Military / Warfare / Cyberwarfare Timeline

In 1896 W. M. Flinders Petrie discovered the Merneptah Stele -- also known as the Israel Stele or Victory Stele of Merneptah -- in the first court of Merneptah's mortuary temple at Thebes. It is inscribed on the reverse of a large granite stele originally erected by the Ancient Egyptian king Amenhotep III, but later inscribed by Merneptah who ruled Egypt from 1213 to 1203 BC. The black granite stele primarily commemorates a victory in a campaign against the Libu and Meshwesh Libyans and their Sea People allies, but its final two lines refer to a prior military campaign in Canaan in which Merneptah states that he defeated Ashkelon, Gezer, Yanoam and Israel among others. It is preserved in the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo.

"The stele has gained much fame and notoriety for being the only Ancient Egyptian document generally accepted as mentioning "Isrir" or "Israel". It is also, by far, the earliest known attestation of Israel. For this reason, many scholars refer to it as the "Israel stele". This title is somewhat misleading, however, because the stele was clearly not focused on Israel per se— in fact, it mentions Israel only in passing. There is only a single line about Israel: "Israel is wasted, bare of seed" or "Israel lies waste, its seed no longer exists" and very little about the region of Canaan. Israel was simply grouped together with three other defeated states in Canaan (Gezer, Yanoam and Ashkelon) in the stele. Merneptah inserts just a single stanza to the Canaanite campaigns but multiple stanzas to his defeat of the Libyans. The line referring to Merneptah's Canaanite campaign reads:

Canaan is captive with all woe. Ashkelon is conquered, Gezer seized, Yanoam made nonexistent; Israel is wasted, bare of seed" 

(Wikipedia article on the Merneptah Stele, accessed 11-29-2008).

Chinese general and military strategist Sun Wu (simplified Chinese: 孙武; traditional Chinese: 孫武; pinyin: Sūn Wǔ), style name Changqing (長卿), better known as Sun Tzu [simplified Chinese: 孙子; traditional Chinese: 孫子; pinyin: Sūn Zǐ]) wrote The Art of War (Chinese: 孫子兵法; pinyin: Sūn Zǐ Bīng Fǎ).

Later called one of the Seven Military Classics of ancient China, The Art of War was the oldest and most influential work on military strategy.

"Sun Tzu suggested the importance of positioning in strategy and that position is affected both by objective conditions in the physical environment and the subjective opinions of competitive actors in that environment. He thought that strategy was not planning in the sense of working through an established list, but rather that it requires quick and appropriate responses to changing conditions. Planning works in a controlled environment, but in a changing environment, competing plans collide, creating unexpected situations.  

"The book was translated into the French language in 1772 by French Jesuit Jean Joseph Marie Amiot, and into English by British officer Everard Ferguson Calthrop in 1905. It likely influenced Napoleon,and leaders as diverse as Mao Zedong, General Vo Nguyen Giap, Baron Antoine-Henri Jomini, and General Douglas MacArthur have claimed to have drawn inspiration from the work. The Art of War has also been applied to business and managerial strategies" (Wikipedia article on The Art of War, accessed 01-30-2010).

Because of the destruction of information that took place in 213 BCE at the instigation of the Qin Emperor, the earliest known manuscript of Sun Tzu's text consists of 13 fragments of chapters among the 4942 bamboo strips known as the Yinqueshan Han Slips, which were discovered in 1972 in Tombs no. 1 and 2 at the foot of Yinqueshan (Sliver Sparrow Mountain) southeast of the city of Linyi in the province of Shandong.

"The time of burial for both tombs had been dated to about 140 BC/134 BC and 118 BC, the texts having been written on the bamboo slips before then. After restoration and arrangement, the slips were organised into a sequential order of nine groups and 154 sections. The first group included 13 fragment chapters from Sunzi's The Art of War, and 5 undetermined chapters; the second group were the 16 chapters of Sun Bin's Art of War, which had been missing for at least 1,400 years; the third included the 7 original and lost chapters from the Six Strategies (before this significant find only the titles of the lost chapters were known); the fourth and fifth included 5 chapters from the Weiliaozi and 16 chapters from the Yanzi; the rest of the groups included anonymous writings" (Wikipedia article on Yinqueshan Han Slips, accessed 01-30-2010).

The Gauls, under their chieftain Brennus or Brennos, defeated Roman armies in the Battle of the Allia and sacked Rome.

With the exception of the Capitoline Hill, the Gauls plundered the city and destroyed nearly all records.

While information has survived concerning ancient Greek library and archive buildings from excavations of ruins, most information concerning library and archive holdings, and library and archive operation, is based on third party accounts, or is fragmentary or speculative.

Dramatic exceptions to this overall lack of surviving archives from ancient Greece are the Archives of the Athenian Cavalry from the fourth and and third centuries BCE preserved on lead tablets. The Archives of the Athenian Cavalry was excavated in 1965 from a water well within the courtyard of the Dipylon, the double-gate leading into the city of Athens from the north. It included 574 lead tablets from the third century BCE. Six years later another hundred or so lead tablets from the fourth and third centuries BCE were excavated from a well at the edge of the excavated section of the Agora in Athens. Historian of ancient archives Ernest Posner characterized these as "by far the largest name file of ancient times. Tightly rolled or folded up, they contain the following information: the name in the genitive of the owner of a horse; the horse's color and brand, if any; and its value stated in drachmas, with 1,200 drachmas as the highest valuation given. Normally, only the name of the owner appears on the outside; the other data is relegated to the interior of the tablet and could not be read unless the tablet was unrolled or unfolded. A number of tablets are palimpsests; that is, the original entries were erased and replaced by new data"  (Posner, "The Athenian Cavalry Archives of the Fourth and Third Centures B.C.", The American Archivist (1974) 579-82).

The wide range of pottery as well as lead tablets excavated from the Dipylon were described by Karin Braun in "Der Dipylon-Brunne B¹ Die Funde," Mitteilungen des Deutschen archäologischen Instituts Athenische Abteilung, Band 85 (1970) 129-269, plates 53-93. Plates 83-93 illustrate lead tablets unfolded to show the writing and tablets rolled up.

From the extensive information available, John H. Kroll, author of the primary paper on the 1971 excavation, developed a theory of the purposes and operation of the Athenian Cavalry Archives, of which I quote a portion:

"The continual turnover of the horses explains, I think, why the records of the horses' values were kept as they were-individually on lead tablets. Official annual records at Athens were normally kept in list form on papyrus or whitened boards. But since a cavalryman was likely to have changed his horse at any time in the course of a year, a more flexible system of records was called for-the equivalent of the modern card-file system-whereby the record of a given horse could be pulled out and replaced if the horse itself was replaced. For such individual records, lead had obvious advantages over paper or wood, and, becatuse it was cheap and could be erased and re-used repeatedly, it would have been less costly in the long run. The re-use of the tablets, incidently, must surely be a factor in the low survival rate of tablets in most series and the loss of other entire series. There is one other respect in which the tablets stand apart from most annual records. I assume that they were rolled or folded simply to facilitate storage and not because the evaluations they contain were to be kept secret. But the fact that they were folded or rolled up, many of them as tightly as they could be, indicates that no one expected them to be referred to on a regular basis. Indeed, since all of the unbroken tablets were recovered from the Kerameikos and Agora wells in their original folded or rolled state, it appears doubtful that any of the extant tablets had ever been consulted. This of course does not mean that the evaluations were never consulted, merely that the records were made up annually and filed away to be consulted only in rare, though anticipated, cases. If the occasion did not arise in the course of the year, they expired, were replaced with the next year's evaluations, and were put aside, eventually to be erased and re-used" (Kroll, "An Archive of the Athenian Cavalry," Hesperia XLVI [1977] No. 2, 94-95). Kroll's extensive article occupies pp. 83-140 of the journal issue and includes numerous drawings and photographs.

The Mawangdui Silk Texts (Chinese: 馬王堆帛書; pinyin: Mǎwángduī Bóshū), texts of Chinese philosophical and medical works written on silk, were found buried in Tomb no. 3 at Mawangdui, in the city of Changsha, Hunan, China in 1973. 

"They include the earliest attested manuscripts of existing texts such as the I Ching, two copies of the Tao Te Ching, one similar copy of Strategies of the Warring States and a similar school of works of Gan De and Shi Shen. Scholars arranged them into silk books of 28 kinds. Together they count to about 120,000 words covering military strategy, mathematics, cartography and the six classical arts of ritual, music, archery, horsemanship, writing and arithmetic" (Wikipedia article on Mawangdui Silk Texts, accessed 01-31-2010).

Most of the Mawangdui Silk Texts are preserved in the Hunan Provincial Museum.

Roman proconsul Julius Caesar waged a series of military campaigns called the Gallic Wars against several Gallic tribes. The Gallic Wars culminated in the decisive Battle of Alesia in 52 BCE, in which a complete Roman victory resulted in the expansion of the Roman Republic over the whole of Gaul. The battle of Alesia also marked marked the definitive conquest of the Continental Celtic people by the Roman Republic, and the end of Celtic dominance in France, Belgium, Switzerland and Northern Italy.

"In 52 BC another, larger revolt erupted in Gaul, led by Vercingetorix. Vercingetorix managed to unite the Gallic tribes and proved an astute commander, defeating Caesar in several engagements, but Caesar's elaborate siege-works at the Battle of Alesia finally forced his surrender. Despite scattered outbreaks of warfare the following year, Gaul was effectively conquered. Plutarch claimed that the army had fought against three million men during the Gallic Wars, of whom 1 million died, and another million were enslaved. The Romans subjugated 300 tribes and destroyed 800 cities.  However, in view of the difficulty in finding accurate counts in the first place, Caesar's propagandistic purposes, and the common exaggeration of numbers in ancient texts, the totals of enemy combatants are likely to be too high" (Wikipedia article on Julius Caesar, accessed 06-17-2011).

Evidence of wide-ranging military literacy in the Roman Empire can be of a very ephemeral kind.

"In 41 BC during the civil war that followed the death of Julius Caesar, Octavian (the future Emperor Augustus) trapped Lucius Antonius and Fulvia (the brother and the wife of Mark Antony) within the walls of the central Italian town of Perugia. A number of lead sling-bolts (roughly the size of hazelnuts), manufactured during the seige that followed, have been recovered in Perugia; they bear short inscriptions, which both sides carved into their moulds, so that the bolts [also called sling bullets or slingshot] could be used in a war of words, as well as to inflict death or injury. Some of these inscriptions are fairly tame, wishing victory to one or other side, or commenting on Lucius Antonius' receding hairline (which is also known from his coinage). Others are rather richer in flavour, like the one, fired from Octavian's side, which bluntly asks: Lucius Antonius the bald, and Fulvia, show us your arse [L. [uci] A[antoni] calve, Fulvia, culum pan[dite] ]. Whoever composed this refined piece of propaganda and had it cast into a sling-bolt certainly expected some of the soldery on the other side to be able to read" (Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization [2005] 157-58).

The first Jewish-Roman War ended with destruction of the Second Temple which stood on Temple Mount, and the fall of Jerusalem. Legions under Titus beseiged and destroyed Jerusalem, looted and burned Herod's Temple and Jewish strongholds (notably Masada in 73), and enslaved or massacred a large part of the Jewish population. This contributed to the numbers and geography of the Jewish Diaspora, as many Jews were scattered after losing their state, or sold into slavery through the empire.

"Estimates of the death toll range from 600,000 to 1,300,000 Jews: there was 'no room for crosses and no crosses for the bodies'. Over 100,000 died during the siege, and almost 100,000 were taken to Rome as slaves. Many fled to areas around the Mediterranean. The Romans hunted down and slaughtered entire clans, such as descendants of the House of David. On one occasion, Titus condemned 2,500 Jews to fight with wild beasts in the amphitheater of Caesarea in celebration of his brother Domitian's birthday" (Wikipedia article on the First Jewish-Roman War, accessed 11-24-2008).

The Vindolanda Writing Tablets, excavated from the Roman fort at Vindolanda, one of the main military posts on the Northern frontier of Britain before the building of Hadrian's Wall, and located near the modern village of Bardon Mill, were written in carbon ink on wafer-thin slices of wood. The tablets were excavated in 1973 from waterlogged conditions in rubbish deposits in and around the commanding officer's residence. Experts have identified the handwriting of hundreds of different people in these documents. They confirm that the officers of Vindolanda were most certainly literate and that some soldiers in the ranks may also have been literate.

"These, and hundreds of other fragments which have come to light in subsequent excavations, are the oldest surviving handwritten documents in Britain.

"Most of the tablets are official military documents relating to the auxiliary units stationed at the fort. However, others are private letters sent to or written by the serving soldiers. The content is fascinating, giving us a remarkable insight into the working and private lives of the Roman garrison. They also display a great variety of individual handwriting, which adds to our knowledge of Roman cursive writing around AD 100.

"The tablets are not made of wood and wax, previously thought to be the most popular medium for writing in the Roman world apart from papyrus. Instead they are wafer thin slices of wood, written on with carbon ink and quill-type pens. Even after specialised conservation the exacavated tablets are fragile and require a carefully controlled environment" (British Museum, Our Top Ten British Treasures, accessed 05-10-2009).

According to chroniclers such as Eusebius, the Battle of the Milvian Bridge between the Roman Emperors Constantine I and Maxentius on October 28, 312 marked the beginning of Contantine's conversion to Christianity. Eusebius recounted that Constantine and his soldiers had a vision that God promised victory if they daubed the labarum (the chi-rho symbol) on their standards. Constantine won the battle and started on the path that led him to end the Tetrarchy and become the sole ruler of the Roman Empire. The Arch of Constantine, erected in Rome in 315 in celebration of the victory, attributed Constantine's success to divine intervention, but whether it was specifically at the hands of the Christian God was left ambiguous in an effort to please both pagan and Christian readers.

Roman emperor Constantine I defeated emperor Licinius at the Battle of Chrysopolis  (Üsküdar), effectively becoming the emperor of the entire Roman Empire.

About 390 CE Roman writer Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus issued Epitoma rei militaris (also referred to as De re militari), and the lesser-known Digesta artis mulomedicinae, a guide to veterinary medicine.

"The latest event alluded to in his Epitoma rei militaris is the death of the Emperor Gratian (383); the earliest attestation of this work is a subscriptio by one Flavius Eutropius, writing in Constantinople in the year 450, which appears in one of two families of manuscripts, suggesting that a bifurcation of the manuscript tradition had already occurred. Despite Eutropius' location in Constantinople, the scholarly consensus is that Vegetius wrote in the Western Empire. Vegetius dedicates his work to the reigning emperor, who is identified as Theodosius, ad Theodosium imperatorem, in the manuscript family that was not edited in 450; the identity is disputed: some scholars identify him with Theodosius the Great, while others . . . identify him with the later Valentinian III, dating the work 430-35.

"Vegetius's epitome mainly focuses on military organization and how to react to certain occasions in war. Vegetius explains how one should fortify and organize a camp, how to train troops, how to handle undisciplined troops, how to handle a battle engagement, how to march, formation gauge, and many other useful methods of promoting organization and valour in the legion.

"As G. R. Watson observes, Vegetius' Epitoma 'is the only ancient manual of Roman military institutions to have survived intact.' Despite this, Watson is dubious of its value, for he 'was neither a historian nor a soldier: his work is a compilation carelessly constructed from material of all ages, a congeries of inconsistencies.' These antiquarian sources, according to his own statement, were Cato the Elder, Cornelius Celsus, Frontinus, Paternus and the imperial constitutions of Augustus, Trajan, and Hadrian.

"The first book is a plea for army reform; it vividly portrays the military decadence of the Late Roman Empire. Vegetius also describes in detail the organisation training and equipment of the army of the early Empire. The third contains a series of military maxims, which were (rightly enough, considering the similarity in the military conditions of the two ages) the foundation of military learning for every European commander from William the Silent to Frederick the Great. When the French Revolution and the "nation in arms" came into history, we hear little more of Vegetius. Some of the maxims may be mentioned here as illustrating the principles of a war for limited political objectives with which he deals:

" * 'All that is advantageous to the enemy is disadvantageous to you, and all that is useful to you, damages the enemy.'

" * 'the main and principal point in war is to secure plenty of provisions for oneself and to destroy the enemy by famine. Famine is more terrible than the sword.'

" * 'No man is to be employed in the field who is not trained and tested in discipline.'

 " * 'It is better to beat the enemy through want, surprises, and care for difficult places (i.e., through manoeuvre) than by a battle in the open field.'

" * 'Let him who desires peace prepare for war.'

"These are maxims that have guided the leaders of professional armies for most of recorded history, as witness the Chinese generals Sun Tzu and Wu. His 'seven normal dispositions for battle,' once in honor among European students of the art of war, are equally useful if applied to more modern conditions. His book on siegecraft is important as containing the best description of Late Empire and Medieval siegecraft. From it, among other things, we learn details of the siege engine called the onager, which afterwards played a great part in sieges, until the development of modern cannonry. The fifth book is an account of the materiel and personnel of the Roman navy.

