avril 1979), 86110.
---, Science et dfense. Une brve histoire du sujet I. Gazette des Mathmaticiens 61 (1994),
260. (Part II has not appeared).
---, Analyse mathmatique II. Postface. Science, technologie, armament, 377-465. Berlin etc.:
Springer, 2001.
Gowing, Margaret, Britain and Atomic Energy 1939-1945. London: Macmillan & Co Ltd, 1964.
Gross, Horst-Eckart, Das sich wandelnde Verhltnis von Mathematik und Produktion, pp.
226-269 in P. Plath & H.J. Sandkhler (eds), Theorie und Labor. Dialektik als Programm
der Naturwissenschaft. Kln: Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, 1978.
Hyrup 1985.
---, 2002.
Meigs, Montgomery C., Slide Rules and Submarines. American Scientists and Subsurface
Warfare in World War II. Honolulu, Hawaii: University Press of the Pacific, 2002.
Reprinted from the 1990 edition.
Proc 1920.
Remmert, Volker, Vom Umgang mit der Macht. Das Freiburger Mathematische Institut im
`Dritten Reich'. 1999. Zeitschrift fr Sozialgeschichte des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts 14
(1999), 56-85.
Schempp, Walter Johannes, Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Mathematical Foundations and
Applications. New York etc.: Wiley, 1998.
The AMRC Papers. By Science for the People, Madison Wisconsin Collective. Madison,
Wisconsin: Science for the People, 1973.
Tschirner, Martina, & Heinz-Werner Gbel (eds), Wissenschaft im Krieg - Krieg in der
Wissenschaft. Ein Symposium an der Phillips-Universitt Marburg. 50 Jahre nach Beginn
des II. Weltkrieges. Marburg: Eigenverlag AMW, 1990.
Wiener 1964.
Youschkevitch 1974.

Suggested illustrations:

1. Oberwolfach today

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Caption: When listening to a music CD we enjoy and do not think of the military origin of the
coding involved. Similarly, mathematicians going to the wonderful Mathematical Research
Institute Oberwolfach enjoy the ambience and do not think about the fact that the institute
originated as a military research institution in 1944 - apparently well planned for the purpose
though too late to become efficient.

2. Rejewski ceremony
Caption: Leading Polish army officers were present at a ceremony in 2001 when a memorial
plaque was unveiled at the tomb of the cryptologist Marian Rejewski (1905-1980), here some
generals with Rejewski's daughter and the president of the Polish Mathematical Society. Not
many mathematicians have experienced similar honours in life or posthumously. Already as a
mathematics student Rejewski had been recruited by the Cipher Bureau of the General Staff of
the Polish Army in 1929. Rejewski then created a mathematical method for breaking the
German Enigma code of that time. It does great credit to the Polish Cipher Bureau officers that
they realized so soon the potential of mathematics in cryptological research.

3. The first page of Ogura's 1944 book on Mathematics in Wartime

Caption: Kinnosuke Ogura (1885-1962) was an excellent Japanese mathematician, struggling for
the modernization and democratization of his home country. However, during the Greater East
Asia War he was trapped in the mobilization of the Tennoist aggression against China. The
picture shows the first page of Ogura's 1944 book on Mathematics in Wartime. He is writing a
bellicose appeal to mobilize mathematics for the Tennoist victory. After 1945 lending of extant
library copies was banned and the book was silently excluded from Ogura's Collected Works in 8
volumes.

4. busgroup.jpg
Caption: There is no known picture of Turing during the wartime period, but this photograph
shows Alan Turing (at left) with his athletic club in 1946. At this point he was engaged in
designing a first digital computer at the National Physical Laboratory, London. This used his
wartime knowledge of electronic technology to put his 1936 theory of the universal machine into
a practical form. The codebreaking machinery at Bletchley Park, although very advanced, had
never actually used Turing's fundamental idea of the universal machine and the stored program,
but as soon as the war ended Turing set to work to bring it to reality.

5. Kolmogorov's Theory of Firing, four front pages 1942, 1945, 1948, 2002
Caption: The 1945 work by Kolmogorov and collaborators on Firing Theory was interesting
enough to be translated by the RAND Corporation in 1948 and is still regarded as fundamental
in quite recent US military education. It is one of the apparent paradoxes of the relation between
mathematics and warfare that the preceding paper by Kolmogorov was published in 1942 for

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everybody to read (including the enemy). Could it be that the 1942 paper was too mathematical
and too general to inform military practice directly? And on the other hand: was the 1945 work
after all too closely linked to a specific problem to inspire further mathematical development?

