[en] The purpose of this obviously non-plasma physics research is to demonstrate that many of the powerful and sophisticated theoretical techniques widely used by the plasma physics community can be applied to engineering problems of direct interest to the magnetic fusion program. Quench protection is such a problem. If a sudden pulse of energy is delivered (usually by accident) to a small section of a superconducting magnet, it may go normal. Under such conditions, the magnet current flows in the surrounding copper matrix, which is essentially in parallel with the superconductor. Although the copper is a good conductor, it still dissipates ohmic power, further adding to the energy input. It is important to detect the quench as early as possible in order to shut off the current, thereby preventing irreversible damage to the conductor. This a non-trivial problem since the cables comprising a coil can be as long as one kilometer. The theory presented here starts with a set of multi-dimensional Navier-Stokes and heat transport equations for the coupled system of helium coolant, superconducting/copper cable, and surrounding jacket. A combination of multiple time scale expansions and asymptotic analysis reduces the problem to a nonlinear fourth order system of 1-D plus time equations. A code has been written whose numerical results are in excellent agreement with more complex engineering codes. There is at least an order of magnitude savings in CPU over the existing codes where a typical run requires one hour Cray CPU. By investigating a number of different cases the authors have been able to introduce further analytic approximations which reduce the problem to quasi-analytic form, a set of three ODE's in time. The results here too are in excellent agreement with the engineering code and requires only several seconds of CPU time. More important, the critical dimensionless parameters have been identified, as well as practical scaling information for the magnet design