Navigate:  home  |  about this site  |  AW bibliography  |  RW bibliography  |  contact  

« Albert Wohlstetter's Pre-RAND Writings (1936-1940) | Main | Albert Wohlstetter's Writings (1960-1969) »

January 22, 2008

Albert Wohlstetter's RAND Writings (1951-1959)

Albert Wohlstetter
The Bibliography Project. This next installment provides a list of Albert Wohlstetter's writings at the RAND Corporation during the 1950s. Again, as with the list of Wohlstetter's pre-RAND writings, this list isn't comprehensive. But it is the best chronological bibliography of Albert's 1950s RAND writings that you'll find outside of the register for the Wohlstetters' private papers.

But first, a little biographical context: Albert Wohlstetter first joined the RAND Corporation as a consultant in February 1951. Prior to that he had been working for several years at a prefabricated housing company in southern California that had tried, but in the end failed, to mass-produce the "Packaged House," a design by Bauhaus architects Konrad Wachsmann and Walter Gropius.

Roberta [Mary Morgan] Wohlstetter, who had been working off-and-on in RAND's social science division since 1948, helped to set up a meeting for her husband with Charles "Charlie" Hitch, a Missouri-born Rhodes Scholar who, after working for the Office of Strategic Services during World War Two, had settled in Santa Monica to head RAND's economics division. Hitch and Wohlstetter immediately clicked, and Hitch hired him to work as a consultant to RAND's mathematics division. In the mathematics division, Albert worked mainly on problems related to modeling logistics, issues far removed from nuclear strategy. But this would all change a few months later.

As Albert Wohlstetter would recall in an interview several decades later, in May 1951 Hitch asked him whether he would be interested in working on a problem that the recently-formed U.S. Air Force (USAF) had posed to RAND. The problem, posed as a question, was basically this: How should the USAF base the Strategic Air Command (SAC)? At first, Albert thought that this would end up being a run-of-the-mill logistics problem. But after a weekend of thinking through the problem, he began to understand better how the choice of SAC's method of basing its small force of medium-range manned bombers -- which, when armed with atomic gravity bombs, constituted at the time America's main hedge against "central war" in Europe, that is, a Soviet invasion of Western Europe -- had important implications.

And so, Albert Wohlstetter accepted Charlie Hitch's offer, and with that, entered the world of nuclear-age strategy.

Albert Wohlstetter's RAND Writings (1951-1959)

Posted by Robert on January 22, 2008 7:16 AM