6. Vostok launch rocket of the first manned spacecraft (launched on April 12, 1961)
Caption: According to information received from Samara Aerospace University, the launchings
of Sputnik 1 and Sputnik 2 in 1957 were made without recourse to the Pontryagin Maximum
Principle. Only bringing down cosmonauts safely and guaranteeing that intercontinental missiles
surviving a first strike would hit New York presupposed the Maximum Principle, which was in
the public domain well before that. For Sputnik 1 and 2, however, Pontryagin assisted to find the
correct weight of the space craft (same source).

7. Circular error probable, table

Caption: The average precision of bombing and firing is commonly characterized by the
Circular Error Probable (CEP), that is, the radius of a disc around the goal point within which
(on average) 50% of the shots hit while 50% fall outside. (Kolmogorov's approach was more
sophisticated). The table shows how CEP has decreased dramatically in aerial bombing over the
last 60 years and how the efficiency of a bomber increased correspondingly. The table gives the
calculated number of bombs required for destroying (hitting once) a 20m x 30m object.

8. Target selection and order of battle, scheme of modern air raid build-up
Caption: In World War II, the destruction of a major composite target might ask for the
deployment of 1000 bombers. Nowadays a similar task may be effectuated by, say, 29 heavy
bombers (lower level of the above schematized front view of the attack - heights are indicated in
kilometres). But these have to be supported by another set of 275 ground attack fighter and
fighters (SEAD package) to suppress enemy air defence (bottom). Higher up, 24 Intelligence-
Surveillance-Reconnaissance (ISR) aircrafts guide the action of the lower levels and on top,
dozens of ISR spacecrafts participate. Not depicted in the scheme are the about 200 tankers for
air-to-air refuelling; the about 60 transporters for flying in supply, ordnance, maintenance
provisions; the hundreds of sea-launched Tomahawk Land Attack Cruise Missiles; and the
swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles. Much more than informatics is thus involved in the
support of the mission itself, and the dramatic decrease of CEP has to be paid for by dramatic
increase of support crafts. However, air raids are still the cheapest way to wage a punitive war
(forbidden by international law, but practised), inflicting huge economic losses on the enemy at
extremely low operational costs.

9. Demolished Varadin Danube River Bridge in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia

Caption: The destruction of the bridges across the important international waterway Danube,
some of them in the North of Yugoslavia and hence far away from Kosovo where the Yugoslav

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military operational capability should be hindered, was unlawful by The Geneva Protocol I. The
counter-argument given is that this kind of warfare is, after all, cost-efficient in human lives,
even for the target population as illustrated by the undamaged blocks of flats standing near to
the crushed bridge. The as yet mysterious health problems of Nato soldiers who participated in
the Gulf and Kosovo wars tell us that other damages that do not show up on photographs may
turn up in medical statistics. An even greater cost of this high-precision warfare supported by
mathematics is its very introduction of the concept of justified risk-less punitive wars without
bloodshed. This creates invincibility illusions, lowers the barrier against war and talks people
into accepting war.

10. Frontispiece Grotius' book, 1646

Title-page of the second edition of Grotius' De Jure Belli Ac Pacis. As indicated by the armillary
sphere, the publisher was also engaged in mathematical publishing. Historians of international
law credit Hugo Grotius with the creation of modern international law, as in particular
established in the Peace Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 and the Charter of the United Nations of
1945, and trace the origins of it back to patterns of mathematical thinking of striking public
appeal in Grotius' time. Military analysts of our time blame the striking public appeal of
mathematics supported modern warfare for undermining international law.

11. The mosaic from http://www.barca.fsnet.co.uk/archimedes.htm (Stdelsches

Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt/M., Germany)
Caption: "Noli turbare circulos meos": When Archimedes's city was conquered in spite of his
astounding mathematical engineering, he pretended (according to the famous anecdote) that he
had only made pure mathematics.

Box to accompany Figure 8 (Scheme of modern air raid build-up)

Precision Bombing Acronyms
AWACS Airborne warning and control system for air and combat control
B-<> Long-range bomber with weapon payload of more than 10 tons
COM Military communication / signals intelligence spacecraft
E-8 Joint surveillance and targeting attack radar system JSTARS
EA-6B "Prowler" carrier-borne radar jammer
EC-130 "Compass Call" communication jammer
F-<> Fighter and fighter ground attack aircraft
GPS Global positioning system navigation satellite
IR-NRO Infra-red (US) National Reconnaissance Office spacecraft
ISR Intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance package
LM-NRO Imaging radar (US) National Reconnaissance Office spacecraft
MET Weather satellite

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RC-135 "Rivet Joint" signals intelligence gathering aircraft
SAM-<> Surface-air missile
SEAD Suppressing enemy air defence package
U-2 Optical spy plane

Bernhelm Boo-Bavnbek and Jens Hyrup are at Roskilde University, Postboks 260, 4000
Roskilde, Denmark. BBB is at the Department of Mathematics and Physics, [email protected]; JH
at the Section for Philosophy and Science Studies, [email protected].

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