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January 23, 2008

Albert Wohlstetter's Writings (1960-1969)

Albert Wohlstetter
The Bibliography Project. During the 1950s Albert Wohlstetter, by that time a middle-aged man in his early forties, quietly established himself as one America's premier defense analysts through his RAND Corporation studies on SAC basing and nuclear-age deterrence. But he didn't become widely known outside of government circles until January 1959, when Foreign Affairs published "The Delicate Balance of Terror." It was this startling and controversial article, which he had written and revised while serving on the U.S. delegation to the 1958 surprise attack conference in Geneva, that first established him as a public intellectual of national security affairs.

Although Albert Wohlstetter would leave the RAND Corporation in 1963, his publishing output during the decade would increase steadily, even as he balanced his classified work as an outside adviser to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations with his unclassified work as a professor -- first at Berkeley, then at UCLA, and finally at the University of Chicago.

During the 1960s, Albert's work in strategy covered a broad range of topics, such as (but certainly not limited to): the aims of US foreign policy; preventing the spread of nuclear weapons not only to America's opponents, but also to America's allies; the Cuban missile crisis and its aftermath; scientific method vs. the authority of scientists in national security debates; civil nuclear energy's military potential; the impact emerging technologies may have on matters of peace and war; and debates over the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system.

Albert Wohlstetter's Writings (1960-1969)

Posted by Robert on January 23, 2008 6:32 PM