Bernard Brodie (military strategist)

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Bernard Brodie (May 20, 1910 – November 24, 1978) was an American

Brodie was initially a strong supporter of the concept of escalating responses; he promoted the view that a war in Europe would be started with conventional forces and escalate to nuclear only if and when necessary. After a meeting with French counterparts in 1960, he came to espouse a very different policy, one based purely on nuclear deterrence with the stated position that the US would use nuclear arms at the first instance of hostilities of any sort. Brodie felt that anything short of this seriously eroded the concept of deterrence and might lead to situations where one side might enter hostilities believing it could remain non-nuclear. This change in policy made Brodie increasingly at odds with his contemporaries.

Life and career

Born in

He married Fawn McKay Brodie – who became a well-known biographer of Richard Nixon, Joseph Smith, Thomas Jefferson and others – on August 28, 1936. They were the parents of three children.

Theories

Initially a theorist about naval power, Brodie shifted his focus to

Working at the RAND Corporation, Brodie wrote Strategy in the Missile Age (1959), which outlined the framework of deterrence. By arguing that preventative nuclear strikes would lead to escalation from limited to total war, Brodie concluded that deterrence by second-strike capability would lead to a more secure outcome for both sides. The virtual abandonment of first strike as a strategy made Brodie suggest investment in civil defense, which included the "hardening" of land based missile locations to ensure the strength of second-strike capability. The building of protected missile silos around the United States is a testament to that belief. It was important for the second-strike force to have first-strike capabilities to provide the stasis necessary for deterrence.^[3]

Brodie believed that the second-strike force should be targeted towards not cities but military installations. That was meant to give the Soviets an opportunity to limit escalation and to allow the United States to win the war. Brodie also advocated the funding of conventional military personnel to ensure the containment of communism by fighting limited wars or, if deterrence failed, a total war.^[4]

Brodie, Kenneth Waltz, and Robert Jervis accepted that deterrence was not ironclad, but that a "stable balance of nuclear terror" would prevent the use of nuclear weapons. This view has been called the "easy deterrence narrative".^[5]

Brodie, who had a fascination with Freud and psychoanalysis, sometimes used it to refer to his work in nuclear strategy. In an internally-circulated memorandum at the RAND Corporation, he compared his no-cities/withhold plan to coitus interruptus, and the SAC plan was like "going all the way." Following those comments, a fellow RAND scholar, Herman Kahn, told an assembled group of SAC officers, "Gentlemen, you don't have a war plan, you have a war orgasm!"^[6] Similar sexual imagery was liberally used in Stanley Kubrick's film Dr. Strangelove, a satire of Cold War nuclear strategy.

Brodie was also responsible, along with Michael Howard and Peter Paret, for making the writings of the Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz more accessible to the English-speaking world. Brodie's incisive "A guide to the reading of On War" in the Princeton translation of 1976 corrected most of the misinterpretations of the theory and provided students with an accurate synopsis of the vital work.

Books

• Sea Power in the Machine Age. Princeton University Press,1941 and 1943.
• A Layman’s Guide to Naval Strategy. Princeton University Press, 1942.
• The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order. (editor and contributor), Harcourt, 1946.
• Strategy in the Missile Age. Princeton University Press, 1959.
• From Cross-Bow to H-Bomb. Dell, 1962; Indiana University Press (rev. ed.), 1973.
• Escalation and the Nuclear Option. Princeton University Press, 1966.
• Bureaucracy, Politics, and Strategy. University of California, 1968 (with Henry Kissinger).
• The Future of Deterrence in U.S. Strategy. Security Studies Project, University of California, 1968.
• War and Politics. Macmillan, 1973.
• A Guide to the Reading of "On War". Princeton University Press, 1976.

Awards

• Carnegie Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, 1941
• Carnegie Corporation
  reflective year fellowship in France, 1960–61

References

Wikiquote has quotations related to Bernard Brodie.

Notes