World War I As Turning Point
David Kahn identifies World War I as a major turning point for institutional cryptology. Before the war, breaking codes was an individual endeavor – one person wresting with the messages until one of due them broke. After the war, successful cryptology against major nation states required large-scale organization.
Japanese cryptology does not seem to have been affected at all by the Great War. The government continued using insecure codes of the sort they had been using since the Meiji Restoration. As a result, in 1921 Japanese diplomacy was unable to gain its preferred result at the Washington Naval Conference, ending with the least position Japan was willing to accept. Weak codes were the primary cause of that result, as the American delegation had the Japanese secret communications available.
Read more about this topic: Japanese Cryptology From The 1500s To Meiji
Famous quotes containing the words turning point, world, war, turning and/or point:
“A turning point in modern history.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.””
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters—not to talk in armies and nations and numbers—but to track it home.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“The journalists think that they cannot say too much in favor of such “improvements” in husbandry; it is a safe theme, like piety; but as for the beauty of one of these “model farms,” I would as lief see a patent churn and a man turning it. They are, commonly, places merely where somebody is making money, it may be counterfeiting.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“You should go to picture-galleries and museums of sculpture to be acted upon, and not to express or try to form your own perfectly futile opinion. It makes no difference to you or the world what you may think of any work of art. That is not the question; the point is how it affects you. The picture is the judge of your capacity, not you of its excellence; the world has long ago passed its judgment upon it, and now it is for the work to estimate you.”
—Anna C. Brackett (1836–1911)