"The author of the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica article states that 'In manuscript, Vegetius's work had a great vogue from its first advent. Its rules of siegecraft were much studied in the Middle Ages.' N.P. Milner observes that it was 'one of the most popular Latin technical works from Antiquity, rivalling the elder Pliny's Natural History in the number of surviving copies dating from before AD 1300.' It was translated into English, French (by Jean de Meun [1284] and others), Italian (by the Florentine judge Bono Giamboni [circa 1250] and others), Catalan, Spanish, Czech, and Yiddish before the invention of printing. The first printed editions are ascribed to Utrecht (1473), Cologne (1476), Paris (1478), Rome (in Veteres de re mil. scriptores, 1487), and Pisa (1488). A German translation by Ludwig Hohenwang appeared at Ulm in 1475." (Wikipedia article on Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus, accessed 05-26-2009).

"English translations [of Vegetius] precede printed books. Manuscript 18A.Xii in the Royal Library, written and ornamented for Richard III of England, is a translation of Vegetius. It ends with a paragraph starting: "Here endeth the boke that clerkes clepethe in Latyne Vegecii de re militari." The paragraph goes on to date the translation to 1408. The translator is identified in Manuscript No. 30 of Magdalen College, Oxford, as John Walton, 1410 translator of Boethius." (Wikipedia article on De re militari, accessed 05-26-2009).

Vegetius' work may frequently be confused with the work with the same title, De re militari, written by the 15th century humanist Roberto Valturio (Valturius). That work, first published in print in 1472, was the first printed work on technology and the first book with informational rather than decorative illustrations.  Vegetius' Epitoma rei militaris was first published in print in an undated edition, probably issued one or two years later in 1473 or 1474 by Nicolaus Ketelaer and Gerardus de Leempt in Utrecht. Their edition had no illustrations. ISTC no. iv00104000.

In 410 Roman legions withdrew from the province of Britannia. With the departure of the last Roman legions from Britain, and the end of Roman rule, literacy gradially left England. Within 40 to 50 years from the time of the departure of the Romans to the arrival of in 597 of Augustine of Canterbury on a mission to convert the Anglo-Saxons, and for a period thereafter, it is believed that the people of Britain were essentially illiterate.

Roughly 40 years after the Romans departed, in 449 Saxons, Angles, and Jutes conducted large scale invasions of Britain, causing numerous members of the Christian aristocracy to flee to Bretagne, France. The environment in Britain became increasingly hostile to Christians, and increasingly illiterate.

The Goths, under Alaric I, captured and sacked the city of Rome.

"Because the barbarians had converted to Christian sect Arianism it was not a particularly violent looting with relatively little rape, murder and damage to buildings, but it still had a profound effect on the city. Many of the city's great buildings were ransacked, including the mausoleums of Augustus and Hadrian, in which many Roman Emperors of the past were buried. This was the first time the city had been sacked in 800 years, and its citizens were devastated. Tens of thousands of Romans fled the economically ruined city into the countryside, with many of them seeking refuge in Africa" (Wikipedia article on Sack of Rome [410], accessed 05-10-2009).

"We are told that during one siege the inhabitants were forced progressively 'to reduce their rations and to eat only half the previous daily allowance, and later, when the scarcity continued, only a third.' 'When there was no means of relief, and their food was exhausted, plague not unexpectedly succeeded famine. Corpses lay everywhere. . . .' The eventual fall of the city, according to another account, occurred because a rich lady 'felt pity for the Romans who were being killed off by starvation and who were already turning to cannibalism', and so opened the gates to the enemy" (Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization [2005]17).

¶ Some historians see this as a major landmark in the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire.

In 451 Roman General Flavius Aetius and Visigothic King Theodoric I defeated the Huns under the command of Attila at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains (or Fields), also called the Battle of Châlons sur Marne (now Châlons-en-Champagne).

Of this battle Gibbon wrote, "Attila's retreat across the Rhine confessed the last victory which was achieved in the name of the Western Roman Empire."

"John Julius Norwich, the historian known for his works on Venice and on Byzantium, said of the battle of Chalons:

" 'It should never be forgotten that in the summer of 451 and again in 452, the whole fate of western civilization hung in the balance. Had the Hunnish army not been halted in these two successive campaigns, had its leader toppled Valentinian from his throne and set up his own capital at Ravenna or Rome, there is little doubt that both Gaul and Italy would have been reduced to spiritual and cultural deserts.

"He goes on to say that though the battle in 451 was 'indecisive insofar as both sides sustained immense losses and neither was left master of the field, it had the effect of halting the Huns' advance.'

"There are a couple of reasons why this combat has kept its epic importance down the centuries. One is that—ignoring the Battle of Qarqar (Karkar), which was forgotten at this time—this was the first significant conflict that involved large alliances on both sides. No single nation dominated either side; rather, two alliances met and fought in surprising coordination for the time. Arthur Ferrill, addressing this issue, goes on to say:

"After he secured the Rhine, Attila moved into central Gaul and put Orleans under siege. Had he gained his objective, he would have been in a strong position to subdue the Visigoths in Aquitaine, but Aetius had put together a formidable coalition against the Hun. Working frenetically, the Roman leader had built a powerful alliance of Visigoths, Alans and Burgundians, uniting them with their traditional enemy, the Romans, for the defense of Gaul. Even though all parties to the protection of the Western Roman Empire had a common hatred of the Huns, it was still a remarkable achievement on Aëtius' part to have drawn them into an effective military relationship.

"Addressing Attila's fearsome reputation, and the importance of this battle, Gibbon noted that it was from his enemies we hear of his terrible deeds, not from friendly chroniclers, emphasizing that the former had no reason to elevate Attila's reign of terror, and the importance of the Battle of Chalons in proving Attila to be merely mortal and defeatable" (Wikipedia article on Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, accessed 05-10-2009).

Vandal king Geiseric sailed his powerful fleet from Carthage up the Tiber to sack Rome.

"The sack of 455 is generally seen by historians as being more thorough than the Visigothic sack of 410, because the Vandals plundered Rome for fourteen days whereas the Visigoths spent only three days in the city" (Wikipedia article on the Sack of Rome [455], accessed 11-22-2008).

German tribes (Anglo-Saxons) conquered England.

The Lombards under Alboin— a Germanic people—invaded and conquered most of Byzantine Italy, and established a Kingdom of Italy, which lasted until 774.

Arabs began their invasion of North Africa.

A muslim army from North Africa invaded southern Spain, creating the empire of Al-Andalus (Arabic: الأندلس‎).

Under the orders of the Great Umayyad Caliph Al-Walid I, Tariq ibn-Ziyad led a small force from North Africa that landed at Gibraltar on April 30, 711. After a decisive victory at the Battle of Guadalete on July 19, 711, Tariq ibn-Ziyad brought most of the Iberian Peninsula under Muslim occupation in a seven-year campaign. . . .

The Iberian peninsula, except for the Kingdom of Asturias, became part of the expanding Umayyad empire, under the name of al-Andalus. The earliest attestation of this Arab name is a dinar coin, preserved in the National Archaeological Museum of Spain in Madrid, dating from five years after the conquest (716). The coin bears the word "al-Andalus" in Arabic script on one side and the Iberian Latin "Span" on the obverse" (Wikipedia article on Al-Andalus, accessed 12-14-2008).

At the Battle of Tours (also called the Battle of Poitiers), fought in 732 in an area between the cities of Poitiers and Tours, in north-central France, near the village of Moussais-la-Bataille (Vouneuil-sur-Vienne), about 20 km northeast of Poitiers, the Frankish king Charles Martel ("Charles the Hammer") decisively stopped the Muslim army's advance into Northern Europe.

"The Battle of Tours earned Charles the cognomen "Martel" ('Hammer'), for the merciless way he hammered his enemies. Many historians, including the great military historian Sir Edward Creasy, believe that had he failed at Tours, Islam would probably have overrun Gaul, and perhaps the remainder of western Christian Europe. Gibbon made clear his belief that the Umayyad armies would have conquered from Rome to the Rhine, and even England, having the English Channel for protection, with ease, had Martel not prevailed. Creasy said "the great victory won by Charles Martel ... gave a decisive check to the career of Arab conquest in Western Europe, rescued Christendom from Islam, [and] preserved the relics of ancient and the germs of modern civilization." Gibbon's belief that the fate of Christianity hinged on this battle is echoed by other historians including John B. Bury, and was very popular for most of modern historiography. It fell somewhat out of style in the twentieth century, when historians such as Bernard Lewis contended that Arabs had little intention of occupying northern France. More recently, however, many historians have tended once again to view the Battle of Tours as a very significant event in the history of Europe and Christianity. Equally, many, such as William Watson, still believe this battle was one of macrohistorical world-changing importance, if they do not go so far as Gibbon does rhetorically" (Wikipedia article on Battle of Tours, accessed 12-14-2008).

Chinese Tang forces were defeated by Arabs at the battle of Battle of the Talas River, near Samarkand, and lost control of the Silk Road through Central Asia. 

Chinese prisoners of war taken at the battle of Talas conveyed papermaking techniques to the Arabs.

'Abd ar-Rahman conquered Córdoba to found the Umayyad dynasty of al-Andalus, the name used for the portion of Iberia (Spain) controlled by Muslims. This dynasty lasted 300 years.

The second Abbassid Caliph, Abu Ja'far Al-Mansur, founded the city of Baghdad. There he founded a palace library, which evolved into The House of Wisdom. The library was originally concerned with translating and preserving Persian works, first from Pahlavi (Middle Persian), then from Syriac and eventually Greek and Sanskrit.

"The House of Wisdom acted as a society founded by Abbasid caliphs Harun al-Rashid and his son al-Ma'mun who reigned from 813-833 CE. Based in Baghdad from the 9th to 13th centuries, many of the most learned Muslim scholars were part of this excellent research and educational institute. In the reign of al-Ma'mun, observatories were set up, and The House was an unrivalled centre for the study of humanities and for sciences, including mathematics, astronomy, medicine, chemistry, zoology and geography. Drawing on Persian, Indian and Greek texts—including those of Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Euclid, Plotinus, Galen, Sushruta, Charaka, Aryabhata and Brahmagupta—the scholars accumulated a great collection of knowledge in the world, and built on it through their own discoveries. Baghdad was known as the world's richest city and centre for intellectual development of the time, and had a population of over a million, the largest in its time.The great scholars of the House of Wisdom included Al-Khawarizmi, the "father" of algebra, which takes its name from his book Kitab al-Jabr" (Wikipedia article on House of Wisdom, accessed 12-01-2008).

The House of Wisdom flourished until it was destroyed by the Mongols in the sacking of Baghdad in 1258.

In the first Viking raid on Britain Vikings sacked the monastery of Lindisfarne and its library.

"In England the Viking Age began dramatically on January 6, 793 when Norsemen destroyed the abbey on Lindisfarne, a center of learning famous across the continent. Monks were killed in the abbey, thrown into the sea to drown or carried away as slaves along with the church treasures. Three Viking ships had beached in Portland Bay four years earlier, but that incursion may have been a trading expedition that went wrong rather than a piratical raid. Lindisfarne was different. The Viking devastation of Northumbria's Holy Island shocked and alerted the royal Courts of Europe. 'Never before has such an atrocity been seen,' declared the Northumbrian scholar Alcuin of York. More than any other single event, the attack on Lindisfarne cast a shadow on the perception of the Vikings for the next twelve centuries. Not until the 1890s did scholars outside Scandinavia begin seriously to reassess the achievements of the Vikings, recognizing their artistry, the technological skills and the seamanship" (quoted from the Wikipedia article on the Viking Age, accessed 11-22-2008).

"Monasteries were a favoured target due to the riches which were contained in them. Jarrow was invaded in 794 and Iona in 795, 802 and 806. After repeated raids by the Norsemen, the monks of Lindisfarne fled the monastery in AD 875, taking the venerated relics of Saint Cuthbert with them for safekeeping" (http://www.englishmonarchs.co.uk/vikings_5.htm, accessed 11-22-2008).

The Codex Spirensis, an illuminated manuscript written in the middle Rhine area of Germany in the late ninth or early tenth century, and discovered at the Cathedral Library at Speyer in the fifteenth century, no longer survives except for a single leaf (Thompson 11). Because of the copies made of this codex in the fifteenth century, the codex preserved thirteen different texts, of which perhaps the most significant were the Notitia Dignitatum, Dicuil's De mensura orbis terrae, and the Anonymous, De rebus bellicis. 

The four primary copies of the Codex Spirensis are:

(C). The copy made for the bibliophile Pietro Donato, bishop of Padua, in January 1436, while Donato was presiding over the Council of Basel. Now at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

(P) A copy in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Cod. Paris. lat. 9661).

(V) A copy written in 1484 and first found at Speyer where it was copied in 1529 for Cardinal Bernhard von Cles (Clesius), Archbishop of Trento, who visited the city that year. The manuscript can later be traced to Salzburg, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century to Vienna (Cod. Vindob.lat. 303). As a result of the peace settlement of Europe in 1919 it was transferred from Austria to Italy, and is now at Trento.

(M) A copy made in June 1550 for the Elector Palatine of the Rhine Otto Heinrich. This had been offered to the prince instead of the original. In 1552 the prince acquired the original Codex Spirensis, and it remained in his family collection until disappearing mysteriously. It is now preserved at the Munich Staatsbibliothek.

Thompson, A Roman Reformer and Inventor. Being a New Text of the Treatise De Rebus Bellicis with a translation and introduction (1952) 6-12.

William the Conqueror,  landed unopposed in England on September 28.

The Norman Conquest of England ocurred with the defeat of the Saxon King Harald's forces at the Battle of Hastings on October 14.

Defeat of the Byzantine Empire in the battle with Seljuk Turkish forces at Manzikert, and the capture of Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes, demonstrated to European Christians that Byzantine forces were not capable of protecting Eastern Christianity. This eventually led to the Crusades.

After Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos sent his ambassador in March 1095 to call for help with defending his empire against the Muslim Seljuk Turks, Pope Urban II, at the Council of Clermont held in November of the same year, delivered a sermon that was characterized as  "the most effective single speech in European history." He summoned the attending nobility and the people to wrestle the Holy Land from the hands of the Seljuk Turks.

This led to the First Crusade. Crusader armies marched on Jerusalem, sacking several cities on their way. In 1099 they took Jerusalem and massacred the population. As a result of the First Crusade, several small Crusader states were created, notably the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

At a battle with Richard I of England (Richard Coeur de Lion, Richard the Lion Heart) on the edge of the Fréteval forest (near Vendome) Philip II Augustus (Philippe Auguste) of France suffered a crushing defeat, and lost the treasure and the fiscal records that he carried on his campaigns. As a result Philippe Auguste was forced to reconstruct his records, and he decided to establish a greffe (registry) for his public acts. This project he entrusted to the monk Guerin. From 1195 official records were stored in the Trésor des Chartes.

In 1204 Philippe Auguste had the archive moved to the Louvre. At the end of the reign of St. Louis the Trésor des Chartes was moved to a building adjoining the Sainte-Chapelle within easy reach of the advocates of the palais. The archive grew as rapidly as the monarchy itself, and there was already a well-established archivist tradition in France by the fourteenth century.

Dessalles, Le Trésor des chartes (1844) 91-92. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (1969) 217. Moore, Restoring Order. The Ecole des Chartes and the Organization of Archives and Libraries in France, 1820-1870 (2008) 3.

In the Fourth Crusade Norman crusaders, attempting to form a Latin Empire, sacked Constantinople, almost completely destroying the city. They burned the Imperial Library which preserved much of the knowledge of the ancient world.

The 1204 sack of Constantinople has been described as one of the most profitable and disgraceful sacks of a city in history. What the Crusaders did not plunder they burned. It is estimated that more destruction was done to the city and its libraries during this sack than  occurred during the seige of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453. It is also believed that crusaders may have sold some Byzantine manuscripts to Italian buyers.

Mongols under the command of Hulagu Khan sacked Baghdad, destroying the House of Wisdom, the leading library in the leading intellectual center of the Arab world.

The House of Wisdom, founded in the eighth century, contained countless precious documents accumulated over five hundred years. Survivors said so many books were thrown into the river that the waters of the Tigris ran black with ink; others said the waters were red from blood.

"In one week, libraries and their treasures that had been accumulated over hundreds of years were burned or otherwise destroyed. So many books were thrown into the Tigris River, according to one writer, that they formed a bridge that would support a man on horseback" (Harris, History of Libraries in the Western World 4th ed [1999] 85).

The Rochefoulcauld Grail was written and illuminated in Flanders or Artois by the same team of artists and scribes who produced the deluxe copies of the text now London, British Library, Add. MS. 10292-4 and Royal MS.14.E.III) perhaps for Guy VII, baron de La Rochefoucauld. It is one of the principal manuscripts of the greatest romance of the Middle Ages, with 107 miniatures illustrating warfare, chivalry and courtly love. It contains the Lancelot-Grail cycle in French prose, the oldest and most comprehensive version of the legend of King Arthur and the Holy Grail.

