# The Magicians of Nuclear Strategy: Ritualized Knowledge Production and the Origins of Strategic Nuclear Thought

Thomas Fraise

► To cite this version:

Thomas Fraise. The Magicians of Nuclear Strategy: Ritualized Knowledge Production and the Origins of Strategic Nuclear Thought. Global Studies Quarterly, 2026, 6 (1), 11 p. (ksag015). 10.1093/issagsq/ksag015. hal-05534528

HAL Id: hal-05534528

https://sciencespo.hal.science/hal-05534528v1

Submitted on 3 Mar 2026

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access
archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-
entific research documents, whether they are pub-
lished or not. The documents may come from
teaching and research institutions in France or
abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est
destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents
scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,
émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de
recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires
publics ou privés.

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

Distributed under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 - Attribution - International License
# The Magicians of Nuclear Strategy: Ritualized Knowledge Production and the Origins of Strategic Nuclear Thought

THOMAS FRAISE*

University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Center for International Studies (CERI-CNRS), Sciences Po, France

In the 1950s, a new intellectual figure emerged in American strategic debates: the nuclear strategist. Drawn largely from the RAND Corporation, these thinkers—such as Bernard Brodie, Albert Wohlstetter, and Thomas Schelling—constructed a new field of knowledge: nuclear strategy. While their direct influence on U.S. war planning remains debated, this article argues that the nuclear strategists' primary impact lay in their ability to create a structured discourse that rendered nuclear deterrence intelligible and actionable. Building on works in epistemic and ontological security, this article conceptualizes deterrence theory as a “script,” an action-oriented construct that transforms unverifiable effects into perceived certainty and provides actors with a sense of control over events. Through ritualized knowledge production, nuclear strategists addressed the radical uncertainty of nuclear policy, acting as “magicians” who linked cause and effect by reference to the deterrence script. This article takes the oft-made comparison between these strategists and “wizards” seriously and shows how their epistemic authority was indeed grounded in relation to magic. Those actors possessed the magicians’ features—liminality, esoteric craft, and secrecy—and were engaged in a practice similar as the one of magicians: sealing over the uncertainties of high-risk activities. The combination of these features granted them with unique epistemic authority over a consequential field of knowledge. In doing so, those “magicians” made the practice of nuclear deterrence sensible, and thus possible.

En la década de 1950, surgió una nueva figura intelectual en el contexto de los debates estratégicos estadounidenses: el estratega nuclear. Estos pensadores (como Bernard Brodie, Albert Wohlstetter y Thomas Schelling), muchos de los cuales provenían de la Corporación RAND, construyeron un nuevo campo de conocimiento: la estrategia nuclear. Aunque el nivel de influencia directa que ejercieron sobre la planificación de la guerra por parte de EE. UU. sigue siendo objeto de debate, este artículo argumenta que el principal impacto que tuvieron los estrategas nucleares residió en su capacidad de crear un discurso estructurado que hizo que la disuasión nuclear resultara inteligible y viable. Este artículo parte de trabajos sobre seguridad epistémica y ontológica y conceptualiza la teoría de la disuasión como un «guion», es decir, como un constructo orientado a la acción que transforma efectos no verificables en certezas percibidas y proporciona a los actores una sensación de control sobre los acontecimientos. Los estrategas nucleares, a través de la producción ritualizada de conocimiento, abordaron la incertidumbre radical de la política nuclear, actuando como «magos» que lograban vincular causa y efecto con relación al guion de la disuasión. Este artículo se toma en serio esta comparación que se hace a menudo entre estos estrategas y los «magos» y demuestra cómo su autoridad epistémica estaba, de hecho, fundamentada con relación a la magia. Estos actores poseían las características de los magos, es decir, liminalidad, esoterismo y secretismo, y se dedicaban a una práctica similar a la de los magos: enmascarar las incertidumbres de las actividades de alto riesgo. La combinación de estas características les otorgó una autoridad epistémica única sobre un campo de conocimiento importante. Debido a esto, esos «magos» lograron que la práctica de la disuasión nuclear resultara sensata y, por lo tanto, posible.

Dans les années 1950, un nouveau type d'intellectuel est apparu dans les débats stratégiques aux États-Unis : le stratège nucléaire. Largement issus de la RAND Corporation, ces penseurs (notamment Bernard Brodie, Albert Wohlstetter et Thomas Schelling) ont établi une nouvelle discipline : la stratégie nucléaire. Bien que l'on débat encore de leur influence directe sur la planification américaine de la guerre, cet article affirme que la principale incidence des stratèges nucléaires réside dans leur capacité à créer un discours construit qui rend la dissuasion nucléaire accessible et exploitable. Se fondant sur des travaux en sécurité épistémique et ontologique, cet article conceptualise la théorie de la dissuasion tel un « script », une construction tournée vers l'action qui transforme des effets non vérifiables en certitude apparente et confère aux acteurs un sentiment de contrôle sur les événements. Par une production de connaissances ritualisée, les stratèges nucléaires ont traité l'incertitude radicale de la politique nucléaire, en agissant comme des « magiciens » qui reliaient causes et effets en faisant référence au script de la dissuasion. Cet article prend au sérieux la comparaison courante entre ces stratèges et des « magiciens » avant de montrer que leur autorité épistémique était bel et bien ancrée dans un rapport à la magie. Ces acteurs possédaient toutes les caractéristiques des magiciens (la liminalité, un métier ésotérique et le secret) et leur pratique ressemblait à celle d'un magicien : maîtriser les incertitudes des activités à haut risque. La combinaison de ces caractéristiques leur conférait une autorité épistémique unique dans un domaine d'étude fondamental. Ce faisant, ces « magiciens » ont donné du sens à la pratique de dissuasion nucléaire, et l'ont donc rendue possible.

Keywords: nuclear strategy; deterrence; ritual; magic; ontological security.

<footnote>*Corresponding author: Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Email: tfr@ifs.ku.dk

Fraise, Thomas (2026) The Magicians of Nuclear Strategy: Ritualized Knowledge Production and the Origins of Strategic Nuclear Thought. *Global Studies Quarterly*, https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksag015</footnote>
In the 1950s, a new figure emerged in American strategic debates: the nuclear strategist. These civilians with impressive academic backgrounds moved freely between academia and the national security state, held security clearances, briefed and advised military officers and policymakers; and almost single-handedly produced a new field of knowledge: nuclear strategy and, more specifically, nuclear deterrence theory.<fnref n="1" /> This group of intellectuals emerged essentially out of the RAND Corporation, an entity of a new genre, created by the Air Force but filled with civilian researchers. RAND strategists had many tasks, but, in the 1950s, one stood out among all others: to “do all in our power to deter” nuclear war (May 1998, 143). They had, in the words of a member of that group, a “sense of mission”: a feeling that “we were in the most literal sense working to save the world” (Ellsberg 2017, 37). Today, Some names stand out more than others (Bernard Brodie, Albert Wohlstetter, Herman Kahn, Thomas Schelling, to name a few). This was truly a community effort that “emerged from a process of interaction among a fairly small number of thinkers” (Gray, in Ayson 2004, viii).

This community had a long-lasting influence on knowledge production about nuclear deterrence. Historian Fred Kaplan, with some exaggeration, reports that during the Cold War, the wisdom of nuclear strategists “would be taken almost for granted, their assumptions worshiped as gospel truth, their insight elevated to an almost mystical level and accepted as dogma” (Kaplan 1991, 11). In the 1970s, most of nuclear strategic thinking already relied on concepts forged in the 1950s by this group.<fnref n="2" /> It is still largely true today (Pelopidas 2015b, 110). Schelling, one of the key architects of this textual canon, claimed that nothing new had been written in deterrence theory since the publication of his *Arms and Influence* in 1966 (Gartzke and Lindsay 2024, 18). This might be self-serving. Nonetheless, for Lawrence Freedman, “any time somebody talks about deterrence [today], they’re influenced by Schelling” (Freedman, cited in *The Economist* 2016). In fact, “the current generation of scholars and policymakers are still the students, or students’ students, of the original nuclear strategists, and in many respects are inheritors and innovators rather than visionaries (Freedman and Michaels 2019, 673).” Clearly, nuclear strategists still carry an impressive epistemic authority.

Some scholars suggest the influence of RAND policy advisors on government action was more limited than supposed, however. Those strategists seem to have had an influence on the definition of US strategy—its declaratory policy—but little at the level of action policy—that is, actual war planning (Nolan 1989). For historian Bruce Kuklick, nuclear strategists had little impact on decisions related to force-sizing and served rather than as rationalization ex post facto (Kuklick 2013). Many of them indeed complained about the lack of interest coming from policymakers regarding concrete proposals.<fnref n="3" />

This article makes the case that the influence of those strategists runs deeper than one may think. Inspired by Xymena Kurowska's work on ontological and epistemic security (Kurowska 2024) and Jutta Weldes' on discursive constructs

that make state actions “possible” (Weldes and Saco 1996; Weldes 1999), I argue that the nuclear strategists’ main influence was not in directly orienting policy but in making the practice of nuclear deterrence possible by providing a structured set of meanings through which given actions could be attributed efficacious effect. They were engaged, unwittingly, in the production of a script of nuclear deterrence.

