Collateral Damage Vs. The Gift of Knowing

Cryptography and the ability to “know” is a critical weapon in wartime. Example after example demonstrate this relationship with arguably the most obvious example being the enigma machine in WWII. Such a weapon as ciphers in wartime situations can make one ponder situations if he was in charge.

I recently pondered over a situation whereas I was a commander in an army and I intercepted a message from the enemy and decrypted it, but the message contained orders to bomb one of my largest cities. I would then have a choice, if I moved defenses to the city, the enemy would know I decrypted their code and would likely change it. If I turn my head, hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians of my own country would die. After some serious thought, a decision was made.

I decided I would move defenses and attempt to crack the enemy’s new code when it appears because if I didn’t, besides the fact that many civilians would die on my knowing account, the rest of the country would lose serious confidence in the army for not “seeing” this happen. There may be a number of collateral damage that is “acceptable” if it means the enemy does not need to know that my army knows the code, and the number of lives will very from man to man, but losing a major city and the trust of the country is far to great of a price when I am only losing the ability to decrypt messages temporarily until we could figure out a new decryption algorithm of new enemy messages sure to follow.