The Age of the Unthinkable

Israeli intelligence task forces coordinated teams of hundreds of people who would spend millions of dollars for a single kill. It also presented all sorts of moral questions for the Israeli military: for instance, how many innocent civilians was it acceptable to kill when trying to take out a keystone terrorist? (The Ministry of Defense asked a group of mathematicians to work on this problem. They submitted an answer —3.4 civilians per dead terrorist —but no one was happy with either the process or the coldness of such a figure.)