This conceptualization of deterrence theory as a discourse has been made before, along different variations (Williams 1992; Klein 1994; Vuori 2016). My argument differs from those by arguing that deterrence theory is a script of a special kind. In one word, it's magic. It is a script about the possibility of establishing control over dangerous and uncertain endeavors through the repetition of actions whose efficacious effects cannot be verified except through reference to the axioms of the original discourse. In effect, it is a magical discourse that constitutes an ideal connection between cause and effect as a real one. By providing security and foreign policy elites, as well as parts of the public, with a sense of certainty regarding the practice of nuclear deterrence, nuclear strategists were addressing the ontological insecurity inherent in engaging in these activities. In doing so, they were doing the work of a magician.

The comparison between nuclear strategists and magicians has been made multiple times but never taken seriously. It is sometimes used to denote admiration, as in Fred Kaplan's classic history of this community, entitled *The Wizards of Armageddon* (1991). Sometimes, it is less charitable. Robert Osgood, a strategist who occasionally worked with RAND, mocked the “propensity of American civilian strategists to propound their ideas (. . .) as revelations of an esoteric body of learning (which to some extent they were).” The effect of this was to facilitate “deference of the uninitiated, overawed by the secrets and rituals of the strategic priesthood” (Osgood 1969, 45). Bradley Klein noted that “the medieval wizardry” involved in nuclear deterrence theory had “often been pointed out but has managed only to glance off the considerable political and discursive armor accumulated by strategic practitioners” (Klein 1994, 75). But this, I argue, is mistaken: pointing out the magical features of nuclear strategists cannot pierce this armor, as it is precisely the metal from which that armor was made. To properly understand the epistemic authority of nuclear strategists, one has to take the comparison with magicians seriously and look at how the peculiar features of these actors participated in the ritualization of knowledge production on nuclear strategy.

This article intends to make two main contributions. First, it contributes to our understanding of the workings of deterrence as a *ritual* practice. Maria Mälksoo (2021, 2024) showed how the ritualization of deterrence does the political work necessary to make deterrent practices produce the effect they name. “Rational deterrence theory’s rulebook for successful deterrence, (. . .),” she writes, “ha[s] a family resemblance with the rule-bound structure of rituals, traditionally rooted in magical thinking.” Magic, in relation to rituals, is what “enables representations of efficacy” of practices when it cannot simply be observed (Sørensen 2013, 229, 233). The “canon” of nuclear deterrence theory should thus not be treated just as a set of universal truths about the nature of deterrence but as a discourse, a script of deterrence as a social practice, which tamed the epistemic and ontological security of security elites in early Cold War America. Second, it investigates the social conditions of possibility for the emergence of nuclear experts as “guardians” of nuclear policymaking. As argued first by Robert Dahl, in Western nuclear-armed states, nuclear policy is governed by a regime of “guardianship,” where select individuals claim legitimate authority over this

<footnote n="1">¹The historiography on these strategists is rich. See, among others, (Herken 1985; Trachtenberg 1989; Kaplan 1991; Buzan and Hansen 2009, chap. 4; Freedman and Michaels 2019).</footnote>

<footnote n="2">²According to Licklider, “with the partial exception of escalation, the basic elements of current [nuclear] strategic thought had been set forth by 1956” but only surfaced publicly after 1957. (Licklider 1971, 153)</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³Interview with Alan Enthoven by Maurice Matloff, February 3, 1986, OSD Historical Office, 4. Available online at: https://history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/oral_history/OH_Trans_EnthovenAlain2-3-1986.pdf?ver=2014-05-28-125024-487. Bernard Brodie also made no secret of his own frustration with the military (Brodie 1971, 153).</footnote>
policy domain by virtue of their superior knowledge of the topic (Dahl 1985). The epistemic authority of those guardians is uniquely high, but the roots of the social validation of this authority remain elusive (Pelopidas, Fialho, and Sorg 2025). Sociology of expertise has established that the social status of an expert is determined not primarily by his possession of specific knowledge but by a process of social attribution (Evans 2016; Bueger 2019, 42). The ability of nuclear experts to claim superior knowledge, this article argues, owes much to the ritualization of knowledge production in that field. Through ritualization, experts become magicians and are thus able to make claims about the unknown in ways that non-magicians cannot socially sustain. In doing so, they engage in boundary work, drawing a line between those who can and cannot exert political power in the nuclear field (Kinsella 2005).

This rest of the article is organized in four sections. In the first section, I outline the theoretical and conceptual background of the article, defining the magician through its features—liminality, esoterism, and secrecy— and its functions—providing ontological security through the taming of radical uncertainty. The second section discusses the emergence of nuclear strategists and shows how they emerged and evolved in a peculiar liminal space at a moment of strong epistemic insecurity in relation to strategic knowledge. The third section shows how the epistemic authority of nuclear strategists depended on two joint claims: a claim to a unique and select craft and a claim of secret knowledge. Finally, the fourth section shows how these features combined to provide security elites with ontological security through a script of deterrence, which sealed over the uncertainty and danger of nuclear policy.

## Deterrence, Magic, and Ritualized Knowledge Production

A prerequisite for state action, Jutta Weldes argued, is the availability of structured sets of meanings about the international system and its functioning: “for the state to act, it must have some understanding of its surroundings and some specification of its goals” (1999, 12). State action is made possible by the preexistence of “a set of socio-cultural resources used by people in the construction of meaning about their world and their activities” (Weldes and Saco 1996, 372). This is not limited to definitions of national interests and threat construction. Christophe Wasinski (2011) has shown how strategic discourses also enabled particular orderings of military actions in the modern era.

The practice of nuclear deterrence requires a similar sense of its feasibility. As argued by Vuori (2016), particular actions or objects have first to be “deterrentified” through language (Vuori 2016). These actions or objects must be connected via a script that ascribes and actualizes this meaning. Social scripts can be understood as action-enabling discourses, which link together social practices and collective background understandings, thus allowing for actors to ascertain the sense of social actions and gauge whether the performance of an action has been proper (Alexander 2011, 57–8). Their structure defines “slots and requirements about what can fill those slots,” providing actors with a sense of connectivity between practices and goals (Schank and Abelson 1977, 40–1). In a sense, deterrence theory functions as a script for the practice of deterrence, as discussed later. The question of how, exactly, does the choice of a particular basing scheme for the US Air Force instead of another—the basis of Wohlstetter’s classic 1958 article on the “delicate balance of terror” (Wohlstetter 1958)—produces a deterrent effect on the USSR had no self-evident answer. It acquired one

through the operations of nuclear strategists who constituted the meaning of those actions and placed them into the slots of a larger script.

But the script of deterrence is a peculiar one, because nuclear deterrence is a peculiar practice. In effect, it is a magical script that constitutes an ideal connection between cause and effect as a real one. “Magical” is not a pejorative term. Though magic is frequently seen as the “other” of modernity, a belief defeated by rationalization (Meyer and Pels 2003, 3–4), it is most likely a fundamental feature of the human mind (Subbotsky 2014, 2010). When social action is combined with uncertainty and danger, magic flares up. As noted by Malinowski, “wherever the elements of chance and accident and the emotional play between hope and fear have a wide and extensive range” as well as where “the element of danger is conspicuous,” magical knowledge is required (1948, 115).

Nuclear strategy combines both a high level of danger, with failure largely understood as unbearable, and a low level of certainty regarding existing knowledge. Material vulnerability is combined with epistemic vulnerability. Rationally accumulated knowledge cannot provide any sense of certainty as to how to do nuclear deterrence correctly. Even if one devised the proper way to do it, they cannot test the viability of their claims in a real setting without great risks. When rationally accumulated knowledge fails, magic enters the stage (Neumann 2006, 85). The social function of magic “consists in the bridging-over of gaps and inadequacies in highly important activities not yet completely mastered by man” (Malinowski 1948, 115). Its function, more specifically, is to provide actors with ontological security, defined by Anthony Giddens as “a sense of the reliability of persons and things,” in the constancy and relative controllability of the “surrounding social and material environments of actions” (Giddens 1997, 54).

Anthony Giddens has argued that in modern societies, this ontological security is generally provided by social trust toward expert systems, which have replaced faith in magic, a characteristic of premodern societies. “Low-probability high consequences risks,” however, “tend to conjure up anew a sense of *fortuna*,” putting us back in a premodern contexts where trust falls back on religion or magic as a way of sealing over the uncertainties (. . . ) thus translating the experience of risk into feelings of relative security” (1997, 133, 130). This sharp distinction between magic and expertise is problematic. Xymena Kurowska has shown how experts can engage in magic. Particularly, she shows how the ritualization of knowledge production entrusts certain experts with an exceptional epistemic authority, and how the social magic of this authority allows them to bridge over gaps and inadequacies. Her conclusion, however, points in a similar direction: What those magician experts do, in the end, is also provide themselves and their community with epistemic security, a form of ontological security that relates to “a sense of confidence in one’s knowledge about the self and the world” (2024, 15).