The manuscript was sold at Sotheby's London on December 10, 2010 for £2,393,250 including premium. The Sotheby's catalogue description, presumably written by Christopher de Hamel, includes the provenance and numerous published references. The manuscript sold consisted of three volumes. A fourth volume of the manuscript is divided between the Bodeleian Library, Oxford (Douce MS 215) and the John Rylands Library, Manchester (MS Fr. 1).

A selection of images from the manuscript was available at The Guardian Online.  

German physician and military engineer Konrad Kyeser wrote Bellifortis, an illustrated book on mechanical machinery, weapons, instruments, and techniques for attack and defense, mainly of towns.

Though he originally conceived the work for King Wenceslaus, Kyeser dedicated the finished book to Rupert III of Germany. Bellifortis summarized material from classical writers on military technology, including Vegetius' De re militari and Frontinus' anecdotal stratagems or Strategemata, emphasizing poliorcetics, or the art of siege warfare, but treating magic as a supplement to the military arts.

"Konrad Kyeser wrote his treatise between 1402 and 1405 when he was exiled from Prague to his hometown of Eichstätt. Many of the illustrations for the book were made by German illuminators who were sent to Eichstatt after their own ousting from the Prague scriptorium. The work, which was not printed until 1967, survived in a single original presentation manuscript on parchment at University of Göttingen, bearing the date 1405, and in numerous copies, excerpts and amplifications, both of the text and of the illustrations, made in German lands" (Wikipedia article on Bellifortis, accessed 10-31-2010).

The catalogue of the Niedersächische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen lists various facsimiles and editions of Bellifortis. 

Italian administrator, artist and engineer Mariano di Jacopo detto il Taccola of Siena, sometimes called the "Sienese Archimedes," published the illustrated technological treatises De ingeneis and De machinis. These manuscripts were widely studied and copied by artists and engineers during the Renaissance, but never seem to have gained the attention of printers, and were not published in print until the 20th century.  Taccola’s original manuscripts, the style of which was more sophisticated than that of their manuscript copies, were rediscovered and identified in the state libraries of Munich and Florence in the 1960s, leading to revival of interest in Tacola and publication of facsimile editions of his manuscripts.

"Taccola left behind two treatises, the first being De ingeneis (Concerning engines), work on its four books starting as early as 1419. Having been completed in 1433, Taccola continued to amend drawings and annotations to De ingeneis until about 1449. In the same year, Taccola published his second manuscript, De machinis (Concerning machines), in which he restated many of the devices from the long development process of his first treatise. 

"Drawn with black ink on paper and accompanied by hand-written annotations, Taccola depicts in his work a multitude of 'ingenious devices' in hydraulic engineering, milling, construction and war machinery. Taccola’s drawings show him to be a man of transition: While his subject matter is already that of later Renaissance artist-engineers, his method of representation still owes much to medieval manuscript illustration. Notably, with perspective coming and going in his drawings, Taccola seemed to remain largely unaware of the ongoing revolution in perspective painting. This is the more curious, since he is the only man known to have interviewed the 'father of linear perspectivity' himself, Filippo Brunelleschi. Despite these graphic inconsistencies, Taccola’s style has been described as being forceful, authentic and usually to be relied upon to capture the essential" (Wikipedia article on Taccola, accessed 01-27-2012).

The Bellicorum instrumentorum liber, cum figuris et fictitys litoris conscriptus, written and drawn by the Italian engineer, self-styled magus, and physician to the Venetian army in Brescia, Giovanni Fontana, may be the earliest extant illustrated Italian manuscript on technology and war machines.

Fontana accompanied each of his roughly 140 illustrations of siege engines, fountains and pumps, lifting and transporting machines, defensive towers, dredges, combination locks, battering rams, a "rocket-powered" craft, the first ever depiction of the magic lantern, scaling ladders, alchemical furnaces, clockwork, robotic automata, and measuring instruments with a caption that was partially encoded with a substitute cypher system.

♦ You can view a digital facsimile of Fontana's manuscript at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek website at this link: http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/0001/bsb00013084/images/index.html?id=00013084&fip=67.164.64.97&no=4&seite=21, accessed 01-16-2010).

Another manuscript by Fontana, preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Nouvelles Acquisitions Latin 635), entitled Secretum de thesauro experimentorum ymaginationis hominum, concerned mnemonic devices and memory: 

"The entire manuscript, excepting the table of contents, title and concluding formula is in cipher; this consists  almost entirely of straight lines and circles. Abbreviation marks are  placed under the script. . . .

"where one sees several projects of combiantorial machines, concentric disks, cylinders, rolls that allow the permutation of isolated elements of writing (letters or words): and engineer's realization of the Lullian dream. However the connection between the theater in the first book and the devices of the second is not one of mere juxtaposition: the Secretum is actually a treatise of mnemotechnics, or, as Battisti put it, "the blueprint for a compact database of the mind (http://www.voynich.net/Arch/2002/09/msg00136.html, accessed 01-16-2010).

Using European artillery experts and European artillery, a 70,000 man Ottoman Turkish army, under the leadership of Mehmed II (Mahomet II,) broke Constantinople's fabled defensive walls, captured Constantinople and killed the Byzantine Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos.

With the death of Constantine XI, the Byzantine Empire, which had lasted for one thousand years, came to an end. This completed the destruction of the Roman Empire.

As a result of the Fall of Constantinople, numerous Byzantine Greek scholars travelled westward to Europe, bringing with them Greek manuscripts of the highest cultural value—source material for Renaissance study of classical texts.

In 1472 printer Johannes Nicolai de Verona issued from Verona, Italy, the first printed edition of Roberto Valturio's (Valturius's) De re militari, a work which first circulated in manuscript circa 1455-1460. Some of the extant manuscripts appear to have been copied from the printed edition, reflecting the interplay between printed book and manuscript production in the first decades of printing. As Valturio lived until 1475 his De re militari has also been called the first printed book by a living author. It vies for that title with Paolo Bagellardo's De infantium aegritudinibus et remediis issued from Padua in 1472.

Valturio's work was the first book printed in Verona, the second Italian book printed with illustrations, and the first book printed with woodcuts by Italian artists. Depending on how the counts are made, the book contains at least 90 woodcuts, though because some of the images are composite it is possible to arrive at a higher count. The images were printed in blank spaces left on the page, presumably after the text was printed, using a thinner ink. Some pages in the edition remain blank.

". . . the illustrations are the first true Italian book illustrations, probably after designs by Matteo de Pasti, the medallist and pupil of Alberti. They were preceeded in Italy only by a blockbook [cf. Essling 1] and the 1467 Rome edition of Torquemada which contains a series of rather crude woodcuts probably designed under German influence” (Printing and the Mind of Man No. 10).

From the scientific standpoint  Valturio's work was first printed book on technology, with the first scientific or technological illustrations— in this case woodcuts of war machines. In Prints and Visual Communication (1953; 32) William Ivins pointed out that these woodcuts were the first dated set of book illustrations made for "informational" rather than decorative or religious purposes.

The images in Valturio's book . . ."the majority of which are in Book X, consist of representations of weapons, war chariots, siege engines, canons, flags, water floats, bridges and pontoons and much else. . . . They depend on a tradition of military illustration, which extends from the late Roman Empire, the best-known text being the De rebus bellicis of the 4th century, to Byzantine and Western medieval texts. The text of the De rebus bellicis was rediscovered in an illustrated manuscript of 9th- or 10th-century date in the library of the Cathedral of Speyer, and it was copied for the book collector and humanist Bishop of Padua, Pietro Donato, during the Council of Basel in 1436. These illustrations, in one or another of the various copies made of them, are likely to have been among the sources for the illustrations in the Valturio text. Two other relevant texts concerning military equipment, both illustrated, are those by Konrad Kyeser of Eichstätt, written shortly after 1400, and Mariano Taccola of Siena, known in various versions dating from c. 1427 to 1449“ (Alexander [ed.] The Painted Page. Italian Renaissance Book Illumination 1450-1550 [1994] No. 63). Alexander describes an illustrates a manuscript written circa 1475-80, of Valturio (Munich, Bayerisch Staatsbibliothek, CLM 23467) which, "is a direct copy of the printed edition. The illustrations also are clearly copied from the woodcuts."

Valturio's work may frequently be confused with the Epitoma rei militaris (also referred to as De re militari) by the late 4th century-early 5th century Roman writer Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus, the first edition of which was published in print in Utrecht, probably one or two years after the first edition of Valturio's work, in 1473 or 1474.

"A secretary to Pope Eugene IV, then adviser to Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, humanist Roberto Valturio is chiefly known for his treatise on warfare, De re militari, of 1455. The work celebrates the military prowess of Malatesta, who sent copies to Mathias Corvinus, Francesco Sforza, Sultan Mohammed II, and perhaps also King Louis XI of France and Lorenzo de Medici. The illustrations are probably the work of Matteo de Pasti, who built the church of San Francesco in Rimini on the model prescribed by Leon Battista Alberti. Matteo also often drew inspiration from the treatises of Guido da Vigevano, Conrad Kyeser, and Taccola" (website of the Institute and Museum of the History of Science in Florence, where you can also watch a brief video about Valturio in Italian, accessed 01-15-2009).

ISTC no. iv00088000.

On February 13, 1483 printer Boninus de Boninis, de Ragusia of Verona issued a second edition of Valturio's De re militari in Latin (ISTC no. iv00089000), followed 4 days later by his Opera dell' arte militare, translated into Italian by Paolo Ramusio on February 17, 1483 (ISTC no. iv00090000).  The Italian translation is the first illustrated book on technology published in a vernacular.

Dibner, Heralds of Science, no. 172 (citing an incomplete copy of the first edition). 

In August 1485 Richard III was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field, 20 miles north of Leicester. Richard, who was characterized by Shakespeare as a hunchback, was perhaps the most reviled king in the history of England.

In the sixteenth century Tudor historian John Rouse identified Richard's burial place as a corner of the chapel in the Greyfriars priory in Leicester. However, during the Reformation the church was demolished and its exact location was eventually forgotten.

In 2012 Richard's bones were located when archaeologists from the University of Leicester used ground-penetrating radar on the site of the former priory and discovered that it was not underneath a 19th-century bank where it was presumed to be, but under a parking lot across the street. Excavation began in August, and the remains were located within days of the start of digging. 

On February 4, 2013 archaeologist Richard Buckley of the University of Leicester reported that DNA testing confirmed that the bones were those of Richard III. Finding a DNA match among Richard's descendents after so many generations was extremely difficult.

"Despite this, a team of enthusiasts and historians traced the likely area - and, crucially, also found a 17th-generation descendant of Richard's sister with whose DNA they could compare any remains recovered.  

"Genealogical research eventually led to a Canadian woman called Joy Ibsen. She died several years ago but her son, Michael, who now works in London, provided a sample.  

"The researchers were fortunate as, while the DNA they were looking for was in all Joy Ibsen's offspring, it is only handed down through the female line and her only daughter has no children. The line was about to stop.  

"But the University of Leicester's experts had other problems.  

"Dr Turi King, project geneticist, said there had been concern DNA in the bones would be too degraded: "The question was could we get a sample of DNA to work with, and I am extremely pleased to tell you that we could."  

"She added: "There is a DNA match between the maternal DNA of the descendants of the family of Richard III and the skeletal remains we found at the Greyfriars dig" (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-21063882, accessed 02-04-2013).

The bones showed signs of severe scholiosis, which would account for Richard's hunched-over appearance. Although around 5ft 8in tall (1.7m), the condition meant King Richard III would have stood significantly shorter, and his right shoulder may have been higher than the left. The skeleton had suffered 10 injuries, including eight to the skull, and other "humiliation" wounds. The individual had unusually slender, almost feminine, build for a man - in keeping with contemporaneous accounts. Radiocarbon dating reveals that the individual had a high protein diet - including significant amounts of seafood - meaning he was likely to be of high status.

The decision was made to rebury Richard III's remains in Leicester's Anglican cathedral, which is about 100 yards from where Richard's remains were found.

The Spanish Army defeated Muslim forces in Granada, the last remaining territory in Spain under Muslim control, thus restoring the whole of Spain to Christian rule.

The earliest English newsbook, a forerunner of the newspaper, may be a pamphlet of 4 leaves called Hereafter ensue thee trew encountre or Batayle lately don betwene. Englande and: Scotlande. In whiche batayle the. Scottsshe. Kinge was slayne, printed in London by Richard Fawkes (Faques). The pamphlet provides an eyewitness account of the large and bloody Battle of Flodden Field won by the English against the Scots, with a list of the English heroes involved.

Printing and the Mind of Man. Catalogue of the Exhibitions Held at the British Museum and at Earls Court, London (1963) no. 640. Schwarz, Vivat Rex! An Exhibition Commemorating the 500th Anniversary of the Accession of Henry VIII (2009) no. 24.

The Morgan Library and Museum holds a contemporary manuscript account of the Battle of Flodden Field: MA 3673. Schwarz, Vivat Rex!, no. 25.

The Venetian Arsenal developed methods of mass-producing warships. These included the frame-first system to replace the Roman hull-first practice. The new system was much faster and required less wood. At the peak of its efficiency the Arsenal employed about 16,000 people who could produce nearly one ship each day, and could fit out, arm, and provision a newly-built galley with standardized parts on a production-line basis not seen again until the Industrial Revolution.

On May 6, 1527 an army of Spanish Catholics and Lutherans beholden to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and led by Charles III,[Duke of Bourbon] marched into Rome.  For eight days these unpaid troops looted and pillaged the city, inflicting especially harsh treatment on priests, monks and nuns, forcing the Pope to flee the Vatican, and destroying art and smashing statuary. During the occupation of the city more than 2000 bodies were disposed of in the Tiber River, and another 10,000 were buried in Rome and its environs.

"In the meantime, [Pope] Clement remained a prisoner in Castel Sant'Angelo. Francesco Maria della Rovere and Michele Antonio of Saluzzo arrived with troops on 1 June in Monterosi, north of the city. Their cautious behaviour prevented them from obtaining an easy victory against the now totally undisciplined Imperial troops. On 6 June, Clement VII surrendered, and agreed to pay a ransom of 400,000 ducati in exchange for his life; conditions included the cession of Parma, Piacenza, Civitavecchia and Modena to the Holy Roman Empire (however, only the latter could be occupied in fact). At the same time Venice took advantage of his situation to capture Cervia and Ravenna, while Sigismondo Malatesta returned in Rimini.

"Emperor Charles V was greatly embarrassed and powerless to stop his troops, by the fact that they had struck decisively against Pope Clement VII and imprisoned him. Some may argue that Charles was partially responsible for the sack of Rome, because he expressed his desire for a private audience with Pope Clement VII and his men took action into their own hands. Clement VII was to spend the rest of his life trying to steer clear of conflict with Charles V, avoiding decisions that could displease him" (Wikipedia article on Sack of Rome (1527), accessed 02-03-2013).

Eventually, many of the invaders succumbed to the plague that swept through Rome in the summer of 1527; however, the occupation continued until February 1528.

More significantly, Charles V's invasion challenged the authority of the Catholic Church and marked a considerable advance for Protestantism. As Martin Luther wrote, "Christ reigns in such a way that the Emperor who persecutes Luther for the Pope is forced to destroy the Pope for Luther" (LW 49:169). In 1533, Clement had to make the delicate decision about whether to grant King Henry VIII of England an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon in a manner the Church could sanction. His decision was as significant for of Protestant advancement as was the sack of Rome.  

Keenly aware that Catherine was the aunt of Charles V, who had a decided interest in Henry's petition, Clement denied the request, which caused Henry to withdraw from the Roman Catholic Church. The Church soon excommunicated him, leading to the formation of the Protestant Church of England. Without the sack of Rome and without Clement finding it necessary to consider how Charles V would react to his decision about the annulment, the pope might well have acceded to Henry's request, which would have had a profound effect on the course of European history. 

In 1599 Galileo Galilei developed his geometric and military compass into a general-purpose mechanical analog calculator, later known in English as the sector. As an instruction manual for purchasers of the compass, and to establish his priority for the invention, in 1606 Galileo published from his own house in Padua,printed by Peitro Marinelli, Le Operazioni del Compasso Geometrico et Militare in an edition of only sixty copies. To avoid having the compass pirated, Galileo had no illustrations of the device included in the pamphlet, which may be considered the first "computer manual."

During the seventeenth century the sector became one of the most widely used mechanical calculators for scientific purposes.

You may view a digital copy of Galileo's Compasso at this link.

The American Revolutionary War began with the rides of Paul Revere and William Dawes on April 17 and the battles of Lexington and Concord the following day.

In 1233/1817 a collection of fatwas relating to the Russo-Persian war was published in Persia by means of printing from movable type.  This was the first book printed in Persia (Iran).

Marzolph, "TULLIP: A Projected Thesaurus Universalis Libri Lithographici Illustrati Persorum," Sadgrove (ed) History of Printing and Publishing in the Languages and Countries of the Middle East (2005) 27.

In 1822 Muhammad Ali Pasha al-Mas'ud ibn Agha (Arabic: محمد علي باشا‎, Muḥammad ʿAlī Bāšā), self-declared Khedive of Egypt and Sudan, established a government press in Bulaq (Boulaq), Egypt, to print manuals for the military, an official manual for the administration, and textbooks for new schools.

