Albert Wohlstetter

And so that's the geopolitical piece of it.

The technology piece we've talked about a little bit, but the technology piece, you know, it's this old problem of the nuclear age, right? Albert Wohlstetter's famous 1957 essay, The Delicate Balance of Terror, observed that, you know, this is a contested idea.

People think Wohlstetter overstated it.

Tom Schelling certainly disagreed with him.

It has potentially preemption incentives itself to attack and prevent these missiles or the command and control systems that enable them from working.

The whole article is based on this kind of analogy to the nuclear history, where Albert Wohlstetter and Thomas Schelling were arguing in the fifties that the US needed to posture its nuclear forces in a way to assure second strike.

You know, they were worrying, probably worrying too much that the Soviets could have an incentive to just, what do we call it, a, a splendid first strike to make it impossible or largely impossible for the US to retaliate.

So we're arguing that the situation is similar at a conventional level in the Western Pacific, so you could increase both crisis stability, lowering the risk of war, and also strengthen deterrence by building assured, secure, conventional second strike.

But at first we were remarkably ignorant, and it took us a long time to sort of figure out how to think in smart ways about nuclear weapons.

Uh, I would just point out to people that Albert Wohlstetter, uh, wrote a very famous article in Foreign Affairs in 1959 called "The Delicate Balance of Terror," uh, which if you look at now for people who understand nuclear deterrence looks like a rather simplistic article.

But it was a revolutionary article at the time because, uh, Wohlstetter in that article, which was based on a RAND study, introduced all sorts of concepts, uh, all sorts of different ways of thinking about nuclear weapons that nobody had really crystallized in their own mind, and therefore the 1959 Wohlstetter piece was enormously important when it came out.

And I bring that up because it just shows you that there was a real learning process that took place.

Nothing is trans-historic.

Or the nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter.

I was concerned about the possibility of a nuclear war.

They were both proponents of a new ideology.

missiles.Yeah. No, thank you.

Um, you've just reminded me of that original, not, not that original, but, um, one of the early reports of the RAND Corporation by Albert Wohlstetter, uh, how to survive ...

I can't remember the exact title.

I have a copy, but how to survive a, a, um, something about how to, how to survive a first strike on an air base sort of thing.