The script of nuclear deterrence, in essence, promises the possibility of establishing control over dangerous and uncertain endeavors through the repetition of specific actions, whose efficacious effects cannot be verified except through reference to the axioms of the original discourse—since the production of a deterrent effect on an interlocutor cannot be externally ascertained. It is a magical script because it relies on ideal connections presented as real ones, and because it is a magical script, it provides actors with ontological security when engaging in the practice of nuclear deterrence.

My argument, in regard to the nuclear strategists, is that their possession of magician-like features grounded their
epistemic authority and allowed them to produce this kind of ontologically securing script. They could write such magical script precisely because they were magician-like. Though the category of “magician” tends to escape ideal-typical classification (Frankfurter 2022), three features appear to entrust actors with a “reputation for magic” (Frazer 2018): the possession of an esoteric craft, a liminal positionality (usually between a visible and invisible world), and the proximity to secrecy and secret knowledge.

First, the magician is characterized by his possession of a certain craft that allows him to access knowledge otherwise unavailable to others. This craft is esoteric in nature—it belongs only to a few—and generally occult, in the sense that it is related to a hidden world. There are many variations on this, and some magical practices can be very empirical and quasi-scientific.<fnref n="4" /> Such was the case of astrologists, whose craft consisted in predicting the future through the rigorous reading of the sky and the stars, and whose political influence was major in Europe and Asia before the 16th century (Azzolini 2013; Zarakol 2022, 97–100). This craft is not limited only to knowledge acquisition. Magical practitioners are also “ritual experts,” who have knowledge of the kind of ritual practices adapted to different situations (Frankfurter 2022). Importantly, magicians are not frauds in that their craft is not deception—though some of them can be accused of charlatanism if they exert their craft outside of the expected social space.<fnref n="5" />

Magicians, second, are liminal figures, entities who are “neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial” (Turner 1991, 95). As noted by anthropologist Victor Turner, “liminal situations and roles are almost everywhere attributed with magico-religious properties” (1991, 108). The same point was noted by Marcel Mauss: there are professions that place their practitioners “apart from the common run of mortals, and it is this separateness which endows them with magical power (1972, 29).” Magic is traditionally practiced by “individuals who are outside the social group, who act in their own interests or in the interest of other individuals, or in their name” (1972, 9). As pointed out by anthropologist Mary Douglas, margins and those who occupy them tend to be looked at with suspicion: “all margins are dangerous” (1992 [1966], 122). The magician, as a result, may be feared and respected, but not necessarily well-liked. A magician has “in so far as he has one, a social status which may be defined as abnormal” (Mauss 1972, 32).

Finally, a magician is “steeped in secrecy,” Tanya Luhrmann notes. Secrecy is key to the magician’s epistemic authority: not only does it “separates one group from another and one person from the rest”—thus establishing the magician’s identity in relation to non-magicians—it also reinforces the belief in their claims as secrecy tends to “elicits awe and deference toward its hidden content.” Secrecy is essential to the practice of magic and to the social status of the magician because it “supports the magician’s belief in a theory that is socially unsupported and empirically difficult to verify” and “reinforces a theory that may be false while providing real, positive results in practices” (Luhrmann 1989, 131, 137–8).

A magician is therefore an actor engaged in a highly ritualized practice of knowledge production, thanks to which they can claim knowledge about uncertain and dangerous endeavors. They possess a form of “oracular power,” an ability to authoritatively draw the line between the known and unknown (McGoey 2019, 61–2). They also have a reassuring function: They provide actors with a sense of confidence in their ability to actually engage in dangerous endeavors, granted that they follow a ritualized script. When magician-experts engage in their activity of expertise, they engage in the production of such an ontologically securing script. Focusing on the ritualized aspects of knowledge production by these experts makes visible the origins of their epistemic authority. In the following sections, I look at the emergence of nuclear strategists, and show how they came to possess the magician’s feature and how this led to the emergence of a highly ritualized form of expertise that could provide security and foreign policy elites with ontological security.

## The Birth of a Liminal Community: Nuclear Strategists at the RAND

This section discusses the emergence of the figure of the “nuclear strategist” in the early 1950s as a liminal figure rising in a context of epistemic insecurity. Nuclear strategists were living in margins. Intellectually, the field of nuclear strategy was relatively autonomous. Institutionally, nuclear strategists remained separated from academia or the military and belonged to a rather unique institution, RAND. Their position, ultimately, allowed them to move in between two worlds without truly belonging to any, one visible (academia) and one hidden (national security policy). This liminal position defined the nuclear strategists and their social perception.

The field of nuclear strategy emerged as a response to a sense of obsolescence of existing knowledge and theories on war in the nuclear age. Discourses according to which military history—the main source of insights and knowledge for strategy experts—was now irrelevant were in fashion in the late 1940s and the early 1950s (Quester 1986, 1). The advent of the H-bomb in 1952, even more than the A-bomb, was the source of epistemic insecurity in American strategic thought. The radically different nature of H-bombs—with a destructive power hundreds of times higher than A-bombs—meant that existing concepts used to think about war appeared poor guides. After 1952, World War II concepts of strategic bombings lost currency, as the problem of how to use those bombs could not be divorced from the problem of deterring their use (Trachtenberg 1989, 302–4). Moreover, in the absence of an actual war, no knowledge could be derived from experience. As a result, nuclear strategy emerged as a relatively autonomous field of knowledge that did not fit in with academic institutions, nor in military ones.

Strategists, though academics, did not truly belong in universities: few of them sought to approach the subject of national security too closely (Michaels and Ford 2023). Only in the late 1960s would academic writings on strategy develop outside of RAND (Smith 1966, 140; Lyons and Morton 1965). But they did not belong to the military either, as they were civilians. This kind of presence of civilians in places where military officers once reigned alone was the result of two major changes in the production of strategic knowledge. The first was the rise during World War Two of “operation research.” It had given evidence that war could be rationalized and guided by modern techniques and expertise possessed mostly by civilians. The nascent Air Force was at the forefront of this movement (Bessner 2022). The second was the

<footnote n="4">⁴Historians Burton and Grandy note that “it is impossible to define the occult in a way that sets it completely apart from religion, science, and technology” (Burton and Grandy 2004, 4).</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵For example, roman *haruspices*—practitioners of divination from animal entrails—were perceived in symmetrically opposite manner depending on whether they exerted their craft privately or for a public institution (Haack 2003, 13).</footnote>
assumption that the bomb had changed everything. and ren-
dered “obsolete the claim to knowledge possessed by senior
career officers” (Ghamari-Tabrizi 2005, 163). As economist
Alan Enthoven is said to have remarked to an Air Force gen-
eral critic, “General, I have fought just as many nuclear wars
as you have” (Kaplan 1991, 254).

Nuclear strategists were socially, intellectually, and institu-
tionally separated. The core of this network of thinkers was
located at the RAND Corporation—though not all were full-
time RAND researchers. Schelling’s longest stay at RAND was
a yearlong research stay in 1958–1959 (Ayson 2004, 3). The
RAND Corporation emerged in 1946 as an Air Force project
designed to maintain a “symbiosis of scientific talent and de-
fense needs” as it existed during the war. For some years, it
remained oriented toward questions of hardware and tech-
nological development. But in 1950, with the creation of de-
partments for economics and for social science, the focus
of RAND switched and changed rapidly (Amadae 2003, 40).
By the late 1950s, RAND had become the epicenter of nu-
clear strategic thought but remained one of a kind (Kaplan
1991). The interdisciplinary nature of the organization was
highly unique and contributed to the originality of its re-
search. Though an Air Force think tank, it was very attached
to its independence, understood as the idea that the conclu-
sion of their reports could not be dictated by the Air Force.
Moreover, as discussed in the next section, it was a nonprofit
organization with a highly classified dimension, a rare occur-
rence (Jardini 2013).

Even inside this community, nuclear strategists seemed
to live in the margins. Neither Brodie—“a lone wolf”—
nor Wohlstetter, nor Herman Kahn were much appreci-
ated by the RAND leadership for their tendency to act au-
tonomously.<fnref n="6" /> By the late 1950s, they started to have their
own politics, circumventing the official Air Force channels
in ways that displeased director Frank Collbohm, some of
them secretly assisting the Kennedy campaign. This led Coll-
bohm to enact what David Jardini describes as “an organi-
zational restructuring apparently designed to choke off the
autonomy of the strategists and assert closer control over
the research program” (Jardini 1996, 160). Wohlstetter’s con-
flicts with RAND leadership led him, in the end, to be fired
from RAND in 1963, after a minor incident involving classi-
fied documents (Abella 2009, 160). Their separateness could
nonetheless be a strength, reinforcing the group boundaries
by creating a strong sense of community—Daniel Ellsberg
compared RAND to a sort of “religious order” cemented by
a “sense of brotherhood” (Ellsberg 2017, 36).