This was the first indigenous Arabic press set up in Egypt by Muslims. It was also the first government press on the African continent, apart from the short-lived presses briefly established by Napoleon during his Egyptian campaign.

"In 1815 he [Muhammad Ali] sent Nicolas Musabiki to Rome and Milan to study type-founding and printing. Muhammad Ali also ordered three presses from Milan - along with the necessary paper and ink from Leghorn and Trieste - and, when Musabiki returned, made him manager of the Bulaq Press, working under 'Uthman Nur al-Din. The press itself, in the meantime, had been established in old Nile port of Bulaq, now a suburb of Cairo, and shortly afterwards, the second, and largest, student mission - it numbered 44 students - had returned from Paris. These men, under the leadship of Rifa'a Bey Rafi' al-Tahtawi, had studied French with a view to the translation of technical books into Arabic. The most prolific of these translators turned out to be al-Tahtawi himself. 

"Al -Tahtawi had been educated at al-Azhar University, then and now the most prestigious center for the study of the Islamic sciences in the Muslim world. There was apparently no opposition by the Shaikhs of al-Azhar to the innovation of printing. . . . Muhmmad Ali attached several professors from al-Azhar to the Bulaq Press to learn the art of printing; one became head of the foundry, another printer-in-chief, and others worked as compositors and proofreaders.

"Between 1822 and 1842, the press at Bulaq published 243 titles. . . . By far the largest number of books - 48 - were on military and naval subjects. Muhammad Ali had seen both the French and the English fleets in action, and realized how vulnerable Egypt was to invasion from the sea. He had also noted how successful the modern arms of the French had been against the antiquated weapons of the Mamluks.

"Interestingly though, the next largest category of books published by the Bulaq Press was poetry. Twenty-six works of poetry in Turkish, Persian and Arabic were published in the first 20 years of the press' operation; clearly the men associated with the Bulaq Press were as interested in traditional Islamic literature as they were in translation of European works on military tactics. After poetry comes grammar, with 21 titles, mathematics and mechanics with 16, medicine with 15 and veterinary medicine with 12. Thre rest of the books published by the press were on religion, botany, agriculture, political administration and so forth" (http://muslimheritage.com/topics/default.cfm?ArticleID=988, accessed 06-10-2012).

♦ In December 1822 the Bulaq Press issued its first book, an Italian-Arabic dictionary by Raphael Antoine Zakhour, an Egyptian born Roman Catholic monk from Aleppo, who had accompanied Napoleon's French expedition on its return to France as a translator:

Dizionario Italiano e Arabo che Contiene in Succinto Tutti Vocaboli che Sono Piu in Uso e Piu Necessari per Imparpar a Parlare de Due Lingue Correttamente Egli e Diviso in Due Parti. Part 1. De Dizionario Disposto Com il Solito Nell-ordine Alfabetico. Parte II. Che Contiene Una Breve Raccolta di Nomi e di Verbi li Piu Neccesari, e Piu Utili all Studio Dell Due Lingue. Bolacco: Dall Stamperio Reale, M.D.CCC.XXII.

Conforming with the idea of Muhammad Ali of "openness toward Europe to achieve development," Italian delegations were sent to Italy, and Italian became the first foreign language taught in Egyptian schools.

By 1851 the Bulaq press issued 570 works.

Cheng-Hsiang Hsu, "A Survey of Arabic-character Publications Printed in Egypt during the Period of 1238-1267 (1822-1851)," Sadgrove (ed) History of Printing and Publishing in the Languages and Countries of the Middle East (2005) 1-16.

In 1858 nurse, statistician, and reformer Florence Nightingale published Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army. Founded Chiefly on the Experience of the Late War. Presented by Request to the Secretary of State for War. This privately printed work contained a color statistical graphic entitled "Diagram of the Causes of Mortality in the Army of the East" which showed that epidemic disease, which was responsible for more British deaths in the course of the Crimean War than battlefield wounds, could be controlled by a variety of factors including nutrition, ventilation, and shelter. The graphic, which Nightingale used as a way to explain complex statistics simply, clearly, and persuasively, has become known as Nightingale's "Rose Diagram." 

In January 1859 Nightingale more offically published and distributed  A Contribution to the the Sanitary History of the British Army During the Late War with Russia. This also contained a copy of the Rose Diagram.

On January 11, 1863 the USS Hatteras, an iron-hulled steamship converted into a gunboat by the U.S. Navy, was taken by surprise and sunk in an engagement  with the disguised Confederate commerce raider CSS Alabama, approximately 20 miles off the coast of Galveston, Texas.

The hull of Hatteras rests in approximately 60 ft (18 m) of water  and is buried under about 3 ft (0.91 m) of sand. Her steam engine and two iron paddle wheels remain on the ocean bottom. The wreck is monitored to ensure that it is not damaged by oil and gas development in the area.

On January 11, 2013, 150 years after the battle, a 3-D sonar map was released by NOAA's (the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration) Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, together with ExploreOcean, Teledyne Blueview, and Northwest Hydro showed never-before seen details of the USS Hatteras, the only Union warship sunk in combat in the Gulf of Mexico during the Civil War.

On November 20, 1869 French civil engineer Charles Joseph Minard published in Paris Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l'Armée Française dans la campagne de Russie 1812-1813. This was a a flow map on Napoleon's disastrous Russian campaign of 1812 in which he marched his army of 500,000 men from the Neman River to Moscow.

"The graph displays several variables in a single two-dimensional image:

"• the army's location and direction, showing where units split off and rejoined

"• the declining size of the army (note e.g. the crossing of the Berezina river on the retreat)

"• the low temperatures during the retreat.

"Étienne-Jules Marey first called notice to this dramatic depiction of the terrible fate of Napoleon's army in the Russian campaign, saying it "defies the pen of the historian in its brutal eloquence". Edward Tufte says it 'may well be the best statistical graphic ever drawn' and uses it as a prime example in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" (Wikipedia article on Charles Joseph Minard, accessed 01-16-2011).

The chart is a lithograph 62 x 30 cm.  

♦ An essay on Minard's historical sources for the chart, and a different reproduction pf the chart, was available at http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/minard in January 2011.

♦ The bibliographer of Minard's statistical graphics, Michael Friendly, posted several very interesting graphic variations on Minard's chart as Re-Visions of Minard. "I use 're-vision' in the sense of both 'to revise' and 'to see again', possibly from a new perspective." This was also available in January 2011.

About 1900 Glasgow publishers of miniature books David Bryce & Son issued a miniature edition of the Qu'ran (Koran) with illuminated opening pages, 2.5 x 1.9 cm. It was sold with a metal locket and a magnifying glass. Many copies were supplied to Indian and other Muslim soldiers fighting for the British in World War I, and also served as talismans.

"The production of miniature Korans in manuscript has a long tradition, but the printing of them in this [miniature] form had to await the arrival of photolithographic techniques in the late 19th century. Such Korans were published in Delhi in 1892 and Istanbul c. 1899, but the one which seems to have achieved the widest circulation is this Scottish edition. It was one of a long series of miniature books produced by David Bryce and Sons. All the copies were issued with metal lockets and magnifying glasses. Many were supplied to Indian and other Muslim soldiers fighting for the British in the First World War, and served also as talismans’ (Hanebutt-Benz, Glass, Roper (eds) Middle Eastern Languages and the Print Revolution: A cross-cultural encounter. A catalogue and companion to the Exhibition at Gutenberg-Museum Mainz,[2002] No. 79, p. 490).

An "almost legendary title published by Bryce … The bindings vary from richly gilt-stamped red or black morocco with gilt edges to plain stiff wrappers and yellow edges . . . (Bondy, Miniature Books [1981] 111–2).

In The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Book 4, Chapter 53) T. E. Lawrence wrote:

"[Auda] told me later, in strict confidence, that thirteen years before he had bought an amulet Koran for one hundred and twenty pounds and had not since been wounded. . . . The book was a Glasgow reproduction, costing eighteen pence; but Auda’s deadliness did not let people laugh at his superstition." 

Simon Beattie, Recent Acquisitions. List prepared for the 46th California International Antiquarian Book Fair, San Francisco, February 2013, No. 23.

Germany declares war on Russia (August 1) and on France (August 3). World War I begins.

As they plundered the city of Leuven, the invading German Army destroyed the library of the Catholic University of Leuven, the oldest and most prominent university in Belgium, founded in 1425 by Pope Martin V.

Along with the historic libary building about 300,000 books, and an untold number of manuscripts, including irreplaceable medieval and renaissance treasures, were lost. The destruction of this library was part of brutal retaliations by the Germans for the extensive activity of "francs-tireurs" against the occupying forces.

Germany signed the Armistice, ending World War I.

American physicist and inventor Robert H. Goddard published A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes. "Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections" 71, no. 2.  

This was earliest practical treatise on the development of rocketry for space flight. Like the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (Tsiolkovskii; Russian: Константи́н Эдуа́рдович Циолко́вский);and the Romanian-German Hermann Oberth, Goddard worked out the theory of rocket propulsion independently. Having explored the mathematical practicality of rocketry since 1906 and the experimental workability of reaction engines in laboratory vacuum tests since 1912, Goddard began to accumulate ideas for probing beyond the Earth’s stratosphere. His first two patents in 1914, for a liquid-fuel gun rocket and a multistage step rocket, led to modest recognition and financial support from the Smithsonian Institution.

The publication in 1919 by the Smithsonian of A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes gave Goddard distorted publicity because he had suggested that rocket power or jet propulsion could be used to attain escape velocity and that this theory could be proved by crashing a flash-powder missile on the moon. Sensitive to criticism of his moon-rocket idea, he worked quietly and steadily toward the perfection of his rocket technology and techniques.

"Goddard began experimenting with liquid oxygen and liquid-fueled rockets in September 1921, and tested the first liquid-fueled engine in November 1923. It had a cylindrical combustion chamber, using impinging jets to mix and atomize liquid oxygen and gasoline.

"He launched the first liquid-fueled (gasoline and liquid oxygen) rocket on March 16, 1926, in Auburn, Massachusetts. His journal entry of the event was notable for its laconic understatement: 'The first flight with a rocket using liquid propellants was made yesterday at Aunt Effie's farm.' The rocket, which was dubbed "Nell", rose just 41 feet during a 2.5-second flight that ended 184 feet away in a cabbage field, but it was an important demonstration that liquid propellants were possible." (Wikipedia article on Robert H. Goddard, accessed 05-15-2010)

Among Goddard’s successful innovations were "fuel-injection systems, regenerative cooling of combustion chambers, gyroscopic stabilization and control, instrumented payloads and recovery systems, guidance vanes in the exhaust plume, gimbaled and clustered engines, and aluminum fuel and oxidizer pumps" (Dictionary of Scientific Biography).

On March 19, 1936 the Smithsonian published Goddard's Liquid Propellant Rocket Development.  The remainder of his work was documented in patents.

"Goddard avoided sharing details of his work with other scientists, and preferred to work alone with his technicians. Frank Malina, who was then studying rocketry at the California Institute of Technology, visited Goddard [in Roswell, New Mexico] in August of 1936. Goddard refused to discuss any of his research, other than that which had already been published in Liquid-Propellant Rocket Development. Theodore von Kármán, Malina's mentor at the time, was unhappy with Goddard's attitude and later wrote, 'Naturally we at Caltech wanted as much information as we could get from Goddard for our mutual benefit. But Goddard believed in secrecy. . . . The trouble with secrecy is that one can easily go in the wrong direction and never know it.' Goddard's concerns about secrecy led to criticism for failure to cooperate with other scientists and engineers.  

"By 1939, von Kármán's Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at Caltech [GALCIT] had received Army Air Corps funding to develop rockets to assist in aircraft take-off. Goddard learned of this in 1940, and openly expressed his displeasure. Malina could not understand why the Army did not arrange for an exchange of information between Goddard and Caltech, since both were under government contract at the same time. Goddard did not think he could be of that much help to Caltech because they were designing rockets with solid fuel and Goddard was using liquid fuels" (Wikipedia article on Goddard).

Goddard’s booklet of 1919 was preceded by the theoretical writings of Tsiolkovsky published in Russian 1903-14 and the theoretical paper by Robert Esnault-Pelterie published in French in 1913. 

Goddard & Pendray, The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, I, 233-38.

Adolf Hitler published Mein Kampf in Munich, the first volume of which he dictated in prison to his associate Rudolf Hess after the abortive Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, November 1923.

One of the most influential books ever published, and possibly the most evil, the publication history, as well as the contents of this work, continue to be intensively reviewed by scholars, and read by people of different political persuasions, including extremists. The Wikipedia article on Mein Kampf contains unusually thorough documentation concerning its publication history.

Though publication of Mein Kampf was banned in some countries in 1947, it continued to sell widely in print in many languages, and according to a New York Times article published in November 2011, it had sold over 70 million copies by 2008.  It was also freely distributed on the Internet.  In 2011, with the pending expiration of its copyright, issues were raised concerning the dangers of allowing this text to circulate freely, and how it might be used to counteract prejudice and Holocaust denial, if that would be possible: 

"In 1947, Austria adopted the Verbotsgesetz — or “Prohibition Act” — banning the Nazi Party and criminalizing the celebration, promotion, or adulation of Nazi ideology; in the 1990s, it was amended to prohibit Holocaust denial. (It was under this law that the English writer David Irving was jailed a few years ago for denying the existence of the gas chambers.) Distributing and displaying Nazi paraphernalia is forbidden here. Germany, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, Lithuania — all these countries also criminalize revisionism and restrict various forms of speech and publications about the Holocaust. And for nearly 70 years, the German state of Bavaria, which holds the copyright for “Mein Kampf,” has fought heartily against the book’s publication in any country where it is possible to fight it.  

But now the rationale behind these restrictions is being questioned. While they may have helped limit the widespread distribution of “Mein Kampf” in Europe, repressive tactics of this kind have not aged well in the Internet era. (The book was never fully blocked anyway: in the 1980s, the U.S. Army sold it in some of its “Stars and Stripes” shops across Germany. And libraries often held copies.) Preventing a book’s publication today is largely a symbolic move.  

“Mein Kampf” is widely available, in its entirety, across the Web. It has been a hit in Japan and Turkey in recent years; it has sold briskly in South America and the Middle East; and it has shown up, like a nefarious inspiration, in such ugly places as the rantings of the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik. By 2008, an estimated 70,000,000 copies had been put into circulation since the book was first published in 1925, according to HatePrevention.org, a consortium of academics and activists. In other words, the restrictions on its publication may have enabled a kind of willful ignorance, a means of not recognizing the continued impact of the book’s ideas on society.  

"And so as Europe faces the end of the copyright on one of the most painful texts of the 20th century, some people now believe that the best course of action is not to extend the ban, but to publish 'Mein Kampf' with extensive annotations that explain how the book was used and what it wrought — that recognize its continued presence. 'Our idea is a zero-censorship effort,' says Philippe Coen, a French attorney at the forefront of HatePrevention.org, which organized the recent conference in Paris. He, like Dreyfus, favors the pedagogical approach to the publication of Hitler’s manifesto" (http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/the-return-of-mein-kampf/?nl=opinion&emc=tyb1, accessed 12-14-2011).

In December 1932 the Biuro Szyfrów ("Cipher Bureau") in Warsaw, the Polish interwar agency charged with both cryptography and cryptanalysis, broke the German Enigma machine cipher.

Over the next nearly seven years before World War II, the Polish "Cipher Bureau" overcame the growing structural and operating complexities of the plugboard-equipped Enigma, the main German cipher device during the Second World War.

Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany systematically destroyed an estimated 100 million books throughout occupied Europe, an act inextricably bound up with the murder of 6 million Jews. By burning and looting libraries and censoring "un-German" publications, the Nazis aimed to eradicate all traces of Jewish culture along with the Jewish people themselves. 

Rose (ed.), The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation (2000).

Austrian-German aerospace engineer Eugen Sänger published Raketenflugtechnik in 1933. This treatise on rocket flight engineering was Sänger's thesis for a degree in engineering, which had been rejected by the Technical University of Vienna as "too imaginative." Sänger was allowed to graduate when he submitted a more mundane thesis on the statistics of wing trusses. Raketenflugtechnik was the first study leading to the eventual development of a reusable human-piloted rocket-powered space plane, a concept which evolved into the X-planes and the space shuttle.

Sänger introduced his goals and purposes for the book as follows: 

“By rocket flight is meant here the motion of such a vehicle within the general air space, the propulsive force being provided by a rocket motor. 

“Rocket flight in the narrow sense is taken to be motion in the upper levels of the stratosphere with a speed such that inertial forces arising from the curvature of the path have a marked effect on the lift.

“This type of rocket flight is the next major development from trophospheric flight, which has been the product of the last thirty years; it is also the forerunner of space travel, the greatest technical problem of the present time.

“This forerunner and the installation of a space station* are the noblest tasks of rocketry, but for the present they are still not realizable.

“There are also several directly practical purposes to be served. Rocket flight should especially:

"1. Provide rapid intercontinental travel around the globe with the highest possible terrestrial speeds.

"2. Advance scientific research in certain fields, especially geophysics and astrophysics.

