ABSTRACT
Two names are likely to figure on any short list, those of Bernard Brodie and Albert Wohlstetter, not only because of what they wrote, but also because of what they stood for. In any case, Brodie and Wohlstetter stand as pole and antipole in the strategic analysis produced since World War II, and it is highly appropriate, as the sun sets over the Cold War era, that two major works should appear commemorating them. Wohlstetter is the opposite. He is a mathematical logician by training, concerned less with deriving principles, analogies and unquantifiable ‘wisdom’ from the past than with solving the immediate problems of the present. At the end of his life, Brodie despaired of strategy because nuclear war could never, in his view, be an instrument of policy. Wohlstetter would not have dissented from that conclusion, but he saw that nuclear weapons could be instruments of policy.