It also allowed nuclear strategists to move between worlds,
between the visible academic world and the hidden, or
opaque, policy world. Schelling described RAND as “an ivory
tower that is part of the real world,” a “researching com-
munity” whose “work is going to have an effect on things
that are happening in the world” (Friedman 1963, 10). Mov-
ing between a visible and hidden world is a feature of ma-
gicians that nuclear strategists were performing particularly
well. A British journalist described them as “mov[ing] freely
through the corridors of the Pentagon or the State Depart-
ment” (Kaplan 1991, 11). In 1959 and 1960, RAND personnel
served in more than 200 advisory committees, boards, or
consultant groups of the federal government (Smith 1966,
140). As soon as 1951, Brodie was a special consultant to the
Air Force Chief of Staff (Steiner 1991, 46). In the early 1960s,
many nuclear strategists joined the Kennedy administration

at the demand of the new secretary for Defense, McNamara.
Those who remained at RAND or in academia kept wander-
ing the corridors of power. During the Cuban Missile Crisis,
arguably the tensest moment of the Cold War, many of them
were drawn from their academic offices to the State Depart-
ment, notably William Kaufmann, Thomas Schelling and
Daniel Ellsberg.<fnref n="7" /> They also became public figures. An article
in *Esquire* singled out Kahn, Wohlstetter, and Schelling as “the
vanguard and foremost representatives of a new element in
the counsels of American government: the Academic Strate-
gists” (cited in *Green 1966*, xiii). Of course, nuclear strate-
gists were also the target of critics. Robin Blackburn wrote in
*1963* that “one has become familiar with the demented logic
and the deadened language of prominent American nuclear
strategists” (*1963*, 32). The point is, admired or loathed, the
nuclear strategist was established as a peculiar public figure
by the 1960s.

It is notable that, in popular representations, strategists
also stood in the lineage of magicians. Evidence of that is Dr.
Strangelove, the archetypal representation of nuclear strate-
gists in the 60s. The character was inspired, notably, by Her-
man Kahn, with whom both Kubrick and his scenarist Peter
George crossed paths. It was not the only source of inspira-
tion for the character, yet the two were almost immediately
linked, and Kahn was repeatedly described as the “prototype”
of Strangelove (Ghamari-Tabrizi 2005, 41). Strangelove is not
exactly a magician but a “mad scientist” (Frayling 2006, 102–
6). However, as literary scholar Peter Goodrich noted, “mad
scientists,” in Western imaginaries, are closely related to wiz-
ards as they emerge from an “imaginative continuum” start-
ing with magician figures like Merlin, sorcerer and advisor to
King Arthur (Goodrich 1994, 85). This association, in popu-
lar perception, between nuclear strategists and wizards was
probably facilitated by the already existing association be-
tween nuclear scientists and wizardry, which had begun in
the early 20th century (Weart 1988).

Secrecy and Esoterism in the Nuclear Strategists' Craft

If nuclear strategists were magician-like, what was their craft? It was esoteric: It belonged primarily to a select community to which one had to be initiated. It was steeped in secrecy, too. Highly technical, while somewhat mysterious, it elicited awe from outsiders, who saw strategists as “human computers” (Friedman 1963). These two features of the magician—possession of an esoteric craft and omnipresence of secrecy—were defining of the perception of nuclear strategists by outsiders and allowed for the ritualization of knowledge production in the field.

Carol Cohn has described how defense intellectuals devel-
oped their own “techno-strategic language.” This language
separated its locutors from nonspeakers because of its use of
specific words or acronyms, whose significance was available
only to experts, and because it ascribed different meanings
to common words (Cohn 1987). The mastery of this language
functioned as a shibboleth, identifying those who belong and
do not belong to this elite group. But this is only a facet of nu-
clear strategists’ craft. The epistemic authority of strategists
was based on their use of methods that were either invented
or radically improved in the RAND’s office, namely system
analysis and game theory. Nuclear strategists were not the
only ones to use those methods. However, they distinguished
themselves from other students of nuclear issues precisely
because of those methods and their reputation for the mas-

<footnote n="6">⁶Interview with Hans Speier by Martin Collins, April 5, 1988; Interview with James Digby by Martin Collins, January 14, 1992, RAND History Project Interviews, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (hereafter NASM).</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷Interview with William Kaufmann by Lawrence Kaplan and Maurice Matloff, Part II, February 2nd, 1987, OSD Historical Office, 5–6.</footnote>
tery of them. They were the strategists' own rituals, practiced to "domesticate" the mystery of nuclear strategy and its art-cana.<fnref n="8" />

System analysis emerged out of an ambition to develop a science of war, solving both strategic and logistical problems through rigorous quantitative analysis (Amadae 2003, 41). It was inevitably torn between a claim of scientificity and the clear limits of any analysis trying to model an infinity of variables (Ghamari-Tabrizi 2005, 140–4). It was dominant among RAND methods in the 1950s (Kaplan 1991, 87). The method's claim to fame was a study led by Wohlstetter that considered the best options for the positioning of the Strategic Air Command's bases, summarized in “The Delicate Balance of Terror” (Wohlstetter 1958; Kaplan 1991, 109). System analysis would, from then, become identified as “a RAND product” (Smith 1966, 111), and nuclear strategists did not hesitate to act proprietary over the method. Wohlstetter, particularly, considered that “good or bad, systems analyses were done by RAND people.”<fnref n="9" /> Only RAND people had done the “empirical study of military operations likely in a nuclear war,” an argument he used to criticize the Pugwash statement (Wohlstetter 1964, 179). In fact, “the distinction itself and the problematic nature of a second-strike capability were hardly understood among the physical scientists, mathematical logicians, and engineers writing on nuclear policy” outside of the RAND ecosystem (Wohlstetter 1964, 213). For him, one of the two biggest disasters for the field of nuclear strategy—along with the invention of the ICBM—was the RAND bomb damage assessment wheel “it was a little circular computer which made anybody with that wheel an expert. And that meant that people were able to get results that sounded very impressive (...) without ever understanding anything very much” or “thinking very hard” about contingencies, something that system analysis was assumed to implicitly prevent.<fnref n="10" />

System analysis had its political success. When Robert McNamara invited several RAND strategists to join his Office for the Secretary of Defense in 1961, the reputation of system analysis as a tool for devising policy planning grew. This invitation came after McNamara read the RAND volume on *The Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age* (1960), which made use of system analysis to show the merits of looking at military problems through economic lenses (Kaplan 1991, 252). Toward outsiders, the method elicited furor—for its shortcomings—but also awe. In a 1963 article on RAND published in *The Atlantic*, which oscillates between deference and critique, Saul Friedman describes it as the “Rand brand of thinking that has had so much influence on the present Administration and on McNamara,” a kind of “superrational quantitative analysis” produced by strategists aiming to attain the “superhuman machine rationality” level of computers (Friedman 1963, 12). The concept was itself described as “esoteric” by Bruce Smith in the first book-length study of the RAND Corporation, but also as a unique way of approaching security issue (Smith 1966, 111). For him, “systems analysis has contributed to the emergence of a new class of “generalist experts” who serve as something of a bridge between the worlds of science and technology and the world of policy” (Smith 1966, 196). Michael Howard, in an early attempt to write the history of nuclear strategy, credited systems analysis, linked it with RAND, and praised it for its help in limiting defense budgets “while addressing the “missile gap” (Howard 2018 [1969], 201).

The other craft of the nuclear strategists was game theory. RAND played a major role in the development of game theory, and the theory itself was clearly associated primarily with the think tank until the 1960s (Smith 1966, 111; Leonard 2012, chap. 13). Game theory was not simply a method of analysis; it was portrayed by its practitioners as a “comprehensive science of decision-making” that would allow to find the optimal decision in any kind of situation (Amadae 2016, 69). Historian Steven Belletto has shown the major cultural impact of this “game theory narrative.” In the early 1950s, Belletto argues, popular writers and journalists started to popularize game theory—presented as a new and esoteric craft with “important potentialities in military affairs,” accessible to the few only due to “its high-security classification” (McDonald 1949)—as a tool for nuclear strategy. This connection was cemented by the connection it had with the nascent and somewhat mysterious RAND Corporation. As RAND’s fame grew, so did the sense that its experts “would employ game theory to manage the randomness of war,” eventually becoming a feature of US Cold War culture (Belletto 2011, 104–8). This association was not always seen as praiseworthy, as evidenced by the number of critics made in the 1960s, which identified game theory as one of, if not the, source of nuclear strategists’ wrongdoings (Horowitz 1962; Rapoport 1966; Green 1966). These critics, in any case, demonstrate the strength of the association between game theory and nuclear strategists.