"3. If necessary provide a war weapon of exceptional power.

“These three purposes can now be reckoned as in part technically feasible. The present book is concerned with the technical basis of the realization of this first stage of rocket flight.

“* In cosmonauts’ plans this is a vehicle that revolves around the Earth outside the sensible atmosphere with a speed such that the weight is balanced by the centripetal force. The space station would serve as starting point for flights to even greater heights” (Sänger, Rocket Flight Engineering. Nasa Technical Translation F-223 [1965] 3).

Sänger and his associate, Irene Bredt, who later became his wife, intended to publish their continuing researches as a second volume of Raketenflugtechnik.  However, with the advent of World War II, their space vehicle project had to be repurposed for military use if it was to survive. A 900-page report on space vehicles, prepared by the two in 1941, was rejected by the German Research Institute for Aviation due to its size and complexity; Sänger and Bredt reworked this into a shorter 376-page secret report on a long range bomber with a rocket engine, intended to drop a dirty bomb on a U.S. city, issued as the GRIA’s “Secret Command Report” UM 3538. The report entitled Über einen Raketenantrieb für Fernbomber was issued in a highly-controlled edition of 100 copies for the Nazi German State Ministry for Aviation in 1944. In 2011 three copies of this original report were recorded worldwide in OCLC, one in the United States.

The Sänger-Bredt Silverbird (Silbervogel), the designs for which were described in the secret report, was a reusable winged vehicle “propelled by a rocket engine burning liquid oxygen and kerosene, capable of reaching Mach 10.0 at altitudes in excess of 100 miles” (Jenkins, Space Shuttle, p. 1).  The Sänger/Bredt report was "the first serious proposal for a vehicle which could carry a pilot and payload to the lower edge of space" (Wikipedia article on Silbervogel).

In order to realize his concept of a reusable rocket engine, Sänger had to solve the major problem of how to cool the engine. “Between 1932 and 1934, [Sänger] performed a series of pioneering experiments with reinforced cooled liquid rocket motors capable of burning mixtures of gas-oil and liquid oxygen (LOX), achieving thrust levels up to 30kp, pressures up to 50 bars, and exhaust velocities of about 3,000 m/s” (Sänger & Szames, “From the Silverbird to interstellar voyages,” 2).

In 1934 Sänger published these studies in "Neuere Ergebnisse der Raketenflugtechnik," Flug: Zeitschr. f. d. gesamte Gebiet der Luftfahrt, Sonderheft 1. This paper contained the results of Sänger’s extensive tests of various rocket engine models in 1933 and 1934, leading up to his 1935 patent for regenerative forced-flow cooling of rocket engines. This he accomplished by designing a “regeneratively cooled” engine cooled by its own fuel circulating around the combustion chamber. This rocket engine was a lasting feature of the Silverbird design. "Almost all modern rocket engines use this design today and some sources still refer to it as the Sänger-Bredt design" (Wikipedia article on Silbervogel).

“Sänger’s former rocket-powered civilian space transport airplane project now evolved into an Earth-orbiting, single-stage, rocket-powered intercontinental bombing machine with a launch weight of 100 tons . . . It would be propelled by a rocket engine using highly efficient fuels with liquid oxygen used as an oxidizer in a combustion chamber at a pressure of 100 atmospheres and creating 100 tons of thrust” (Myrha, p. 78).

This rocket-powered bomber was designed to attack strategic targets in the United States: New York City, Washington DC, Chicago and the steel-refining plants in Pittsburgh. Page 339 of Sänger and Bredt’s report shows a map of lower Manhattan superimposed with a bull’s-eye and containing calculations of the expected destruction pattern.  

After World War II Sänger emigrated from Germany to France where he worked for the Arsénal de l’Aéronautique. During his time in France “he was the subject of a botched attempt by Soviet agents to win him over. Joseph Stalin had become intrigued by reports of the Silvervogel design and sent his son, Vasily, and scientist Grigori Tokaty to convince [Sänger] to come to the Soviet Union, but they failed to do so. It has also been reported that Stalin instructed the NKVD to kidnap him” (Wikipedia). In 1954 Sänger returned to Germany, where he founded a research center in Stuttgart and earned unwelcome notoriety through his involvement with Egypt’s military buildup in the early 1960s. From 1963 until his death, he was a professor of astronautic technologies at the technical university in Berlin.

An English translation of the Sänger-Bredt report, prepared by the Technical Information Branch of U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics in 1946, was also limited to a small number of copies.  A condensed version of the translation was published in 1952. The work was also studied in Russia where a Russian translation was published.

Sänger-Bredt, “The Silver Bird story: A memoir,” in Hall, ed., Essays on the History of Rocketry and Astronautics, vol. 1 (1977), pp. 195-228. Sänger-Bredt & Engel, “The development of regeneratively cooled liquid rocket engines in Austria and Germany, 1926-42,” Durant & James, eds., First Steps toward Space, 217-46. Myrha, Sänger: Germany’s Orbital Rocket Bomber in World War II (2002).

Researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D. C. who in the year 2000 began documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories in operation during the Nazi regime, documented 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, located in German-controlled areas from France to Russia and in Germany from 1933 to 1945. 

In 2009 the Holocaust Memorial Museum began publication of The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945. The vast encyclopedia would be complete in 7 volumes by 2025. In March 2012 the first two volumes were print: 

"Published by Indiana University Press in association with the Museum, each of the encyclopedia's seven volumes will address a group of sites according to type or subordination so that each volume can stand on its own. In this way, the reader can gain some appreciation for the conditions at a particular site as well as for how the system functioned as a whole. Photographs, charts, and maps will supplement the text.

"OVERVIEW

"VOL. I:

"EARLY CAMPS, YOUTH CAMPS, AND CONCENTRATION CAMPS AND SUBCAMPS UNDER THE SS-BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION MAIN OFFICE (WVHA). Editor: Geoffrey P. Megargee; Foreword: Elie Wiesel. Published June 2009.

"Contains entries on 110 early camps, 23 main SS concentration camps (including Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Dachau), 898 subcamps, 39 SS construction brigade camps, and three so-called youth protection camps. Introductory essays provide broader context, while citations and source narratives offer the basis for additional research. The volume is more than 1,700 pages, with 192 photographs and 23 maps. 

"VOL. II:

"GHETTOS IN GERMAN-OCCUPIED EASTERN EUROPE. General Editor: Geoffrey P. Megargee; Volume Editor: Martin Dean; Introduction: Christopher R. Browning. Published April 2012.

Provides a comprehensive account of how the Nazis conducted the Holocaust throughout the scattered towns and villages of Poland and the Soviet Union. It covers more than 1,150 sites, including both open and closed ghettos. Regional essays outline the patterns of ghettoization in 19 German administrative regions. Each entry discusses key events in the history of the ghetto; living and working conditions; activities of the Jewish Councils; Jewish responses to persecution; demographic changes; and details of the ghetto's liquidation. Personal testimonies help convey the character of each ghetto, while source citations provide a guide to additional information. Documentation of hundreds of smaller sites—previously unknown or overlooked in the historiography of the Holocaust—make this an indispensable reference work on the destroyed Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. 

"VOL. III:

"CAMPS AND GHETTOS RUN BY EUROPEAN STATES AFFILIATED WITH NAZI GERMANY, including camps and ghettos in Croatia, Hungary, Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Vichy France. Editor: Joseph White.

"VOL. IV:

CAMPS AND OTHER DETENTION FACILITIES UNDER THE GERMAN MILITARY, including prisoner-of-war camps and military brothels. Co-editor: Rüdiger Overmans; Advisor: Pavel Polian.

"VOL. V:

"CAMPS UNDER THE SS-REICH SECURITY MAIN OFFICE AND THE HIGHER SS AND POLICE LEADERS, including the Operation Reinhard extermination camps, Gestapo prisons, and some categories of forced labor, detention, and transit camps.

"VOL. VI:

"NON-SS FORCED LABOR CAMPS, including forced labor camps under Organisation Todt, REIMAHG, local labor offices, and private firms.

"VOL. VII:

"OTHER KILLING AND DETENTION FACILITIES, including so-called euthanasia centers, Justice Ministry penal camps, “Germanization” camps for Polish children, and civilian prisons."

" 'The numbers are so much higher than what we originally thought,” Hartmut Berghoff, director of the institute, said in an interview after learning of the new data.  

“ 'We knew before how horrible life in the camps and ghettos was,” he said, “but the numbers are unbelievable.”  

"The documented camps include not only “killing centers” but also thousands of forced labor camps, where prisoners manufactured war supplies; prisoner-of-war camps; sites euphemistically named “care” centers, where pregnant women were forced to have abortions or their babies were killed after birth; and brothels, where women were coerced into having sex with German military personnel.  

"Auschwitz and a handful of other concentration camps have come to symbolize the Nazi killing machine in the public consciousness. Likewise, the Nazi system for imprisoning Jewish families in hometown ghettos has become associated with a single site — the Warsaw Ghetto, famous for the 1943 uprising. But these sites, infamous though they are, represent only a minuscule fraction of the entire German network, the new research makes painfully clear.  

"The maps the researchers have created to identify the camps and ghettos turn wide sections of wartime Europe into black clusters of death, torture and slavery — centered in Germany and Poland, but reaching in all directions."

"The numbers astound: 30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettos; 980 concentration camps; 1,000 prisoner-of-war camps; 500 brothels filled with sex slaves; and thousands of other camps used for euthanizing the elderly and infirm, performing forced abortions, 'Germanizing' prisoners or transporting victims to killing centers.  

"In Berlin alone, researchers have documented some 3,000 camps and so-called Jew houses, while Hamburg held 1,300 sites.

"Dr. Dean, a co-researcher, said the findings left no doubt in his mind that many German citizens, despite the frequent claims of ignorance after the war, must have known about the widespread existence of the Nazi camps at the time.  

“ 'You literally could not go anywhere in Germany without running into forced labor camps, P.O.W. camps, concentration camps,' he said. 'They were everywhere.'" (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/sunday-review/the-holocaust-just-got-more-shocking.html?hp, accessed 03-02-2013).

As head of the Radio Research Station at Ditton Park near Slough, England, Robert Watson-Watt published a report entitled The Detection of Aircraft by Radio Methods.

"On February 26, 1935 Watson-Watt and [his assistant Arnold] Wilkins demonstrated a basic radar system to an observer from the Air Ministry Committee the Detection of Aircraft. The previous day Wilkins had set up receiving equipment in a field near Upper Stowe, Northamptonshire, and this was used to detect the presence of a Handley Page Heyford bomber at ranges up to 8 miles by means of the radio waves which it reflected from the nearby Daventry shortwave radio transmitter of the BBC, which operated at a wavelength of 49 m (6 MHz). This convincing demonstration, known as the Daventry Experiment, led immediately to development of radar in the UK."

Believing that war with Germany is inevitable, Alan Turing built in a Princeton University machine shop an experimental electromechanical cryptanalysis machine capable of binary multiplication.

Polish Cipher Bureau mathematician and cryptologist Marian Rejewski designed the bomba, or bomba kryptologiczna  ("bomb" or "cryptologic bomb,") a special-purpose machine for breaking German Enigma-machine ciphers.

In March 2011 I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. You cannot grasp the scale of the Holocaust until you visit Birkenau, especially— a giant factory of death capable of processing 20,000 people per day. The impact of the Holocaust was still reverberating in my head in April 2011 when I wrote this database entry. Needing to understand more, I read Richard Rhodes' book, Masters of Death, from which the horrifying wider scope of the Holocaust, unfolded in my consciousness, and from which I quote: 

“The notorious gas chambers and crematoria of the death camps have come to typify the Holocaust, but in fact they were exceptional. The primary means of mass murder the Nazis deployed during the Second World War was firearms and lethal privation. Shooting was not less efficient than gassing, as many historians have assumed. It was hard on the shooters’ nerves, and the gas vans and chambers alleviated the burden. But shooting began earlier, continued throughout the war and produced far more victims if Slavs are counted, as they must be, as well as Jews. ‘The Nazi regime was the most genocidal the world has ever seen,’ writes sociologist Michael Mann. ’During its short twelve years (overwhelmingly its last four) it killed approximately twenty million unarmed persons. . . . Jews comprised only a third of the victims and their mass murder occurred well into the sequence. . . . Slavs, defined as Untermenschen were the most numerous victims—3 million Poles, 7 million Soviet citizens and 3.3 million Soviet POWs.’ Even among Jewish victims, Daniel Goldhagen estimates, ‘somewhere between 40 and 50 percent’ were killed ‘by means other than gassing, and more Germans were involved in these killings in a greater variety of contexts than in those carried out in the gas chambers’ ” (Richard Rhodes, Masters of Death. The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust [2002] 156-157).

In tracing and documenting the crimes committed by the SS summarized in these statistics Rhodes does not intend in any way to diminish the incredible losses suffered by the Jews, nor to blur the particular focus of the Nazis' Final Solution on the Jews. His exploration of SS crimes exposes a scope of criminality that is wider, almost beyond comprehension.

Germany invades Poland. World War II begins.

Britain and France declare war on Germany.

English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist Alan Turing reported to the Government Code and Cypher School, Bletchley Park, in the town of Bletchley, England.

In 1940 Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr and her neighbor, avant-garde composer George Antheil, invented “frequency-hopping” transmission, now called spread-spectrum. The following year Lamarr patented "frequency-hopping" under her then-married name of H. K. Markey, and assigned the patent to the U.S. Government. This early version of frequency hopping used a piano-roll to change between 88 frequencies, and was intended to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or jam.

♦ In 2011 historian and writer Richard Rhodes told this unusual story in detail in Hedy's Folly. The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World.

Between 1940 and 1941 Max Newman and his team at Bletchley Park, including Alan Turing, created the top-secret Heath Robinson cryptographic computer, named after the cartoonist-designer of fantastic machines. This special-purpose relay computer successfully decoded messages encrypted by Enigma, the Nazis' first-generation enciphering machine.

At the Forest of Compiègne in the department of Oise, between Nazi Germany and France on June 22, 1940 France signed an armistice with Germany, followed by an armistice with Italy, which entered the war on June 10. The Vichy government, which collaborated with the Axis powers from July 1940 to August 1944, was established.

Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman at Bletchley Park designed an improved Bombe cryptanalysis machine for deciphering Enigma messages.

Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor caused the United States to declare war on Japan. Within days Germany and Italy declared war on the United States.

In 1943 Alan Turing consulted with Claude Shannon and Harry Nyquist at Bell Labs in New York concerning the encryption of speech signals between Roosevelt and Churchill.

The top-secret Colossus programmable cryptanalysis machine designed by Tommy Flowers and his team at the Post Office Research Station, Dollis Hill, in North West London, and installed at Bletchley Park to crack the higher level encryption of the Nazi Lorenz SZ40 machine. Colossus employed vacuum tubes and was between one hundred and one thousand times faster than Heath Robinson.  "It exceeded all expectations and was able to derive many of the Lorenz settings for each message within a few hours, compared to weeks previously" (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/03/remembering-colossus-worlds-first.html, accessed 03-0-2012).

The Colossus machines have been called the first operational programmable electronic digital computers.

The first improved Colossus Mark 2 with 2400 vacuum tubes was operational at Bletchley Park just in time for the Normandy Landings.

By the end of the war there were ten Colossus computers operating. They enabled the decryption of 63,000,000 characters of high-grade German messages. Even though these machines incorporated features of special purpose electronic digital computers, and had incalculable influence on the outcome of WWII, they had little influence, in the conventional sense, on the development of computing technology because they remained top secret until about 1970.

"The Colossus computers were used to help decipher teleprinter messages which had been encrypted using the Lorenz SZ40/42 machine — British codebreakers referred to encrypted German teleprinter traffic as "Fish" and called the SZ40/42 machine and its traffic as 'Tunny'. Colossus compared two data streams, counting each match based on a programmable Boolean function. The encrypted message was read at high speed from a paper tape. The other stream was generated internally, and was an electronic simulation of the Lorenz machine at various trial settings. If the match count for a setting was above a certain threshold, it would be sent as output to an electric typewriter" (Wikipedia article on Colossus computer, accessed 11-23-2008).

In March 2012 the Colossus Rebuild Project at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park had completed an operating reconstruction of a Colossus II, after 10 years and over 6,000 man-days of volunteer effort. The Rebuild stands in its historically correct place, the room in H Block, in Bletchley Park, where Colossus No. 9 stood in WW II.

In 1945, after the end of World War II, the Research and Intelligence Branch of the U. S. Army Forces in the Branch European Theatre issued a secret report entitled The story of Peenemünde or what might have been [cover title; title-page reads “Peenemünde east, through the eyes of 500 detained at Garmisch”]. After the classification was reduced from "Secret" to "Restricted" they issued a few copies of this 749-page collection of reports reproduced from typescript. The report included numerous halftone reproductions of photographs, and diagrams. The punched sheets were held together by metal clips. The front wrapper was illustrated with an aerial photograph of Peenemünde.

