The Bombeshell at Bletchley: What if Alan Turing had not Broken Enigma

The Counterfactual Reality

Alan Turing was fervently working away at his desk in Hut 8 at Buckinghamshire's Bletchley Park. Three Polish mathematicians had arrived with a device that they called the Bomba Kryptologiczna, which they claimed could crack the German Enigma keys and messages a month prior. The demonstration, in Turing's opinion, was sufficient, as it was successful, but he knew that he could do better with a different approach. This approach, he thought, would be based off of the assumption that a previously deciphered phrase or letter appeared in the message that was being studied. With this approach, he thought that one could hypothesize any combination of letters and test that combination.

What Turing was working on was a way to test those hypotheses. He sat scribbling away on paper, images of rotors and cables and wires appearing with the stroke of a pencil. Mathematical equations and formulas littered the images. Calculations left incomplete were crumpled up and thrown on the floor. Ideas, both his and others', were tacked to the wall. This was his brainchild. This was his legacy. This was the bombe....his bombe. All he needed to do was convince the government to swing a little more money his way so that he could purchase the parts needed to bring his child to life, a dream of his since its conception.

The rhythmic hum of voices was a comforting sound to Turing as he continued to work while other members of his team deciphered intercepted messages by hand or with the Enigma machine that Hut 8 had on hand. Several times they had interrupted his thoughts, usually to ask him if he was hungry or to ask him to explain what he was doing.

Now completed with his design, Turing swung his feet up on his desk, reclined in his chair, took a bite of an apple (many of which were left half eaten and strewn everywhere), and sighed a sigh of relief. Enigma could be broken, and he was confident it would be with his machine.

Standing up, Turing took his papers over to the other members of Hut 8 and explained the function of the bombe: how the rotors worked, how the cables related to the wires, what a stop state was and what the different stop states each indicated. He knew that the construction of his machine would be jeopardous; if anything were to go wrong it would be on him, which could potentially ruin his reputation. He also knew that in building it, he would be opening the door to another opportunity to defeat one of the greatest evils of the time.

Everyone in Hut 8 pushed Turing to ask for more funding so that the bombe could be built. Although hesitant at first, they eventually came on board with the idea that they were willing to go with Turing when he asked for more funding.

Asking for more funding from the government was going to be difficult. Great Britain was in a depression; people were starving. Any extra money that the government came across went toward the war effort, that is supplies for the soldiers fighting on the front lines. These were the exact reasons that the British government gave Turing for denying him the extra money to construct the bombe of his dreams. His child that had been conceived only a month ago was now a stillborn condemned to death the second he put the proposed amount needed on the table.

The war continued; Turing and those in Hut 8 continued to decipher Enigma messages by hand. Britain was still starving; the Americans had dropped a bomb on Berlin. The Allies had claimed victory over the Axis. Through it all, Turing sat wondering what the war would have been like if he would have been given the chance to build his bombe, his stillborn child. He wondered if his machine could have potentially saved lives; if the attack on Normandy would have come sooner; if the Americans would not have dropped Little Boy on Berlin, but instead somewhere like Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Turing knew that if he would have been able to build his creation, it could have propelled the world to reach a technological age in which artificial intelligence existed, a world in which his idea, justly called 'The Imitation Game', was taken seriously and not scoffed at as if it were a child's dream that one knew would never come true. This world, he thought, would involve students of the next century sitting in classes using miniature Turing Machines, both Universal and not, to complete their schoolwork and a conversation between a human and a computer would be as typical as the rising of the sun. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Students completed arithmetic using pencil and paper with reports being written on typewriters or by hand. One computer took up the size of an entire room, meaning that only prestigious companies owned them.