ABSTRACT
Bernard Brodie has been called-rightly-the ‘dean’ of America’s civilian strategists. Upon Brodie’s death in 1978, another eminent member of the fraternity of nuclear strategists, Thomas Schelling, acknowledged Brodie as ‘first-both in time and in distinction’—among those whose profession has been to think about the unthinkable. What I intend to argue here is not only that this ranking of Bernard Brodie at the top of the list of civilian strategists is deserved and correct, but that Brodie’s work, and his subsequent reflections upon it, is itself a kind of personal embodiment of the crisis which has befallen nuclear strategy and strategists, as well as a measure of their current discontent.1