Compiled by the U. S. Army between May and September 1945, describing rocketry research conducted by the Nazi regime between 1937 and 1945 at Peenemünde East, this document marks the first account published outside of Nazi Germany of the rocketry program conducted at Peenemünde East. The Story of Peenemünde is also the first document to record the transfer of German rocketry technology to the United States as part of what came to be known as Operation Paperclip, which culminated in the development of America’s space program, and advanced missile weapons systems, and helped transform the United States into a global superpower. Many historians have stated that had the United States not essentially smuggled the Rocket Team into the U.S., the United States might have fallen behind drastically in the post war arms race.

The document consists of 118 separate reports, including transcripts of the U.S. Army’s original interrogations of key German rocket scientists at Garmisch, Germany, and heavily illustrated plans of various advanced rocket designs, guidance systems, etc., which only appeared in print in this form. The quality of typescript and printing varies considerably throughout, indicating a rushed, relatively non-professional production. When we checked in February 2013 OCLC cited seven copies of The Story of Peenemünde in libraries, five of which were U.S. government institutions (Naval Postgraduate School, U.S. Air Force Academy, Smithsonian Institution, Combined Arms Res. Library, U. S. Army Heritage and Education Center); the remaining two were the University of Illinois and the University of Alabama at Huntsville, the city close to the Redstone Arsenal where the Wernher von Braun and the Nazi Rocket Team were eventually based in the U. S. 

In the final years of World War II the Peenemünde East facility developed the V-2 rocket, the world’s first long-range supersonic combat-ballistic missile. Under the guidance of Wernher von Braun, head of Peenemünde’s scientific and engineering team, the Peenemünde rocketry group also worked on several other pioneering designs including the Wasserfall surface-to-air antiaircraft missile and the A-9 intercontinental ballistic missile, both of which were still under development at the war’s end (the Nazis planned to use the A-9 to attack the United States). The Nazi rocketry program was at least a generation more advanced than anything developed by the Allied Forces, and when the American military learned of it in 1943 they immediately started a project to study the V-2 and to capture the people who had designed it.

As for the Peenemünde team, when it became clear that the Allies would defeat Germany, General Dornberger and Wernher von Braun “decided it would be best to seek out the Americans, particularly as they wanted to continue working on rockets after the war. It looked as though the Red Army would reach Peenemünde first. Surrendering to the Soviets was never an option, and they knew that the British and French could not afford a major post-war rocket program. They concluded their best opportunity to continue building large rockets would be in America” (Kennedy, p. 25).

On May 2, 1945 the Peenemünde group surrendered to the American 44th Infantry division. Shortly afterwards the Americans seized about 100 V-2 rockets, which were eventually shipped to the proving ground in White Sands, New Mexico to form the basis of America’s new rocketry program; they also captured the entire Peenemünde archive of scientific and engineering documents (totaling nearly 14 tons), and drew up a list of key German rocket personnel to be found and interrogated. This was the start of the American intelligence project that became famous under the name of Operation Paperclip, which was responsible for bringing von Braun, Dornberger and over one hundred other German rocketry experts to the United States. The Story of Peenemünde dates from the very beginning of this operation, when captured German rocket scientists were still being held and interrogated at the U.S. military garrison at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria. Among the 118 separate documents, mostly in English but with a few in German, are:

• Interrogations conducted by U.S. Army Intelligence of key Nazi scientific and engineering personnel, including Walter Dornberger (director of Peenemünde East), and Wernher von Braun, both of whom played critical roles in the creation of the U.S. rocketry and space programs

• Illustrated plans for the Wasserfall surface-to-air antiaircraft missile and the A-9 intercontinental ballistic missile, taken from the Peenemünde archives

• Accounts of rocket components, guidance systems, and liquid and solid fuels

• Ballistics reports

• Description of the Peenemünde wind tunnel—then the largest supersonic wind tunnel in the world—and wind tunnel experiments along with other documents crucial to the establishment of America’s postwar rocketry and space programs. The separately printed mimeographed index indicates that these materials were brought to Washington by “Colonel McCoy”; i.e. Col. Howard McCoy, head of the Air Documents Research Center, which was responsible for translating, cataloguing and indexing captured German documents.

Kennedy, The Rockets and Missiles of White Sands Proving Ground, 1945-1958, pp. 24-26. Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich, p. 346 (bibliographical citation). Ordway & Sharpe, The Rocket Team, chs. 4-5, p. 294 (bibliographical citation). Von Braun, Ordway & Dooling, Space Travel: A History, pp. 114-118.

With the onset of World War II, the most precious holdings of the Sächsische Landesbibliothek at Dresden were dispersed to eighteen castles and offices. As a result they largely survived the bombing raids of February and March 1945 on this major industrial center by the British and American Air Forces.

However, the raids destroyed the former library buildings and virtually the whole historic center of Dresden— with losses of about 200,000 volumes of twentieth-century manuscript and printed holdings. The losses included  irreplaceable musical manuscripts, including the major corpus of Tomasso Albinoni's unpublished music, though Georg Philipp Telemann's manuscripts were preserved. After the war, some 250,000 books from the library were taken to Russia.

The collapse of the Third Reich occurred after the meeting of Western and Russian armies at Torgau in Saxony.

The unconditional surrender of Germany took place on "Victory in Europe" (VE) Day.

The surrender of Japan marked the end of World War II.

From 1945 through 1946 the ENIAC, development of which had been provided by the U. S. Army, remained at the Moore School in Philadelphia, working out numerical solutions to problems in such fields as atomic energy and ballistic trajectories. Dismantling at the Moore School began in the winter, and the first units arrived at Aberdeen Proving Ground in January 1947. By August 1947 the ENIAC was once again operational.

Under the name Project Charles, the Air Force funded a project proposed by George Valley and Jay Forrester of MIT to develop a military grade version of the Whirlwind computer.

The goal of this project was to develop an automated detection and interception system to protect the entire U.S. from incoming bombers. This  evolved into the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment or SAGE system.

In 1950 Jule Charney, Agnar Fjörtoff, and John von Neumann published “Numerical Integration of the Barotropic Vorticity Equation,” Tellus 2 (1950) 237-254.

Charney, Fjörthoff, and von Neumann's paper reported the first weather forecast by electronic computer. It took twenty-four hours of processing time on the ENIAC to calculate a twenty-four hour forecast.

"As a committed opponent of Communism and a key member of the WWII-era national security establishment, von Neumann hoped that weather modeling might lead to weather control, which might be used as a weapon of war. Soviet harvests, for example, might be ruined by a US-induced drought.

"Under grants from the Weather Bureau, the Navy, and the Air Force, he assembled a group of theoretical meteorologists at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study (IAS). If regional weather prediction proved feasible, von Neumann planned to move on to the extremely ambitious problem of simulating the entire atmosphere. This, in turn, would allow the modeling of climate. Jule Charney, an energetic and visionary meteorologist who had worked with Carl-Gustaf Rossby at the University of Chicago and with Arnt Eliassen at the University of Oslo, was invited to head the new Meteorology Group.

"The Meteorology Project ran its first computerized weather forecast on the ENIAC in 1950. The group's model, like [Lewis Fry] Richardson's, divided the atmosphere into a set of grid cells and employed finite difference methods to solve differential equations numerically. The 1950 forecasts, covering North America, used a two-dimensional grid with 270 points about 700 km apart. The time step was three hours. Results, while far from perfect, justified further work" (Paul N. Edwards [ed], Atmospheric General Circulation Modeling: A Participatory History, accessed 04-26-2009).

The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) approved a U.S. - Canadian Permanent Joint Board on Defense (PJBD) recommendation (51/1) for an extension of the Permanent Radar Net. 

The recommendation called for the extension and consolidation of the control and warning system of Canada and the U.S. into one operational system to meet air defense needs of both countries.

On March 10, 1951 51 the U.S. Army Antiaircraft Command assumed command for the first time of all antiaircraft forces assigned to air defense for both countries.

These developments are considered the origin of NORAD (North American Air Defense Command; now North American Aerospace Defense Command). The agency was not officially founded until May 12, 1958. 

NORAD headquarters are located at Peterson AFB, Colorado Springs, Colorado. NORAD command and control is exercised through the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center, located a short distance away.

"The Operations Center itself lies along one side of a main tunnel bored almost a mile through the solid granite heart of the mountain. The tunnel is designed to route the worst of a blast's shock wave out the other end, past the two 25-ton blast doors that mark one wall. The center was designed to withstand up to a 30 megaton blast within 1-nautical-mile (1.9 km).

"The underground Combat Operations Center (COC) was originally intended to provide a 70% probability of continuing to function if a five-megaton nuclear weapon detonated three miles (5.6 km) away, but was ultimately built to withstand a multimegaton blast within 1.5 nautical miles (2.8 km; 1.7 mi). It was also designed to be self-sufficient for brief periods, have backup communications and television intercom with related commands, house personnel during an emergency, and protect staff against fallout and biological and chemical warfare.

"The main entrance to the complex is about one-third of a mile (540 m) from the North Portal via a tunnel which leads to a pair of 25-ton steel blast doors. Behind them is a steel building complex built within a 4.5 acres (18,000 m2) grid of excavated chambers and tunnels and surrounded by 2,000 feet (600 m) of granite. The main excavation consists of three chambers 45 feet (15 m) wide, 60 feet (20 m) high, and 588 feet (180 m) long, intersected by four chambers 32 feet (10 m) wide, 56 feet (17 m) high and 335 feet (100 m) long. Fifteen buildings, freestanding without contact with the rock walls or roofs and joined by flexible vestibule connections, make up the inner complex. Twelve of these buildings are three stories tall; the others are one and two stories.

"The outer shells of the buildings are made of three-eighths-inch (9.5 mm) continuously welded low carbon steel plates which are supported by structural steel frames. Metal walls and tunnels serve to attenuate electromagnetic pulse (EMP). Metal doors at each building entrance serve as fire doors to help contain fire and smoke. Emphasis on the design of the structure is predicated on the effects of nuclear weapons; however, building design also makes it possible for the complex to absorb the shock of earthquakes. During a nuclear explosion, powerful springs that support the complex can absorb much of the energy. North Portal

"Blast valves, installed in reinforced concrete bulkheads, have been placed in the exhaust and air intake supply, as well as water, fuel, and sewer lines. Sensors at the North and South Portal entrances will detect overpressure waves from a nuclear explosion, causing the valves to close and protect the complex. The buildings in the complex are mounted on 1,319 steel springs, each weighing about 1,000 pounds (450 kg). The springs allow the complex to move 12 inches (30 cm) in any one direction. To make the complex self-sufficient, adequate space in the complex is devoted to support functions. A dining facility, medical facility with dental office, pharmacy and a two-bed ward; two physical fitness centers with exercise equipment and sauna; a small base exchange and barber shop are all located within the complex.

"Electricity comes primarily from the city of Colorado Springs, with six 1,750 kilowatt diesel generators for backup. Water for the complex comes from an underground supply inside Cheyenne Mountain, deposited into four excavated reservoirs with a capacity of 1.5 million U.S. gallons (6,000 m³) of water. Three serve as industrial reservoirs and the remaining one is the complex's primary domestic water source. They are so large that workers sometimes cross them in rowboats. About 30,000 to 120,000 U.S. gallons (110 to 450 m³) are actually retained at any given time.

"Incoming air may be filtered through a system of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear filters to remove harmful pathogens and/or radioactive and chemical particles.

"The fresh air intake is mainly from the south portal access which is 17.5 feet (5.3 m) high and 15 feet (4.6 m) wide and linked to the north portal access which is 22.5 feet (7 m) high and 29 feet (9 m) wide. The entire tunnel from north to south entry portals is nine-tenths of a mile (1.5 km) long. The NORAD command center has been modernized several times over the years. The original equipment resembled Mission Control for NASA's Project Apollo in the 1960s-1970s and used similar Philco-Ford consoles and display systems. The current (2005) version, with ordinary desks and flat-screen displays, looks rather ordinary by comparison and resembles NASA's current (2000s) mission control" (Wikipedia article on Cheyenne Mountain, accessed 02-29-2012).

British electrical engineer Kenyon Taylor and team, working on the Royal Canadian Navy's DATAR project (a pioneering computerized battlefield information system) invented the first trackball, a precursor of the computer mouse. It used a standard Canadian five-pin bowling ball. The DATAR system was first successfully tested on Lake Ontario in autumn 1953.

The National Security Agency/Central Security Service (NSA/CSS), a cryptologic intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign communications and foreign signals intelligence, as well as protecting U.S. government communications and information systems, officially came into existence on November 4, 1952. 

"The National Security Agency's predecessor was the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA), created on May 20, 1949. This organization was originally established within the U.S. Department of Defense under the command of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The AFSA was to direct the communications and electronic intelligence activities of the U.S. military intelligence units: the Army Security Agency, the Naval Security Group, and the Air Force Security Service. However, that agency had little power and lacked a centralized coordination mechanism. . . . As the change in the security agency's name indicated, the role of NSA was extended beyond the armed forces" (Wikipedia article on National Security Agency, accessed 01-14-2012).

Development began for NORAD on the SAGE Air Defense System, using a computer built by IBM after a design based on the Whirlwind.

The system included the first light pen.

The full SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) automated control system for tracking and intercepting enemy bomber aircraft was completed by 1963.

The first SAGE AN/FSQ-7 was operational for the SAGE Air Defense System on a limited basis. The AN/FSQ-7 computer contained 55,000 vacuum tubes, occupied 0.5 acres (2,000 m2) of of floor space, weighed 275 tons, and used up to three megawatts of power. Performance was about 75,000 instructions per second. From the standpoint of physical dimensions, the fifty-two AN/FSQ-7s remain the largest computers ever built.  

"Although the machines used a large number of vacuum tubes, the failure rate of an individual tube was low due to efforts in quality control and a novel quality assurance system called marginal checking that discovered tubes that were growing weak, before they failed. Each SAGE site included two computers for redundancy, with one processor on "hot standby" at all times. In spite of the poor reliability of the tubes, this dual-processor design made for remarkably high overall system uptime. 99% availability was not unusual."

The system allowed online access, in graphical form, to data transmitted to and processed by its computers. Fully deployed by 1963, the IBM-built early warning system remained operational until 1984. With 23 direction centers situated on the northern, eastern, and western boundaries of the United States, SAGE pioneered the use of computer control over large, geographically distributed systems.

"Both MIT and IBM supported the project as contractors. IBM's role in SAGE (the design and manufacture of the AN/FSQ-7 computer, a vacuum tube computer with ferrite core memory based on the never-built Whirlwind II) was an important factor leading to IBM's domination of the computer industry, accounting for more than a half billion dollars in revenue, nearly 10% of IBM's income in the late 1950s" (Wikipedia article on Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, accessed 03-03-2012).

The U.S. Navy launched NAVSAT, also known as TRANSIT. 

"The TRANSIT satellite system was developed by the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) of Johns Hopkins University for the U.S. Navy. Just days after the Soviet launch of Sputnik 1, the first man-made earth-orbiting satellite on October 4, 1957, two physicists at APL, William Guier and George Weiffenbach, found themselves in discussion about the microwave signals that would likely be emanating from the satellite. They were able to determine Sputnik's orbit by analyzing the Doppler shift of its radio signals during a single pass. Frank McClure, the chairman of APL's Research Center, suggested that if the satellite's position were known and predictable, the Doppler shift could be used to locate a receiver on Earth.

"Development of the TRANSIT system began in 1958, and a prototype satellite, Transit 1A, was launched in September 1959. That satellite failed to reach orbit. A second satellite, Transit 1B, was successfully launched April 13, 1960, by a Thor-Ablestar rocket. The first successful tests of the system were made in 1960, and the system entered Naval service in 1964" (Wikipedia article on Transit (satellite), accessed 12-26-2012).

NAVSAT was the first operational satellite navigation system. Using a constellation of five satellites, the system was primarily used to obtain accurate location information by ballistic missile submarines, and was also used as a general navigation system by the Navy, and in hydrographic and geodetic surveying. Since there was no computer small enough to fit through a submarine’s hatch, a new computer was designed, named the AN/UYK-1. It was built with rounded corners to fit through the hatch, was about five feet tall, and sealed to be water-proof.

MITRE Corporation was founded to manage the development and production of SAGE (Semi Automatic Ground Environment) "an automated control system for collecting, tracking and intercepting enemy bomber aircraft."

SAGE was used by NORAD into the 1980s.

IBM began production of the the AN/FSQ-7, a military grade version of the Whirlwind.

"The AN/FSQ-7 used 55,000 vaccuum tubes, about 1/2 acre (2,000 m²) of floor space, weighed 275 tons and used up to three megawatts of power. Although the failure rate of an individual tube was low due to efforts in quality control. So many were used that the daily failure rate was in the hundreds. Each center had staff dedicated to replacing dead tubes by running up and down the racks of machinery with shopping carts filled with replacements. The AN/FSQ-7s remain the largest computers ever built, and will likely hold that record in the future. Each SAGE site included two computers for redundancy, with one processor on "hot standby" at all times. In spite of the poor reliability of the tubes, this dual-processor design made for remarkably high overall system uptime. 99% availability was not unusual."

