Introduction

In a scholarly career spanning over 50 years, Thomas Schelling has made some of the most distinctive contributions to strategic studies in the age of nuclear weapons.1 In particular, he played a defining role in shaping the ideas underpinning the so-called ‘golden age’ of nuclear strategy during the late 1950s and early 1960s.2 The work of this American economist and strategic thinker is especially notable for using bargaining theory to understand strategic problems and for its pioneering analysis of nuclear deterrence, crisis management, limited war, arms control, coercion and compellence. Schelling also made important contributions to American thinking about Cold War crises in the early 1960s such as Berlin and Cuba and echoes of his approach have been detected especially in the US approach to conducting limited war in Vietnam.3