The strategists themselves entertained an ambiguous relationship with game theory, claiming both distance and affiliation as they were incorporating it into their craft. For Brodie, “the refinements of game theory (...) are generally of little importance to the strategic analyst (...) though they will unquestionably utilize some of its concepts” (Brodie 1964, 252). Arguably, Brodie stood aside from other strategists with his more historical approach and lesser interest in a “science of strategy” (Brodie 1949; Booth 1991, 25). But Schelling himself declared that “none” of the work of RAND strategists “has been dependent on game theory.” At most it was a “a help in formulating ideas” (Schelling 2004, 138). When Rapoport’s critique of nuclear strategists’ practice of game theory was published, Schelling published a lengthy response to the argument. In it, he rejected the bulk of the charges on the basis that most of the RAND strategists were not in fact doing game theory, with the exception of Kahn and himself (Schelling 1964, 1083–4).

But his position was not that game theory was without utility, simply that its use was lesser than generally conceived. In a conference organized under the aegis of the NATO Scientific Office in 1964, he declared that “for most American strategists, the influence of game theory has been modest and indirect. (...) where Rapoport argues that the impact of game theory of strategic thinking has been large and unhealthful, in my estimate it has been small, could be larger, and would be healthful.” What Schelling meant was, like Brodie, that nuclear strategists had behaved toward game theory somewhat extractively, taking concepts that appeared useful for them without contributing directly to the development of this wholly independent scientific field. This primitive use of game theory could nonetheless prove fruitful since “some of the most powerful concepts, as measured by the help they give in analyzing a real problem can be quite elementary”—such as the “pay-off matrix” that Schelling compared to “a truth table or a conservation principle or an equation” (Schelling 1966, 473, 480). Similarly, Wohlstetter was highly ambiguous in his relation to game theory, claiming that it was both useless and very useful (Green 1966, 93). The strategists’ claims about game theory cannot be interpreted as a

<footnote n="8">⁸On the “domestication” of nuclear mysteries through techno-strategic courses of control, see Kinsella (2005).</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹Ibid. p. 19.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰Interview with Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter, July 29, 1987, NASM, p. 9</footnote>
dismissal of the theory, nor a separation from it, but rather
as a recognition of the immense power of this craft and of
their inability to wield it properly—yet. This is a clear exam-
ple of a strategic ritualization of knowledge.

There existed a discrepancy between how this craft was
presented and how it was actually practiced. While hailed as a
highly technical form of analysis, system analysis largely re-
lied on “simple arithmetic” (Posen 1991, 27, fn. 43). If it was
seen as esoteric yet powerful, it is also because systems anal-
ysis remained largely opaque to the outside world. Not only
did its proponents not produce any stable definition or meth-
ods, but most of the analysis produced by RAND remained
highly classified.<fnref n="11" /> Similarly, the practice of game theory by
nuclear strategists was subjected to much criticism for its
simplistic allure (Mirowski 1991). This does not mean that
it was not valuable as such, but give credit to the idea that
these functioned not just as methods, but also as what Alfred
Gell called “techniques of enchantment,” “expert expressive
practices cultivated for the sake of arousing fascination and
awe” (Gell 1988, 7; Jones 2011, 11). Evidence of the force of
this enchantment can be found in the later history of sys-
tems analysis. In the late 60s, system analysis began to be
exported to other fields of government, notably urban pol-
icy. This extension to more conventional domains, with less
mystery and more public assessment, coincided with the fall
from grace of the methods in the public eye (Jardini 2013).
As if, detached from the ritualization that nuclear strategists
attached to it, its magic had weakened. The aura of secrecy
and mystery that accompanied nuclear strategists was key in
producing enchantment through ritualization.

As Luhrmann has argued, magic is inseparable from se-
crecy: secrecy separates groups, and it also elicits “awe and
defference toward its hidden contents” (Luhrmann 1989, 137).
It creates mystery by suggesting the existence of an invis-
ible world where apparent contradictions are solved. It es-
tablishes authority. RAND's relationship with secrecy was in-
timate. For historian Janet Farrell Brodie, “secrecy played a
key role in the formation, identity, and work conducted at
RAND” (Farrell Brodie 2011, 647). All members of staff had to
have a Top Secret clearance (Ellsberg 2017, 164)—if not, they
could not access the main RAND facility (Wolfson 1972, 20).
Although the leadership agreed to publish some of the work
produced by its analysts, most of their work remained clas-
sified. It is only in the late 1950s that RAND analysts started
publishing some of their work on nuclear strategy in an un-
classified manner (May 1998, 332). Secrecy procedures were
complex and established a “prestige economy” inside the or-
ganization itself, with nuclear clearance being high on the
hierarchy (Bessner 2018, 148–9). The separating, and aris-
tocratic effects, of access to secrecy was well recognized by
RAND analysts. Ellsberg describes the effects of receiving a
security clearance at RAND as an initiating moment: After it,
“you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have
it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now
and most others don’t. . . and that all those other people are
fools” (Ellsberg 2003, 238–9).

This ritualized dimension of knowledge production at
RAND was a large part of its identity. It was strongly push-
ing this narrative. A 1959 article in *The Nation* insisted on the
think tank's relation to secrecy, citing a pamphlet according
to which "the failure of an individual to qualify for neces-
sary clearance will result in termination."<fnref n="12" /> Wohlstetter also
publicly emphasized the importance of access to restricted

information that distinguished RAND from the “useful” but
ultimately “candid” public writings on strategy. The real in-
ternal work needed more than “fragmentary public data.”
Even though “there can be no certainty on such matters, (...) to
write seriously about them at all requires thought and
much information” (Wohlstetter 1964, 215–6). In a later let-
ter, which was drawn from lectures given at Oxford, he fur-
ther emphasized this distinction between RAND system an-
alysts and outsiders. At RAND, “they were dealing with actual
operational, design, and plans data”: “such access is a neces-
sary, though not a sufficient, condition for concrete judgments
about the stability of nuclear deterrence at any particular
time” (Wohlstetter 2009, 240, 243). The central importance
of direct access to information for the work of nuclear strate-
gists is confirmed by Schelling’s later claim that he stopped
focusing on military affairs when he stopped consulting for
the government, which resulted in his loss of access to infor-
mation and the loss of an audience (Schelling and Swedberg
1990, 189).

Making Deterrence Possible: The Legacy of Nuclear
Strategists

The writings of nuclear strategists made it possible to think
about the practice of nuclear deterrence as a controlled prac-
tice, effectively “bridging-over (...) gaps and inadequacies
in highly important activities not yet completely mastered
by man” to retell Malinowski’s definition of the magician’s
role (Malinowski 1948, 115). The only certain thing about nu-
clear weapons in the 1950s and 1960s was the possibility of a
catastrophe. The rest was speculation about what nuclear war
could look like, or how to prevent it, that could only be “re-
solved in a land of make-believe” (Connelly et al. 2012, 1432).
The absence of previous experience, which could serve as a
reference point, created uncertainty and epistemic insecu-
rity. In this context, the epistemic authority of any locutors—
the shared beliefs regarding the validity of pronouncements
emanating from a given source (Kruglanski 1989, 202)—
could not be grounded on the continuous correspondence
between their claims and reality. Simply put, nobody could
pretend to really *know* about nuclear war. Both conditions
of danger and inadequate knowledge were met. But the rit-
ual features of knowledge production in the field of nuclear
strategy made it possible to ground the claims of strategists in
something else, in their “oracular power” (McGoey 2019). Rit-
ualized knowledge, noted Xymena Kurowska, appears natu-
ral and self-evident, not by virtue of its content, but thanks
to the “magic slippage” done by locutors who shift between
scientific and sacred, or magical, frames (Kurowska 2024).

Because the practice of deterrence rarely, if ever, offers op-
portunities to check whether the performance of an action
succeeded in producing the desired result, such a check can
only be obtained by gauging the correspondence between
the performance and the script. This does not mean that
those elites blindly trusted nuclear strategists to make pol-
icy decisions or even read their work with attention. But the
omnipresence of the nuclear strategists in advisory boards,
the frequent consulting work they did for various federal
administrations, and the numerous briefings they gave—
McNamara even asked Kaufmann to teach his aides a series
of seminars on “strategic nuclear theory” in preparation for
SALT talks<fnref n="13" />—is evidence for the existing demand for a script
that could provide the elites with a sense of epistemic secu-
rity.