The Burroughs “Atlas Guidance” computer was used at Cape Canaveral (now Cape Kennedy) to control the launch of the Atlas missile. It was one of the first computers to use transistors.

". . .the first machine was installed at the Cape Canaveral missile range in June 1957. Although Atlas missile launches started in September 1957, test patterns were transmitted to the missile in place of actual guidance commands for the first four flights. The first computer-controlled launch was on July 19, 1958. The computer had separate memory areas for instructions (2048 18-bit words) and data (256 24-bit words). The instruction area was increased to 2816 words, beginning with the Model III version, which was first delivered in December 1958. The Atlas guidance computer had no facilities for developing programs, so they were written on the UDEC II, the Datatron, and the 220, using simulator software. Burroughs was still doing Atlas programming on the 220 in 1964. In all, 18 Atlas guidance computers were built at a total project cost of $37 million. The computer was very reliable, and no Atlas launch was ever aborted due to computer failure." 

The first of the Corona series of American strategic imaging reconnaissance satellites was launched. Produced and operated by the Central Intelligence Agency Directorate of Science and Technology with assistance from the U.S. Air Force, the Corona satellites were used for photographic surveillance of the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China and other areas.

"The Corona satellites used 31,500 feet (9,600 meters) of special 70 millimeter film with 24 inch (60 centimeter) focal length cameras. Initially orbiting at altitudes from 165 to 460 kilometers above the surface of the Earth, the cameras could resolve images on the ground down to 7.5 meters in diameter. The two KH-4 systems improved this resolution to 2.75 meters and 1.8 meters respectively, because they operated at lower orbital altitudes. . . .

"The first dozen or more Corona satellites and their launches were cloaked with disinformation as being part of a space technology development program called the Discoverer program. The first test launches for the Corona/Discoverer were carried out early in 1959. The first Corona launch containing a camera was carried out in June 1959 with the cover name Discoverer 4. This was a 750 kilogram satellite launched by a Thor-Agena rocket.

"The plan for the Corona program was for its satellites to return canisters of exposed film to the Earth in re-entry capsules, called by the slang term "film buckets", which were to be recovered in mid-air by a specially-equipped U.S. Air Force planes during their parachute descent. (The buckets were designed to float on the water for a short period of time for possible recovery by U.S. Navy ships, and then to sink if the recovery failed, via a water-dissolvable plug made of salt at the base of the capsule. This was for secrecy purposes.)" (Wikipedia article on Corona (satellite) accessed 11-29-2010).

"The return capsule of the Discoverer 13 mission, which launched August 10, 1960, was successfully recovered the next day. This was the first time that any object had been recovered successfully from orbit. After the mission of Discoverer 14, launch on August 18, 1960, its film bucket was successfully retrieved two days later by a C-119 Flying Boxcar transport plane. This was the first successful return of photographic film from orbit.

American mathematician James W. Cooley of IBM Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York,  and American statistician John W. Tukey published "An algorithm for the machine calculation of complex Fourier series", Mathematics of  Computation 19, 297–301. This paper enunciated the Cooley-Tukey FFT algorithm, the most common fast Fourier transform algorithm.

"The motivation for it [FFT algorithm] was provided by Dr. Richard L. Garwin at IBM Watson Research who was concerned about verifying a Nuclear arms treaty with the Soviet Union for the SALT talks. Garwin thought that if he had a very much faster Fourier Transform he could plant sensors in the ground in countries surrounding the Soviet Union. He suggested the idea of how Fourier transforms could be programmed to be much faster to both Cooley and Tukey. They did the work, the sensors were planted, and he was able to locate nuclear explosions to within 15 kilometers of where they were occurring" (Wikipedia article on James Cooley, accessed 03-06-2012).

American political scientist Gene Sharp of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth published The Politics of Nonviolent Action, in which he provided a pragmatic political analysis of nonviolent action as a method for applying power in a conflict. Sharp, whose work influenced resistance organizations all over the world, has been called the "Machiavelli of nonviolence," and the "Clausewitz of nonviolence."

ARPANET split into ARPANET and MILNET. MILNET, designed for unclassified U.S. Department of Defense traffic, was integrated into the Defense Data Network that was created the previous year.

In Death By Government (1994), revised 2005) political scientist Rudolph J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii estimated that "deaths at the hands of one's own government in the period 1900-87 amounted to 212 million persons, while deaths from warfare numbered 34 million. In other words, victims of their own government (what he calls democide) were in fact over six times greater than those killed in the century's wars. The largest number of fatalities was 78 million killed by the Chinese Communists, then 62 million by the Soviet Communists, 21 million by the Nazis, 10 million by the Chinese nationalists, and 6 million by the Japanese militarists. Even this listing is incomplete; as Rummel puts it, 'post-1987 democides by Iraq, Iran, Burundi, Serbia and Bosnian Serbs, Bosnia, Croatia, Sudan, Somalia, the Khmer Rouge guerrillas, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and others have not been included' (http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2012/01/anarchy-the-new-threat, accessed 01-31-2012).

The Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition & Technology published the unclassified REPORT OF THE DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD TASK FORCE ON INFORMATION WARFARE - DEFENSE (IW-D.

This 212-page report was a "call to arms" for cyber warfare or information warfare in the United States

In 2001 Edwin Black issued IBM and the Holocaust.

This book documents

"how IBM's New York headquarters and CEO Thomas J. Watson acted through its overseas subsidiaries to provide the Third Reich with punch card machines that could help the Nazis to track down the European Jewry (especially in newly conquered territory). The book quotes extensively from numerous IBM and government memos and letters that describe how IBM in New York, IBM's Geneva office and Dehomag, its German subsidiary, were intimately involved in supporting Nazi oppression. The book also includes IBM's internal reports that admit that these machines made the Nazis much more efficient in their efforts. Several documentaries, including the 2003 film The Corporation Screened, C-SPAN broadcast and The Times, the Village Voice, the JTA and numerous other publications published close-ups of several documents demonstrating IBM's involvement in the Holocaust. These included IBM code sheets for concentration camps taken from the files of the National Archives. For example, IBM's Prisoner Code listed 8 for a Jew and Code 11 for a Gypsy. Camp Code 001 was Auschwitz, Code 002 was Buchenwald. Status Code 5 was executed by order, code 6 was gas chamber. One extensively quoted IBM report written by the company's European manager during WWII declared “in Germany a campaign started for, what has been termed … ‘organization of the second front.’ ” The memo added, “In military literature and in newspapers, the importance and necessity of having in all phases of life, behind the front, an organization which would remain intact and would function with ‘Blitzkrieg’ efficiency … was brought out. What we had been preaching in vain for years all at once began to be realized.”

"The book documents IBM's CEO Thomas J. Watson as being an active Nazi supporter. Watson made numerous statements in numerous venues that the international community ought to give Nazi Germany a break from the economic sanctions. As head of the International Chamber of Commerce, Watson engineered an annual meeting to be held in Berlin, where he was witnessed to publicly give a Nazi salute to Hitler in the infamous "Seig, Heil" fashion. Watson traveled to Germany numerous times after the Nazis took power in 1933, but it was on the Commerce trip that he received an honor medal from Hitler himself. Watson also dined privately with Hitler, and attended lavish dinners with many infamous Nazi officials at the same time that Jews were being officially robbed and driven from their homes.

"There was an IBM customer site, the Hollerith Abteilung, in almost every concentration camp, that either ran machines, sorted cards or prepared documents for IBM processing. The Auschwitz tattoo began as an IBM number.

"Although IBM actively worked with the Hitler regime from its inception in 1933 to its demise in 1945, IBM has asserted that since their German subsidiary came under temporary receivership by the Nazi authorities from 1941 to 1945, the main company was not responsible for its role in the latter years of the holocaust. Shortly after the war, the company worked aggressively to recover the profits made from the many Hollerith departments in the concentration camps, the printing of millions of punchcards used to keep track of the prisoners, the custom-built punchcard systems, and its servicing of the Extermination through labour program. The company also paid its employees special bonuses based on high sales volume to the Nazis and collaborator regimes. As in many corporate cases, when the US entered the war, the Third Reich left in place the original IBM managers who continued their contacts via Geneva, thus company activities continued without interruption" (Wikipedia article on IBM and the Holocaust, accessed 05-23-2009).

The National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad, lost an estimated 15,000 artifacts, including priceless relics of Mesopotamian civilization, to looters in the days after Baghdad fell to U.S. forces in the Iraq War. Of the objects looted, about 5,000 wer still missing in 2003, 4,000 were returned and 6,000 were recovered, according to Lawrence Rothfield, author of Antiquities Under Siege: Cultural Heritage Protection After the Iraq War (2008).''

Vital US infrastructure, including power grids and banking systems, were put under simulated attack in a week-long security exercise called Cyber Storm.

♦ FROM THE U.S. GOVERNMENT'S PUBLISHED INTERPRETATION OF THE RESULTS

"The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) National Cyber Security Division (NCSD) successfully executed Cyber Storm, the first national cyber exercise Feb. 6 thru Feb. 10, 2006. The exercise was the first government-led, full-scale cyber security exercise of its kind. NCSD, a division within the department’s Preparedness Directorate, provides the federal government with a centralized cyber security coordination and preparedness function called for in the National Strategy for Homeland Security, the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace and Homeland Security Presidential Directive 7. NCSD is the focal point for the federal government’s interaction with state and local government, the private sector and the international community concerning cyberspace vulnerability reduction efforts."

"The Scenario

"The exercise simulated a sophisticated cyber attack campaign through a series of scenarios directed at several critical infrastructure sectors. The intent of these scenarios was to highlight the interconnectedness of cyber systems with physical infrastructure and to exercise coordination and communication between the public and private sectors. Each scenario was developed with the assistance of industry experts and was executed in a closed and secure environment.

"Cyber Storm scenarios had three major adversarial objectives:

"* To disrupt specifically targeted critical infrastructure through cyber attacks

"* To hinder the governments' ability to respond to the cyber attacks

"* To undermine public confidence in the governments' ability to provide and protect service" (http://www.dhs.gov/xnews/releases/pr_1158340980371.shtm, accessed 08-09-2009).

♦ A LESS OPTIMISTIC INTERPRETATION FROM THE WIKIPEDIA

"The Cyber Storm exercise was a simulated exercise overseen by the Department of Homeland Security that took place February 6 through February 10, 2006 with the purpose of testing the nations defenses against digital espionage. The simulation was targeted primarily at American security organizations but officials from Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand participated as well.

"Simulation

"The exercise simulated a large scale attack on critical digital infrastructure such as communications, transportation, and energy production. The simulation took place a series of incidents which included.

" * Washington's metro trains mysteriously shutting down.

" * Bloggers revealing locations of railcars containing hazardous materials. * The airport control towers of Philadelphia and Chicago mysteriously shutting down.

" * A mysterious liquid appearing on a London subway.

" * Significant numbers of people on "no fly" lists suddenly appearing at airports all over the nation.

" * Planes flying too close to the White House. * Water utilities in Los Angeles getting compromised.

"Internal difficulties

"During the exercise the computers running the simulation came under attack by the players themselves. Heavily censored files released to the Associated Press reveal that at some time during the exercise the organizers sent every one involved an e-mail marked "IMPORTANT!" telling the participants in the simulation not to attack the game's control computers.

"Performance of participants

"The Cyber Storm exercise highlighted the gaps and shortcomings of the nation's cyber defenses. The cyber storm exercise report found that institutions under attack had a hard time getting the bigger picture and instead focused on single incidents treating them as 'individual and discrete.'

"In light of the test the Department of Homeland Security raised concern that the relatively modest resources assigned to cyber-defense would be 'overwhelmed in a real attack' (Wikipedia article on Cyber Storm Exercise, accessed 08-09-2009).

Julian Assange and others founded Wikileaks, a website, with no official headquarters, that published anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive governmental, corporate, or religious documents, while attempting to preserve the anonymity and untraceability of its contributors. 

Within one year of its foundation the site grew to 1,200,000 documents.

"The site states that it was 'founded by Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and startup company technologists, from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa". The creators of Wikileaks were unidentified as of January 2007, although it has been represented in public since January 2007 by non-anonymous speakers such as Julian Assange, who had described himself as a member of Wikileaks' advisory board and was later referred to as the 'founder of Wikileaks.' "

"Wikileaks describes itself as 'an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking'. Wikileaks is hosted by PRQ, a Sweden-based company providing 'highly secure, no-questions-asked hosting services'. PRQ is said to have 'almost no information about its clientele and maintains few if any of its own logs'. PRQ is owned by Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij who, through their involvement in The Pirate Bay, have significant experience in withstanding legal challenges from authorities. Being hosted by PRQ makes it difficult to take Wikileaks offline. Furthermore, 'Wikileaks maintains its own servers at undisclosed locations, keeps no logs and uses military-grade encryption to protect sources and other confidential information.' Such arrangements have been called 'bulletproof hosting' (Wikipedia article on Wikileaks, accessed 11-25-2009).

"WikiLeaks was originally launched as a user-editable wiki site, but has progressively moved towards a more traditional publication model, and no longer accepts either user comments or edits. The site is available on multiple online servers and different domain names following a number of denial-of-service attacks and its severance from different Domain Name System (DNS) providers" (Wikipedia article on Wikileaks, accessed 12-08-2010).

"The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is conducting the largest cyber security exercise ever organized. Cyber Storm II is being held from March 10-14 in Washington, D.C. and brings together participants from federal, state and local governments, the private sector, and the international community.

"Cyber Storm II is the second in a series of congressionally mandated exercises that will examine the nation’s cyber security preparedness and response capabilities. The exercise will simulate a coordinated cyber attack on information technology, communications, chemical, and transportation systems and assets.

" 'Securing cyberspace is vital to maintaining America’s strategic interests, public safety, and economic prosperity,' said Greg Garcia, Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Cyber Security and Communications. 'Exercises like Cyber Storm II help to ensure that the public and private sectors are prepared for an effective response to attacks against our critical systems and networks.'

"Cyber Storm II will include 18 federal departments and agencies, nine states (Calif., Colo., Del., Ill., Mich., N.C., Pa., Texas and Va.), five countries (United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom), and more than 40 private sector companies. They include ABB, Inc., Air Products, Cisco, Dow Chemical Company Inc., Harris Corporation, Juniper Networks, McAfee, Microsoft, NeuStar, PPG Industries, and Wachovia" (http://www.dhs.gov/xnews/releases/pr_1205180340404.shtm, accessed 08-09-2009).

"From 3AM on Wednesday November 25, 2009, until 3AM the following day (US east coast time), WikiLeaks released half a million US national text pager intercepts. The intercepts cover a 24 hour period surrounding the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington.

"The messages were broadcasted 'live' to the global community — sychronized to the time of day they were sent. The first message was from 3AM September 11, 2001, five hours before the first attack, and the last, 24 hours later.  

"Text pagers are usualy carried by persons operating in an official capacity. Messages in the archive range from Pentagon, FBI, FEMA and New York Police Department exchanges, to computers reporting faults at investment banks inside the World Trade Center  

"The archive is a completely objective record of the defining moment of our time. We hope that its entrance into the historical record will lead to a nuanced understanding of how this event led to death, opportunism and war" (http://911.wikileaks.org/, accessed 11-26-2009).

According to BBC.com, the number of text messages published may have been as high as 573,000.

"Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident--albeit a significant one--was something quite different.

"First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses--including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors--have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.  

"Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.

"Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users' computers.  

"We have already used information gained from this attack to make infrastructure and architectural improvements that enhance security for Google and for our users. In terms of individual users, we would advise people to deploy reputable anti-virus and anti-spyware programs on their computers, to install patches for their operating systems and to update their web browsers. Always be cautious when clicking on links appearing in instant messages and emails, or when asked to share personal information like passwords online. You can read more here about our cyber-security recommendations. People wanting to learn more about these kinds of attacks can read this Report to Congress (PDF) by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (see p. 163-), as well as a related analysis (PDF) prepared for the Commission, Nart Villeneuve's blog and this presentation on the GhostNet spying incident.

 "We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech. In the last two decades, China's economic reform programs and its citizens' entrepreneurial flair have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. Indeed, this great nation is at the heart of much economic progress and development in the world today.  

"We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that 'we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.'

"These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China" (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html, accessed 01-16-2010).

"Exploit code for the zero-day hole in Internet Explorer linked to the China-based attacks on Google and other companies has been released on the Internet, Microsoft and McAfee warned on Friday.

"Meanwhile, the German federal security agency issued a statement on Friday urging its citizens to use an alternative browser to IE until a patch arrives.  

" 'We still only see limited targeted attacks affecting Internet Explorer 6,' Jerry Bryant, senior security program manager lead at the Microsoft Security Response Center, said in a statement. 'While newer versions of Internet Explorer are affected by this vulnerability, mitigations exist that make exploitation much more difficult.'

"McAfee researchers have seen references to the code on mailing lists and confirmed that it has been published on at least one Web site, the company's Chief Technology Officer George Kurtz wrote in his blog. 'The exploit code is the same code that McAfee Labs had been investigating and shared with Microsoft earlier this week,' he said.

