Bernard Brodie (military strategist)

Bernard Brodie (20 May 1910-November 24 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.

Biography

Bernard Brodie was the son of Max and Esther (Bloch) Brodie. Brodie graduated from the University of Chicago with a Ph.B in 1932 and a Ph.D in 1940. He was an instructor at Darmouth College 1941-43. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Naval Reserve Bureau of Ordinance and at the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. He taught at Yale University from 1945-1951. He worked at the RAND Corporation as a senior staff member 1951-1966.

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.

Brodie was also responsible, along with Michael Howard and Peter Paret, for making the writings of 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 Prussian's theory and provided students with an accurate synopsis of this vital work.

He married Fawn McKay Brodie on August 28, 1936. Fawn was a well-known biographer of Richard Nixon, Joseph Smith, Thomas Jefferson and others.

Works

• 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; Indian 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.

Awards

• Carnegie fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, 1941
• Carnegie Corp. reflective year fellowship in France, 1960-61

References

• "Bernard Brodie, at 68; A Political Strategist and Military Author" New York Times, November 27, 1978 page D12.
• Contemporary Authors Online, 2003.