ABSTRACT
Thomas Schelling observed that he had for ten years tried to get the Pentagon to undertake a study to produce a check-list for political leaders in case they decided the time had come to use a nuclear weapon. This chapter offers some suggestions about how the analysis might, or might not, apply to a war in Korea; in that case the term “coalition” does not seem quite right — for the forces on either side. Despite the unpopularity of war termination as a subject, and thus the paucity of work on it, several “classic” works on bargaining and limited war, usually in the nuclear context and mostly written two decades ago, provide some suggestive insights. Any process of war termination assumes the parties have both the technical means and the will to stop the war short of victory or suicide.