" 'The public release of the exploit code increases the possibility of widespread attacks using the Internet Explorer vulnerability,' Kurtz wrote. 'The now-public computer code may help cybercriminals craft attacks that use the vulnerability to compromise Windows systems. Popular penetration testing tools are already being updated to include this exploit.' Microsoft issued a warning on Thursday about the new hole and said it was working on a patch. The vulnerability affects IE 6, 7 and 8 on all the modern versions of Windows, including Windows 7, according to Microsoft's advisory. Microsoft said IE 6 was the browser version being used on the computers that were targeted in the attacks. Google disclosed the attacks targeting it and other U.S. companies on Tuesday and said the attacks originated in China. Human rights activists who use Gmail also were targeted, Google said.

"The company said it discovered the attacks in mid-December and while it did not specifically implicate the Chinese government, it says that as a result of the incidents, it may withdraw from doing business in China. Sources familiar with the attack code say the attacks are similar to previous attacks on U.S. corporations that were linked to the Chinese government or proxies operating for the government. Source code was stolen from some of the more than 30 Silicon Valley companies targeted in the attack, sources said. Adobe has confirmed that it was targeted by an attack, and sources have said Yahoo, Symantec, Juniper Networks, Northrop Grumman, and Dow Chemical also were targets.

"McAfee says references in the IE-related attack code it analyzed indicate that the attackers called the operation 'Aurora' and that the attack was extremely sophisticated" (http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10436083-245.html, accessed 01-16-2010).

In June 2010 the Stuxnet computer worm, the first malware that spied on and subverted industrial systems, was discovered.  Stuxnet was also the first malware to include a programmable logic controller (PLC) rootkit. 

"The worm initially spreads indiscriminately, but includes a highly specialized malware payload that is designed to target only Siemens supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems that are configured to control and monitor specific industrial processes. Stuxnet infects PLCs by subverting the Step-7 software application that is used to reprogram these devices.

"Different variants of Stuxnet targeted five Iranian organizations, with the probable target widely suspected to be uranium enrichment infrastructure in Iran; Symantec noted in August 2010 that 60% of the infected computers worldwide were in Iran. Siemens stated on 29 November that the worm has not caused any damage to its customers, but the Iran nuclear program, which uses embargoed Siemens equipment procured secretly, has been damaged by Stuxnet. Kaspersky Lab concluded that the sophisticated attack could only have been conducted "with nation-state support". This was further supported by the F-Secure's chief researcher Mikko Hyppönen who commented in a Stuxnet FAQ, 'That's what it would look like, yes'. It has been speculated that Israel and the United States may have been involved. . . .

"Experts believe that Stuxnet required the largest and costliest development effort in malware history. Its many capabilities would have required a team of people to program, in-depth knowledge of industrial processes, and an interest in attacking industrial infrastructure. Eric Byres, who has years of experience maintaining and troubleshooting Siemens systems, told Wired that writing the code would have taken many man-months, if not years. Symantec estimates that the group developing Stuxnet would have consisted of anywhere from five to thirty people, and would have taken six months to prepare. The Guardian, the BBC and The New York Times all claimed that (unnamed) experts studying Stuxnet believe the complexity of the code indicates that only a nation-state would have the capabilities to produce it. The self-destruct and other safeguards within the code imply that a Western government was responsible, with lawyers evaluating the worm's ramifications. Software security expert Bruce Schneier condemned the 2010 news coverage of Stuxnet as hype, however, stating that it was almost entirely based on speculation. But after subsequent research, Schneier stated in 2012 that 'we can now conclusively link Stuxnet to the centrifuge structure at the Natanz nuclear enrichment lab in Iran' " (Wikipedia article on Stuxnet, accessed 05-30-2012).

"On 29 July 2010 WikiLeaks added a 1.4 GB "Insurance File" to the Afghan War Diary page. The file is AES encrypted and has been speculated to serve as insurance in case the WikiLeaks website or its spokesman Julian Assange are incapacitated, upon which the passphrase could be published, similar to the concept of a dead man's switch. Following the first few days' release of the United States diplomatic cables starting 28 November 2010, the US television broadcaster CBS predicted that 'If anything happens to Assange or the website, a key will go out to unlock the files. There would then be no way to stop the information from spreading like wildfire because so many people already have copies.' CBS correspondent Declan McCullagh stated, 'What most folks are speculating is that the insurance file contains unreleased information that would be especially embarrassing to the US government if it were released' "(Wikipedia article on Wikileaks, accessed 12-08-2010).

Columbia University announced that the 96th annual Pulitzer Prize "For a distinguished example of reporting on national affairs, using any available journalistic tool" was awarded to Huffington Post reporter David Wood "for his riveting exploration of the physical and emotional challenges facing American soldiers severely wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan during a decade of war."

Wood's series, Beyond the Battlefield, was characterized by the Huffington Post as "an exploration of the physical and emotional challenges, victories and setbacks that catastrophically wounded soldiers encounter after returning home."

"In recent years, the Pulitzer board has bestowed honors on newer outlets, such as ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that often teams up with established news organizations, and PolitiFact, a project of the Tampa Bay Times. Politico, a five-year-old newspaper and web site, took home its first Pulitzer prize Monday for Matt Wuerker's editorial cartoons. Still, a win in national reporting by an online-only news site is a departure from the typical list of legacy news outlets who clean up at the Pulitzers year after year" (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/16/huffington-post-pulitzer-prize-2012_n_1429169.html, accessed 04-18-2012).

On May 28, 2012 the MAHER Center of the Iranian National Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), Kaspersky Lab headquartered in Moscow, and Cry SyS Lab (Laboratory of Cryptography and National Security) of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics announced the discovery of Flame malware that attacked computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system.  A virus that collected information, it was arguably the most complex malware ever found.

"According to estimates by Kaspersky, Flame has infected approximately 1,000 machines, with victims including governmental organizations, educational institutions and private individuals. As of May 2012, the countries most affected are Iran, Israel, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. . . .

"According to Kaspersky, Flame has been operating in the wild since at least February 2010. CrySyS reports that the file name of the main component had been observed as early as December 2007. However, its creation date cannot be determined directly, as the creation dates for the malware's modules are falsely set to dates as early as 1994. Computer experts consider it the cause of an attack in April 2012 that caused Iranian officials to disconnect their oil terminals from the Internet. At the time the Iranian Students News Agency referred to the malware that caused the attack as "Wiper", a name given to it by the malware's creator. However, Kaspersky Lab believes that Flame may be 'a separate infection entirely' from the Wiper malware. Due to the size and complexity of the program—described as "twenty times" more complicated than Stuxnet—the Lab stated that a full analysis could require as long as ten years. On 28 May, Iran's CERT announced that it had developed a detection program and a removal tool for Flame, and had been distributing these to 'select organizations' for several weeks " (Wikipedia article on Flame (malware) accessed 05-30-2012).

"(Reuters) - Global hacking network Anonymous said it will shut down Syrian government websites around the world in response to a countrywide Internet blackout believed to be aimed at silencing the opposition to President Bashar al-Assad.  

"Syria was plunged into communication darkness on Thursday [November 29] when Internet connectivity stopped at midday. Land lines and mobile phones networks were also seriously disrupted.  

"The Syrian government said 'terrorists' had attacked Internet lines but the opposition and human rights groups suspect it to be the work of the authorities.  

"Opposition activists have used the Internet extensively to further their cause by publishing footage of aerial strikes and graphic images of civilian casualties. In the absence of a free press, they have used social media to disseminate information during the uprising and communicate with journalists abroad.  

"Anonymous, a loose affiliation of hacking groups that opposes Internet censorship, said it will remove from the Internet all web assets belonging to Assad's government that are outside Syria, starting with embassies.  

"By 1000 GMT on Friday, the website for Syria's embassy in Belgium was down but the embassy in China - which Anonymous said it would target first - was operating. Most government ministry websites were down although this could be due to the blackout.  

"Several networking experts said that it was highly unlikely that the lines had been sabotaged by anti-Assad forces.  

"CloudFlare, a firm that helps accelerate Internet traffic, said on its blog that saboteurs would have had to simultaneously sever three undersea cables into the port city of Tartous and also an overland cable through Turkey in order to cut off the entire country's Internet access.  

" 'That is unlikely to have happened,' CloudFlare said.  

" The government has been accused of cutting communications in previous assaults on rebel-held areas. Anonymous said Assad's government had physically 'pulled the plug out of the wall'.  

" 'As we discovered in Egypt, where the dictator (Hosni) Mubarak did something similar - this is not damage that can be easily or quickly repaired,'it added, referring to an Internet outage during the early days of the 2011 uprising in Egypt.  

" French foreign ministry spokesman Philippe Lalliot said the communications cut was of a matter of 'extreme concern'.  

" 'It is another demonstration of what the Damascus regime is doing to hold its people hostage. We call on the Damascus regime to reestablish communications without delay,' he said.  

"Rebels have seized a series of army bases across Syria this month, exposing Assad's loss of control in northern and eastern regions and on Thursday fighting on the outskirts of the capital blocked access to the international airport.  

"More than 40,000 people have been killed since the uprising began in March 2011, according to opposition groups.  

Human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, said the Internet cut could signal that Assad is seeking to hide the truth of what is happening in the country from the outside world.  

"Syrian authorities have severely restricted non-state media from working in the country.  

"The hacker collective has staged cyber attacks on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and Britain's Serious Organised Crime Agency. Earlier this month, The Israeli government said it logged more than 44 million hacking attempts in just a few days during its military assault on Gaza after Anonymous waged a similar campaign" (http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/30/us-syria-crisis-internet-idUSBRE8AT0PN20121130, accessed 11-30-2012).

♦ After two days of complete Internet blackout in Syria Cloudflare reported in its blog that Internet service partially resumed in Syria on December 1. Whether the service resumption was in response to political pressure from abroad, or threats from Anonymous, or caused by some other factor or factors was unclear.

By GEOFFREY YORK, The Globe and Mail, Dec. 27 2012

"As rebels searched the bags of the truck passengers at a checkpoint near Timbuktu, one man was trying to hide his nervousness.

"Mohamed Diagayete, an owlish scholar with an eager smile, was silently praying that the rebels would not discover his laptop computer. Buried in his laptop bag was an external hard drive with a cache of thousands of valuable images and documents from Timbuktu’s greatest cultural treasure: its ancient scholarly manuscripts.  

"Radical Islamist rebels in northern Mali have repeatedly attacked the fabled city’s heritage, taking pickaxes to the tombs of local saints and smashing down a door in a 15th century mosque. They demolished several more mausoleums this week and vowed to destroy the rest, despite strong protests from UNESCO, the United Nations cultural agency.  

"With the tombs demolished, Timbuktu’s most priceless remaining legacy is its vast libraries of crumbling Arabic and African manuscripts, written in ornate calligraphy over the past eight centuries, proof of a historic African intellectual tradition. Some experts consider them as significant as the Dead Sea Scrolls – and an implicit rebuke to the harsh narrow views of the Islamist radicals.  

"But now the manuscripts, too, could be under threat. And so a covert operation is under way to save them.  

"That’s why Mr. Diagayete was so anxious to smuggle his hard drive out of Timbuktu. For years, he’s been helping preserve the manuscripts by digitizing them. But the project was halted when the Islamists seized Timbuktu in April. A few months later, Mr. Diagayete made an undercover visit to Timbuktu and brought back as many of the digital images as he could.  

"The quest to save the documents rarely leaves his thoughts. 'What will happen to the manuscripts?' he asks from the safety of Mali’s capital, Bamako, where he fled after the fall of Timbuktu.  

“ 'I’m always asking myself thousands of questions about the manuscripts,' he says. 'When we lose them, we have no other copy. It’s forever.'

Mr. Diagayete is a researcher at the Ahmed Baba Institute, which has been digitizing the manuscripts for nearly a decade with support from foreign governments. But because of technical delays, and the huge number of manuscripts in the city (up to 700,000 by some estimates), only a tiny fraction has been copied so far.  

"The manuscripts, dating back to the 13th century, are evidence of ancient African and Islamist written scholarship, contradicting the myth of a purely oral tradition on the continent.  

"Many of the manuscripts are religious documents, but others are intellectual treatises on medicine, astronomy, literature, mathematics, chemistry, judicial law and philosophy. Many were brought to Timbuktu in camel caravans by scholars from Cairo, Baghdad and Persia who trekked to the city when it was one of the world’s greatest centres of Islamic learning. In the Middle Ages, when Europe was stagnating, the African city had 180 religious schools and a university with 20,000 students.  

"Timbuktu fell into decline after Moroccan invasions and French colonization, but its ancient gold-lettered manuscripts were preserved by dozens of owners, mostly private citizens, who kept them in wooden trunks or in their own libraries.  

"Today, under the occupation of the radical jihadists, the manuscripts face a range of threats. Conservation experts have fled the city, so the documents could be damaged by insects, mice, sand, dust or extreme temperatures. Or the Islamist militants could decide to raise money by looting and selling the documents.  

"There’s also a risk that the militants could simply destroy the manuscripts, since some are written by African mystics or moderate Sufis, regarded by the Islamist rebels as ideological enemies. Another threat is the planned Western-backed military campaign against the rebels, which could lead to house-to-house fighting in Timbuktu, further endangering the manuscripts.  

"The government-run Ahmed Baba Institute holds nearly 40,000 manuscripts in two main buildings, including a headquarters built with South African assistance in 2009. But the Islamist rebels have seized the institute, looting its computers and using its new building as a sleeping quarters.  

“ 'It’s a big setback for the institute,' said Susana Molins Lliteras, a researcher at a South African-based project to protect the Timbuktu manuscripts.  

“ 'It’s very possible that things have been lost,' she said. 'We haven’t even had a chance to research the manuscripts – we haven’t scratched the surface. So if they are lost, we won’t even know what is lost.'

"Since the rebel takeover, the private owners have scrambled to protect the manuscripts. Nobody knows exactly what they have done, but it is believed that some owners have hidden the manuscripts, buried them in the sand, or smuggled them to villages.  

"This, too, is dangerous, since the ancient texts can easily be damaged when they are moved. 'They are very fragile,' Mr. Diagayete said. 'The choice is difficult: Either we lose them all or we lose part of them. Everyone is trying to find a way to protect their manuscripts.'

"Adama Diarra, a Malian journalist, saw three owners piling their manuscripts into 50-kilogram rice bags in April, shortly after the Islamists seized Timbuktu, apparently in an effort to move them to safer places. 'The pages were falling out,' he said.  

"Mohamed Galla Dicko, director of the Ahmed Baba Institute for 17 years before leaving the institute this year, says the threat to the manuscripts is serious. 'The old pages can be damaged just by touching them,' he said. 'And the people who are moving them are not specialists in handling them.'

"While the Timbuktu manuscripts are in trouble, there is better news from another ancient Malian town, Djenne, south of the rebel-controlled territory. With help from the British Library, researchers are digitizing thousands of Djenne’s historic manuscripts – some nearly 500 years old.  

"Even when fuel and electricity were rationed after the rebel advances, dedicated workers kept toiling on the project at Djenne’s manuscript library. 'We’ve saved a large number of the manuscripts,' said Sophie Sarin, a Swedish hotel owner in Djenne.  

"The project aims to collect 200,000 images by next July. After the rebels captured northern Mali this year, Ms. Sarin travelled to London with a hard drive containing 80,000 digital images of the Djenne manuscripts. She brought them to specialists at the British Library, who were very relieved to see them, she said."

"In the first study of its kind, researchers with the Defense Department have found that pilots of drone aircraft experience mental health problems like depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress at the same rate as pilots of manned aircraft who are deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.

"The study affirms a growing body of research finding health hazards even for those piloting machines from bases far from actual combat zones.  

“ 'Though it might be thousands of miles from the battlefield, this work still involves tough stressors and has tough consequences for those crews,' said Peter W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who has written extensively about drones. He was not involved in the new research.  

"That study, by the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center, which analyzes health trends among military personnel, did not try to explain the sources of mental health problems among drone pilots.  

"But Air Force officials and independent experts have suggested several potential causes, among them witnessing combat violence on live video feeds, working in isolation or under inflexible shift hours, juggling the simultaneous demands of home life with combat operations and dealing with intense stress because of crew shortages. 'Remotely piloted aircraft pilots may stare at the same piece of ground for days,' said Jean Lin Otto, an epidemiologist who was a co-author of the study. 'They witness the carnage. Manned aircraft pilots don’t do that. They get out of there as soon as possible.'  

"Dr. Otto said she had begun the study expecting that drone pilots would actually have a higher rate of mental health problems because of the unique pressures of their job.  

"Since 2008, the number of pilots of remotely piloted aircraft — the Air Force’s preferred term for drones — has grown fourfold, to nearly 1,300. The Air Force is now training more pilots for its drones than for its fighter jets and bombers combined. And by 2015, it expects to have more drone pilots than bomber pilots, although fighter pilots will remain a larger group.

"Those figures do not include drones operated by the C.I.A. in counterterrorism operations over Pakistan, Yemen and other countries" (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/23/us/drone-pilots-found-to-get-stress-disorders-much-as-those-in-combat-do.html?hpw&_r=0, accessed 02-23-2013).