[ivan_gammel]

I guess it was not only the fusion that interested Soviet scientists. I remember attending lectures on parallel computing there, where Vladimir Voevodin was telling the story about Soviet computers in 1970s calculating ICBM flight routes 30 minutes faster than American ones. Not sure if this story was true, but there was always a significant military component in research.

[calamari4065]

>Soviet computers in 1970s calculating ICBM flight routes 30 minutes faster

That's hilarious. That sort of computation has to be completely trivial with modern computers. It's so crazy to think that plotting a ballistic trajectory ever took more than a few milliseconds, much less hours

[jazzyjackson]

IIRC the press unveiling of the ENIAC boasted that for the first time, they could compute a parabola in less time than it took for the projectile to fly it.

The next milestone years later would be "predict the weather 24 hours from now in fewer than 24 hours"

A lot of the government's interest in advancing computers was the military advantage of being able to predict the weather. Maybe if it was thoroughly understood, they could even control it! Alas.

All covered in the book "Turings Cathedral"

[namibj]

They are ((sub-)orbital) rockets, not atmospheric bullets.

I'm not surprised it was hard to compute to the accuracies desired.

[calamari4065]

The B in ICBM stands for ballistic.

I'm not saying the computation isn't complicated, I'm marveling at the fact that my watch can run that computation in microseconds

[ivan_gammel]

You are right, it’s complicated. Ballistic doesn’t mean it is a parabolic trajectory. At this distance (I stands for Intercontinental) you need to account for the atmospheric drag, winds, differences in gravity etc. Besides that ICBMs of 1960-1970s were using inertial navigation and had maneuvering warheads (e.g. SS-10), which increased complexity of the calculations. You still can do it on your modern watch.