<footnote n="11">¹¹On the opacity, see Duller (2016, 173); on the classification, Digby (1989, n. 8).</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹²Gene Marine, “Think Factory De Luxe,” *The Nation*, February, 14, 1959, 132.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³Interview with William Kaufmann, *op. cit.*, p. 22.</footnote>
This scriptwriting was achieved, first, through language. Crafting a language for nuclear deterrence, they provided a sense of “cognitive mastery” of the object (Cohn 1987, 704–5; Schiappa 1989). Second, nuclear strategists also made nuclear deterrence knowable. The discourse on a “science of warfare,” which backed system analysis and game theory, constituted knowledge produced through these frameworks as uncovered “timeless truths” about the nature of strategy (Booth 1991, 50)—in the case of Schelling, even about the nature of social action (Williams 1991). This universal claim implies that even more than a script of deterrence, they provided the script of deterrence. Finally, the script of nuclear strategy did away with chance and uncertainty (Pelopidas 2015a, 2017). Surely, uncertainty was acknowledged by all actors. At the same time, strategists insisted on the “terminology of probabilistic reasoning where no discoverable probabilities exist[ed]” (Green 1966, 27), meaning that uncertainty was understood through the framework of risk rather than chance. RAND, outside of the social science division, “was a world in which chance did not exist.”<fnref n="14" /> Schelling’s famous concept of “threats that leave something to chance” is exemplary in that regard (Green 1966; Pelopidas 2016, chap. 4). Even when writing about accidents, Schelling fell back to the conclusion that “accidents do not cause war (...) Decisions cause war.” The correct practice of deterrence at all levels could bring the probability of accidents to 0 (Schelling 1960). As for the tense moments of the Cuban Missile crisis, he apparently held the conviction that “if Khrushchev caused a problem, others would put a gun to his head” (Lebow 2020, xii). Other, like William Kaufmann acknowledged their conviction that president would likely never use nuclear weapons. For him, “realistically, whatever the potential utility of nuclear weapons might be, their use just wasn’t in the cards”<fnref n="15" />. Brodie apparently reached a similar conclusion (Booth 1991, 48). Even in the case of Herman Kahn, who most explicitly acknowledged the possibility of nuclear war, escalation was a controlled activity with a ritual crescendo (Kahn 1962). Nuclear strategists constituted the unknowable as knowable, sometimes even known, and ultimately controllable. One only had to craft and perform the proper script. A final dimension of the magicians’ craft and legacy is relative to gender.<fnref n="16" /> The magicians’ identity of the nuclear strategist is heavily masculine coded: It aims at establishing control and overcoming vulnerability; it uses a techno-strategic magic that draws from “hard science” and insists on rationality; it produces a “sense of brotherhood; and it eventually revolves around one’s ability to yield violence. All those features are, in some ways, markers of masculinity. As argued by Catherine Eschle (2025), this coding of deterrence as masculine through the making of the strategists’ identity is not some superficial feature of strategic knowledge production. Rather, the strategists’ securing of a new form of hegemonic masculinity, replacing “military pugilism” with “muscular rationality” established a new regulatory ideal in strategic practices and participated in the naturalization of deterrence thinking. The magicians’ features, and their correspondence to masculine codes, likely participated in this constitution and the general narrative constitution of nuclear matters as masculine (Considine 2021; Faux 2024).

## Conclusion

This article aimed to take seriously the “wizard” label frequently attributed to RAND’s nuclear strategists. It argued that these actors indeed possessed the features of magical practitioners. The highly ritualized practices of knowledge production (taking place in a liminal space, using an esoteric craft, and shrouded in secrecy) grounded their epistemic authority in a field of knowledge where certainty was impossible and danger very high—exactly the kind of situations where magic replaces expert systems. By doing so, they provided security elites with a sense of epistemic, and thus ontological, security that made the practice of nuclear deterrence possible. Nuclear strategists did not, by themselves, define US nuclear policy. They did, however, provide elites, as well as parts of the public, with a sense of control over their practices by offering a script with which one could have a sense of the efficacious effects of actions.

None of this is to say that the work of strategists lacked scientific merit. It certainly was important work, and the content of their knowledge production certainly mattered in assuring their influence and legacy. The argument is rather that the value attributed to the knowledge produced and claimed by nuclear strategists is not simply the result of an external assessment of their substantial value but of the features of these experts and of their subject matters. Similarly, this also means that there was more at play than Bourdieusian processes of objectivation and of social capital accumulation, as previously argued (Villumsen Berling 2011, 391). While objectivation demystifies its object by “destroying” or creating “pure artefacts” out of it (Bourdieu, cited in Villumsen Berling 2011), nuclear strategy remained highly mystified. The authority of strategists was grounded not only in their ability to objectivate, rationalize and categorize nuclear strategy, but also to make knowledge gaps invisible or irrelevant and to enable action through script-writing. More than a reputation for scientific knowledge, they had a reputation for possessing “special enlightenment and almost mystical authority” which characterizes those who can claim oracular power (McGoey 2019, 62).

In the 1960s, nuclear strategists slowly left the scene as a result of combination of political, scientific, and institutional factors (Walt 1991, 215–6). With the departure of the likes of Kahn and Wohlstetter, RAND was turning into a “nonprophet” organization, feared one of its department heads (Jardini 2013, 436). But the status of those “prophets” in the field remained special, and a form of sacralization of their knowledge took place over time. To this day, the canon of nuclear strategic thought is composed mainly of texts produced by these magicians, at the expense of other strategic visions (Egeland, Fraise, and Taha 2022). They even frequently are granted responsibility for the avoidance of nuclear war. In a popular history book on RAND, we can read that those strategists “arguably saved America from nuclear annihilation” (Abella 2009, 13). In his obituary to Brodie, Schelling wrote that he “truly believe[d]” that “his work has helped us to avoid” nuclear war (1978, 3). When Schelling passed, he was awarded the same honor: “all he did was prevent the greatest imaginable human health catastrophe: nuclear war (Blumenthal 2017).” Before that, in 2005, he had received the Nobel prize in economics to reward his work, which had “proved of great relevant for conflict resolution and efforts to avoid war” (BBC News 2005). In the wake of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops, and the subsequent instances of nuclear talks, public debates quickly went back to this classic script of deterrence (e.g., The Economist 2022) in search of security (Makarychev and Nizhnikau 2023). Bruce

<footnote n="14">¹⁴Interview with Hans Speier, op. cit., p. 26.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵Interview with William Kaufmann, op. cit., p. 12.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">¹⁶We would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for pointing out this dimension to our attention.</footnote>
Kuklick (2013) reduced the influence of those strategists to a role of rationalization of policymakers narratives. To frame this as a critique ignores the importance of such narrations for both individuals and states (Mälksoo 2015; Steele 2019). Strategists did not simply rationalize deterrence practices. They made them possible and sustainable.

## Funding

This work has been made possible by funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Research Council Consolidator Grant no. 101043468 RITUAL DETERRENCE. Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. The open access publication of the Special Forum this article is part of has been supported by the ERC Consolidator Grant RITUAL DETERRENCE, project number 101043468.

## Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Maria Mälksoo, Xymena Kurowska, Benoît Pelopidas, and Olivier Schmitt, as well as the anonymous reviewers, for their comments on this article. Finally, I would like to thank Swann for showing up late and leaving me just enough time to submit this piece and Gwladys Latremé for all her labor.

## References

* ABELLA, ALEX. 2009. *Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire*. Boston, MA: HarperCollins Publishers.

* ALEXANDER, JEFFREY C. 2011. *Performance and Power*. Malden, MA: Polity.

* AMADAE, S. M. 2003. *Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism*. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

* AMADAE, S. M. 2016. *Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy*. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

* AYSON, ROBERT. 2004. *Thomas Schelling and the Nuclear Age: Strategy as Social Science*. London: Cass. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203502136.

* AZZOLINI, MONICA. 2013. *The Duke and the Stars: Astrology and Politics in Renaissance Milan*. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

* BBC NEWS. 2005. "Game Theorists Share Nobel Prize." October 10. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4326732.stm. Date Accessed 9 September 2024.

* BELLETTTO, STEVEN. 2011. *No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives*. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199826889.001.0001.

* BESSNER, DANIEL. 2018. *Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual*. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501709395.

* BESSNER, DANIEL. 2022. "The Progressive Origins of Project RAND." In *Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations. New Histories*. edited by C. M.C. Nichols and D. Milne, 385-412. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. https://doi.org/10.7312/nich20180.

* BLACKBURN, ROBIN. 1963. "Guerilla Warfare." *New Left Review* I: 32-6. https://doi.org/10.64590/xm7.

* BLUMENTHAL, DAVID. 2017. "Of Thomas Schelling, Nuclear War, and the ACA." *The Commonwealth Fund*. January 5. https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2017/thomas-schelling-nuclear-war-and-aca. Date Accessed 9 February 2025.

* BOOTH, KEN. 1991. "Bernard Brodie." In *Makers of Nuclear Strategy*, edited by J. Baylis and J. Barnett, 19-56. London: Pinter.

* BRODIE, BERNARD. 1949. "Strategy as a Science." *World Politics* 1: 467-88. https://doi.org/10.2307/2008833.

* BRODIE, BERNARD. 1964. "The Scientific Strategists." In *Scientists and National Policy-Making*, edited by R. Gilpin and C. Wright, 240-60. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

* BRODIE, BERNARD. 1971. "Why Were We So (Strategically) Wrong?" *Foreign Policy* 5: 151-61. https://doi.org/10.2307/1147725.

