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> No one has yet found any war-like purpose to be served by the theory of numbers or relativity or quantum mechanics, and it seems very unlikely that anybody will do so for many years.

G.H.Hard. Eureka, issue 3, Jan 1940

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Less than 100 years later, we stand waiting for nuclear bombs guided by GPS to be launched when the authorization cryptographic certificate is verified.

Nuclear weapons (based on quantum mechanics and special relativity) were used less than 6 years after that quote.

And number theory was critical to breaking enigma. So they were all used within 5 years.

Was it? My understanding was that they didn’t use number theoretic approaches.

My bad. You’re right. It was group theory and cryptanalysis. Number theory comes in later in the 1970s for public key cryptography (1976 publicly, early 1970s at GCHQ). So the military work on it really started in the late 1960s.

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