Strategic Thought in America, 1952–1966

Abstract

In the 1950s, strategy emerged in the United States as a new field with a distinct intellectual personality. A small group of men -Bernard Brodie, Thomas Schelling, Albert Wohlstetter, and a handful of others working mainly at the RAND Corporation, had moved into an intellectually barren no-man's land traditionally neglected by both military officers and students of international politics.I The body of thought they created was very different from anything that had come before. Their ideas would prove to be enormously influential, and their style of analysis in large measure became the sophisticated way of approaching nuclear issues in the United States. The aim here is not simply to offer yet another description of this body of thought. The real goal is to try to give some sense for how this intellectual tradition took the shape it did what caused it to emerge, how the central ideas developed, and why, after an extraordinary period of intellectual productivity, these ideas by around 1966 or so seemed to have played themselves out. Why, in other words, did strategy hit something of a dead end in the late 1960s? The focus will be on the basic tension that dominated the development of this set of ideas. It was as though the coming of the hydrogen bomb in 1952 had released two great shock waves in the world of strategic thought. There was on the one hand the fundamental point that when both the United States and the Soviet Union had obtained survivable and deliverable strategic forces, all-out war between these two powers would become an absurdity: with thermonuclear weapons, the overriding goal had to be to limit war, and in particular to reduce to a minimum the risk that the nuclear powers would launch massive attacks on each other's cities.

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