* BUEGER, CHRISTIAN. 2019. "Experts in an Adventure with Pirates. A Story of Somali Piracy Expertise." In *Assembling Exclusive Expertise: Knowledge, Ignorance and Conflict Resolution in the Global South*, edited by O. Waever and A. Leander, 40-56. London: Routledge.

* BURTON, DAN, AND DAVID A GRANDY. 2004. *Magic, Mystery, and Science: The Occult in Western Civilization*. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

* BUZAN, BARRY, AND LENE HANSEN. 2009. *The Evolution of International Security Studies*. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511817762.

* COHN, CAROL. 1987. "Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals." *Signs* 12: 687-718. https://doi.org/10.1086/494362.

* CONNELLY, MATTHEW, MATT FAY, GIULIA FERRINI, MICKI KAUFMAN, WILL LEONARD, HARRISON MONSKY, RYAN MUSTO, TAUNTON PAINE, NICHOLAS STANDISH, AND LYDIA WALKER. 2012. "General, I Have Fought Just as Many Nuclear Wars as You Have': Forecasts, Future Scenarios, and the Politics of Armageddon." *The American Historical Review* 117: 1431-60. https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/117.5.1431.

* CONSIDINE, LAURA. 2021. "Narrative and Nuclear Weapons Politics: The Entelechial Force of the Nuclear Origin Myth." *International Theory* 14: 551-70.

* DAHL, ROBERT A. 1985. *Controlling Nuclear Weapons: Democracy versus Guardianship*. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

* DIGBY, JAMES. 1989. "Operations Research and Systems Analysis at RAND, 1948-1967." N-2936-RC, RAND Corporation.

* DOUGLAS, MARY. 1992. *Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo*. London: Routledge.

* DULLER, MATTHIAS. 2016. "Internationalization of Cold War Systems Analysis: RAND, IIASA and the Institutional Reasons for Methodological Change." *History of the Human Sciences* 29: 172-90. https://doi.org/10.177/0952695116667882.

* EGELAND, KJØLV, THOMAS FRAISE, AND HEBATALLA TAHA. 2022. "Casting the Atomic Canon: (R)Evolving Nuclear Strategy." *European Journal of International Security* 7: 382-99. https://doi.org/10.1017/eis.2021.35.

* ELLSBERG, DANIEL. 2003. *Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers*. New York, NY: Penguin Books.

* ELLSBERG, DANIEL. 2017. *The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner*. New York, NY: Bloomsbury.

* ESCHLE, CATHERINE. 2025. "Masculinity and the Cold War Origins of Nuclear Deterrence: Wizards, Cowboys and Action Intellectuals at the RAND Corporation." *The Non-Proliferation Review* 32 1-3 25-46

* EVANS, ROBERT. 2016. "What is Expertise? Technical Knowledge and Political Judgment." In *Security Expertise: Practice, Power, Responsibility*, edited by T. V. Berling and C. Bueger, 19-36. Oslo: Taylor & Francis.

* FARRELL BRODIE, JANET. 2011. "Learning Secrecy in the Early Cold War: The RAND Corporation." *Diplomatic History* 35: 643-70. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7709.2011.00971.x.

* FAUX, EMILY. 2024. "Deconstructing Barbenheimer: A Feminist Analysis of Gender and the Representation of Nuclear War." *Feminist Theory* 25: 669-86. https://doi.org/10.1177/14647001241291706.

* FRANKFURTER, DAVID. 2022. "Dynamics of Ritual Expertise in Antiquity and Beyond: Towards a New Taxonomy of 'Magicians'." In *Magic and Ritual in the Ancient World*, edited by Mirecki and M. Meyer, 159-78. Leiden: Brill.

* FRAYLING, CHRISTOPHER. 2006. "Mad, Bad and Dangerous? The Scientist and the Cinema." London: Reaktion.

* FRAZER, ELIZABETH. 2018. "Political Power and Magic." *Journal of Political Power* 11: 359-77. https://doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2018.1523315.

* FREEDMAN, LAWRENCE, AND JEFFREY H MICHAELS. 2019. *The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy*. 4th ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-37-57350-6.

* FRIEDMAN, SAUL. 1963. "The Rand Corporation and Our Policy Makers." *The Atlantic* September 1963. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1963/09/the-rand-corporation-and-our-policy-makers/658922/Date Accessed 5 February 2025.

* GARTZKE, ERIK, AND JON R. LINDSAY 2024. *Elements of Deterrence: Strategy, Technology, and Complexity in Global Politics*. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197754443.001.001.

* GELL, ALFRED. 1988. "Technology and Magic." *Anthropology Today* 4: 6-9. https://doi.org/10.2307/3033230.
GHAMARI-TABRIZI, SHARON. 2005. *The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War*. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674037564.

GIDDENS, ANTHONY. 1997. *The Consequences of Modernity*. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

GOODRICH, PETER H. 1994. "The Lineage of Mad Scientists: Anti-Types of Merlin." In *Dionysus in Literature. Essays on Literary Madness*, edited by B. M. Rieger, 71–88. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

GREEN, PHILIP. 1966. *Deadly Logic. The Theory of Nuclear Deterrence*. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press.

HAACK, MARIE-LAURENCE. 2003. *Les Haruspices Dans Le Monde Romain*. Bordeaux: Ausonius Éditions. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.ausonius.9849.

HERKEN, GREGG. 1985. *Counsels of War*. New York, NY: Knopf.

HOROWITZ, IRVING. 1962. *The War Game: Studies of the New Civilian Militarists*. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

HOWARD, MICHAEL. 2018. "The Classical Strategists (1969)." *Adelphi Series* 58: 179–214. https://doi.org/10.1080/19445571.2018.1721783.

JARDINI, DAVID R. 1996. "Out of the Blue Yonder: The Rand Corporation's Diversification into Social Welfare Research, 1946–1968." *Doctoral Dissertation*, Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University.

JARDINI, DAVID R. 2013. *Thinking through the Cold War: RAND, National Security, and Domestic Policy*, 1945–75. Los Gatos, CA: Smashwords.

JONES, GRAHAM M. 2011. *Trade of the Tricks: Inside the Magician's Craft*. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

KAHN, HERMAN. 1962. *Thinking about the Unthinkable*. New York, NY: Avon Books.

KAPLAN, FRED M. 1991. *The Wizards of Armageddon*. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

KINSELLA, WILLIAM. 2005. "One Hundred Years of Nuclear Discourse: Four Master Themes and Their Implications for Environmental Communication." In *The Environmental Communication Yearbook*, by S. L. Senecah, vol. 2: 49–72. New York, NY: Routledge.

KLEIN, BRADLEY S. 1994. *Strategic Studies and World Order*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511559037.

KRUGLANSKI, ARIE W. 1989. *Lay Epistemics and Human Knowledge: Cognitive and Motivational Bases*. New York, NY: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0924-4.

KUKLICK, BRUCE. 2013. *Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger*. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400849468.

KUROWSKA, XYMENA. 2024. "Epistemic Security and the Redemptive Hegemony of Magical Realism." *Cambridge Review of International Affairs* 37: 440–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2023.2276343.

LEBOW, RICHARD NED. 2020. *Between Peace and War: 40th Anniversary Revised Edition*. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43443-4.

LEONARD, ROBERT. 2012. *Von Neumann, Morgenstern, and the Creation of Game Theory from Chess to Social Science, 1900-1960*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

LICKLIDER, ROY E. 1971. *The Private Nuclear Strategists*. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press.

LUHRMANN, T.M. 1989. "The Magic of Secrecy." *Ethos* 17: 131–65. https://doi.org/10.1525/eth.1989.17.2.02a00010.

LYONS, GENE M., AND LOUIS MORTON. 1965. *Schools for Strategy: Education and Research in National Security Affairs*. Westport: Praeger.

MAKARYCHEV, ANDREY, AND RYHOR NIZHNIKAU. 2023. "Normalize and Rationalize: Intellectuals of Statecraft and Russia's War in Ukraine." *Journal of International Relations and Development* 26: 632–42. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-023-00299-x.

MALINOWSKI, BRONISLAW. 1948. *Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays*. Boston: Beacon Press.

MÄLKSOO, MARIA. 2015. "Memory Must Be Defended': Beyond the Politics of Mnemonic Security," *Security Dialogue* 46: 221–37. https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010614552549.

MÄLKSOO, MARIA. 2021. "A Ritual Approach to Deterrence: I Am, Therefore I Deter." *European Journal of International Relations* 27: 53–78. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066120966039.

MÄLKSOO, MARIA. 2024. "Deterrence Icons as Status Symbols: American Forces in NATO's Eastern Flank." *Cooperation and Conflict* 60: 75–96.

MAUSS. 1972. *A General Theory of Magic*. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

MAY, ANDREW DAVID. 1998. "The RAND Corporation and the Dynamics of American Strategic Thought, 1946–1962." Doctoral Dissertation, Emory University.

MCDONALD, JOHN. 1949. "A Theory of Strategy." *Fortune* 34: 100–110

MCGOEY, LINSEY. 2019. *The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World*. London: Zed Books Ltd. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350225725.5

B. MEYER, AND P. PELS, eds. 2003. *Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment*. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781503620056.

