Bernard Brodie

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Bernard Brodie (7 August 1909-1978) was an American military strategist well-known for establishing the basics of nuclear strategy. Known as "the American Clausewitz," he was an initial architect of nuclear deterrence strategy and tried to ascertain the role and value of nuclear weapons after their creation.

[edit] Biography

Initially a theorist about naval power, Brodie shifted his focus to nuclear strategy after the creation of the nuclear bomb. His most important work, written in 1946, was entitled "The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order'', which laid down the fundamentals of nuclear deterrence strategy. He saw the usefulness of the atomic bomb was not in its deployment but in the threat of its deployment. In a now famous passage he said "Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose." In the early fifties, he shifted out of academia and began work at the Rand Corporation where a stable of important strategists, Herman Kahn and others, developed the rudiments of nuclear strategy and warfighting theory.

His wife Fawn McKay Brodie was a well-known biographer of Richard Nixon, Joseph Smith, Thomas Jefferson and others.

[edit] Works

• Sea Power in the Machine Age, (1943)
• The Absolute Weapon, ed., (1946)
• The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order (1946)
• Strategy in the Missile Age (1959)
• War and Politics (1973)