MICHAELS,JEFFREY H., AND MATTHEW C. FORD 2023. "Grand Strategy or Grant Strategy? Philanthropic Foundations, Strategic Studies and the American Academy." *Journal of Strategic Studies* 46: 764–86. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2023.2174107.

MIROWSKI, PHILIP. 1991. "When Games Grow Deadly Serious: The Military Influence on the Evolution of Game Theory." In *Economics and National Security. A History of Their Interactions*, edited by C. D. Goodwin, 227–56. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

NEUMANN, IVER B. 2006. "Pop Goes Religion: Harry Potter Meets Clifford Geertz." *European Journal of Cultural Studies* 9: 81–100. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549406060809.

NOLAN, JANNE E. 1989. *Guardians of the Arsenal: The Politics of Nuclear Strategy*. New York, NY: Basic Books.

OSGOOD, ROBERT E. 1969. "The Reappraisal of Limited War." *The Adelphi Papers* 9: 41–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/05679326908441827.

PELOPIDAS, BENOIT. 2015a. "A Bet Portrayed as a Certainty: Reassessing the Added Deterrent Value of Nuclear Weapons." In *The War That Must Never Be Fought. Dilemmas of Nuclear Deterrence*, edited by G. P. Shultz and J. E. Goodby, 5–55. Stanford, CA: Hoover Press.

PELOPIDAS, BENOIT. 2015b. "Pour une Histoire Transnationale Des Catégories de la Pensée Nucléaire." *Stratégique* 108: 109.

PELOPIDAS, BENOIT. 2016. "The Book that Leaves Nothing to Chance. How the Strategy of Conflict and His Legacy Normalized the Practice of Nuclear Threats." Paper prepared for Workshop on "Stability at Low Nuclear Numbers: Alternative Framings." Ithaca, NY.

PELOPIDAS, BENOIT. 2017. "The Unbearable Lightness of Luck: Three Sources of Overconfidence in the Manageability of Nuclear Crises." *European Journal of International Security* 2: 240–62. https://doi.org/10.1017/eis.2017.6.

PELOPIDAS, BENOIT, FABRICIO M. FIALHO, AND ALEXANDER SORG. 2025. "Democracy and Nuclear Weapons Public Attitudes towards Nuclear Weapons Governance." Paper presented at the Nuclear Knowledges Research in Progress Seminar, Paris.

POSEN, BARRY R. 1991. *Inadvertent Escalation: Conventional War and Nuclear Risks*. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

QUESTER, GEORGE H. 1986. *Deterrence before Hiroshima: The Airpower Background of Modern Strategy*. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.

RAPOPORT, ANATOL. 1966. *Strategy and Conscience*. New York, NY: Harper & Row.

SCHANK, ROGER C., AND ROBERT P. ABELSON. 1977. *Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding. An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures*. Hove: Routledge.

SCHELLING, THOMAS C. 1960. "Meteors, Mischief, and War." *Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists* 16: 292–300. https://doi.org/10.1080/00963402.1960.11454123.

SCHELLING, THOMAS C. 1964. "Reviewed Work: Strategy and Conscience by Anatol Rapoport." *The American Economic Review* 54: 1082–88.

SCHELLING, THOMAS C. 1966. "Strategy, Tactics and Non-Zero-Sum Theory." In *Theory of Games. Techniques and Applications*. *Proceedings of a Conference under the Aegis of the NATO Scientific Affairs Committee*. Toulon, 29th June–3rd July 1964, edited by A. Mensch, 469–80. London: The English Universities Press.

SCHELLING, THOMAS C. 1978. "A Tribute to Bernard Brodie and (Incidentally) to RAND." *International Security* 3: 2–3.

SCHELLING, THOMAS C. 2004. "Academics, Decision Makers, and Security Policy during the Cold War: A Comment on Jervis." In *The Evolution of Political Knowledge: Democracy, Autonomy, and Conflict in Comparative and International Politics*, edited by E. D. Mansfield and R. Sisson, 137–39. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press.

SCHELLING, THOMAS C., AND RICHARD SWEDBERG. 1990. "Thomas C. Schelling." In *Economics and Sociology. Redifning Their Boundaries: Conversations with Economists and Sociologists*, edited by R. Swedberg, 186–99. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
SCHIAPPA, EDWARD. 1989. "The Rhetoric of Nukespeak." *Communication Monographs* 56: 253-72. https://doi.org/10.1080/03637758909390263.

SMITH, BRUCE L. R. 1966. *The Rand Corporation. Case Study of a Nonprofit Advisory Corporation*. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674866256.

SØRENSEN, JESPER. 2013. "Magic Reconsidered: Towards a Scientifically Valid Concept of Magic." In *Defining Magic: A Reader*, edited by B.-C. Otto and M. Stausberg, 229-42. Sheffield: Equinox.

STEELE, BRENT J. 2019. "Welcome Home! Routines, Ontological Insecurity and the Politics of US Military Reunion Videos." *Cambridge Review of International Affairs* 32: 322-43. https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2018.1564899.

STEINER, BARRY H. 1991. *Bernard Brodie and the Foundations of American Nuclear Strategy. Modern War Studies*. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.

SUBBOTSKY, EUGENE. 2010. *Magic and the Mind: Mechanisms, Functions, and Development of Magical Thinking and Behavior*. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195398873.001.0001.

SUBBOTSKY, EUGENE. 2014. "The Belief in Magic in the Age of Science." *SAGE Open* 4: 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244014521433.

THE ECONOMIST. 2016. "Thomas Schelling, Economist and Nuclear Strategist, Died on December 13th, Aged 95." *The Economist*. December 20. https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2016/12/20/thomas-schelling-economist-and-nuclear-strategist-died-on-december-13th-aged-95.

THE ECONOMIST. 2022. "The Disturbing New Relevance of Theories of Nuclear Deterrence." March 18, 2022. https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2022/03/18/the-disturbing-new-relevance-of-theories-of-nuclear-deterrence. Date Accessed 25 January 2025.

TRACHTENBERG, MARC. 1989. "Strategic Thought in America, 1952-1966." *Political Science Quarterly* 104: 301-34. https://doi.org/10.2307/2151586.

TURNER, VICTOR WITTER. 1991. *The Ritual Process: Structure and Antistructure*. Symbol, Myth and Ritual Series. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press Cornell Paperbacks.

VILLUMSEN BERLING, TRINE. 2011. "Science and Securitization: Objectivation, the Authority of the Speaker and Mobilization of Scientific Facts." *Security Dialogue* 42: 385-97. https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010611418714.

VUORI, JUHA A. 2016. "Deterring Things with Words: Deterrence as a Speech Act." *New Perspectives* 24: 23-50. https://doi.org/10.1177/2336825X1602400203.

WALT, STEPHEN M. 1991. "The Renaissance of Security Studies." *International Studies Quarterly* 35: 211. https://doi.org/10.2307/2600471.

WASINSKI, CHRISTOPHE. 2011. "On Making War Possible: Soldiers, Strategy, and Military Grand Narrative." *Security Dialogue* 42: 57-76. https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106103983550.

WEART, SPENCER. 1988. "The Physicist as Mad Scientist." *Physics Today* 41: 28-37. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.881120.

WELDES, JUTTA. 1999. *Constructing National Interests: The United States and the Cuban Missile Crisis*. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

WELDES, JUTTA, AND DIANA SACO. 1996. "Making State Action Possible: The United States and the Discursive Construction of 'the Cuban Problem', 1960-1994." *Millennium: Journal of International Studies* 25: 361-95.

WILLIAMS, MICHAEL C. 1992. "Rethinking the 'Logic' of Deterrence." *Alternatives: Global, Local, Political* 17: 67-93. https://doi.org/10.1177/030437549201700103.

WILLIAMS, PHIL. 1991. "Thomas C. Schelling." In *Makers of Nuclear Strategy*, edited by J. Baylis and J. Barnett, 120-35. London: Pinter.

WOHLSTETTER, ALBERT. 1958. "The Delicate Balance of Terror." *Foreign Affairs* 37: 211-34. https://doi.org/10.2307/20029345.

WOHLSTETTER, ALBERT. 1964. "Strategy and the Natural Scientists." In *Scientists and National Policy-Making*, edited by R. Gilpin and C. Wright, 174-239. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

WOHLSTETTER, ALBERT. 2009. "On the Genesis of Nuclear Strategy: Letter to Michael Howard (1968)." In *Nuclear Heuristics: Selected Writings, by Henry S. Rowen, Alain C. Enthoven, Richard Perle, Stephen J. Lukasik, and Andrew W. Marshall*, edited by A. Wohlstetter, R. Wohlstetter, R. Zarate and H. D. Sokolski, 217-53. Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute.

WOLFSON, ROBERT J. 1972. "In the Hawk's Nest." *Society* 9: 18-24. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02701758.

ZARAKOL, AYŞE. 2022. *Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108975877.