Ellsberg’s conversion was from one passion to another, opposite passion. But there were also less extreme though still personally disturbing and disruptive transformations among some of Ellsberg’s erstwhile colleagues. Most notable was the case of Bernard Brodie.
Once considered the dean of American strategy, Brodie was conspicuously absent from the pilgrimage to Washington and power trailed by so many others from RAND in the 1960s. Brodie’s first step away from the view of the world tacitly held by the strategists of RAND’s economics division began in the late 1950s. Through the influence of several Soviet-affairs experts in RAND’s social science division, especially Nathan Leites, Brodie came to realize that the Soviets were not irrational monsters, that they were impressed by the dangers of conflict getting out of hand, that in crises they tended to be prudent. Then, while in France for a year in 1960, Brodie met some of the leading French strategists—mainly Raymond Aron, Pierre Gallois, André Beaufre—and he increasingly sympathized with their views. This was when de Gaulle was publicly proclaiming that France could no longer trust the U.S. to defend Europe with nuclear weapons and so must build its own independent arsenal. Meanwhile, the new Kennedy Administration in the U.S., filled with several of Brodie’s old friends, was publicly opposing such plans and encouraging the West Europeans to spend much more money to build up a conventional-weapons defense.
Brodie’s new French friends thought the American idea was absurd, reflecting insensitivity toward the security interests of France. To Pierre Gallois, the American strategy meant that NATO would have to concentrate its troops to head off a Soviet invasion, thus creating an attractive, tightly packed target for a Soviet nuclear strike if the Russians found their aggression otherwise repelled. On the other hand, if NATO’s troops were dispersed, they would not have the strength to resist a conventional advance. Gallois, along with de Gaulle, concluded that deterring war in the first place was the only sound policy, and to do that the West had to convince the Russians that it would use nuclear weapons to counter an invasion. McNamara’s proclamation that the U.S. would try to avoid using nuclear weapons only blunted their deterrent value. Moreover, Gallois seriously doubted that the Russians, after taking the enormous risk of mounting an offensive against the West, would hesitate to use nuclear weapons if they found themselves losing without them—no matter what kinds of “signals” NATO might send. Brodie went to Europe a firm believer in the strategy of conventional limited war; he had been one of its progenitors, and the idea had gained nearly unanimous acceptance among his fellow American defense intellectuals. But he went home siding with his French friends.
Back in the States, his drift toward the French position was accelerated by the growing animosity between himself and Albert Wohlstetter. It was something that had been festering for a couple of years, as Brodie saw the Wohlstetter style of strategic thought gradually displacing his own preeminent position in the field. The Brodie-Wohlstetter falling-out symbolized the clash between the old and the new—Wohlstetter the mathematical logician versus Brodie the scholar of philosophy and international relations, rigor versus softheadedness in Wohlstetter’s eyes, apolitical scholasticism versus a keen historical sense in Brodie’s. As Wohlstetter’s star began to shine and as several of his closest acolytes took over the Pentagon as Whiz Kids, the general image of nuclear strategy changed, and Brodie’s own light dimmed.
Brodie was the original nuclear strategist, the only one, except for Kaufmann and Schelling, who had given any thought to strategy before coming to RAND. Yet, in 1961, Brodie, unlike his friends and colleagues who had soared off to Washington, was offered no official position, nor even asked for his advice. He felt shunned, humiliated. And the main object of his envy was the mentor of the Whiz Kids, Wohlstetter, who became Brodie’s bête noire. His sympathy for the French position stiffened. He would frequently take one side of an argument just because Wohlstetter had taken the other.
Those who had known Brodie for years were suddenly puzzled by the series of flip-flops that he made in the early 1960s. The Bernard Brodie who wrote in 1958 that “between the use and non-use of atomic weapons there is a great watershed of difference and distinction… that ought not be cavalierly thrown away if we are serious about trying to limit war,” now believed that “the idea that we may not initiate use of nuclear weapons of any size or number tactically, for fear that it will precipitate a general nuclear war, seems to me to be one of the grossest forms of self-disarming that history can record.” The Brodie who as late as 1960 referred to Wohlstetter’s famed Foreign Affairs article as having “the significant name of The Delicate Balance of Terror’” wrote one year later that “the balance has… proved something other than delicate,” and still later, “I think the balance of terror has never been delicate.” In early 1961, Brodie observed, “It may indeed be rational for the Soviet leaders to start a total war, which is to say that they might think it rational and have fairly good reasons for thinking so.” By 1965, he believed, “Unless we are dealing with utter madmen… it is virtually impossible to discover in the real world the considerations that could make the Soviet leaders undertake to do such a thing in the face of the enormous risks they would be incurring—risks that are certainly not slighted in their military and political doctrines.”
Brodie laid out the case for theater nuclear weapons and against large conventional forces in a 1966 book, first printed as a 1965 RAND memorandum, called Escalation and the Nuclear Option. Clearly, there were logical inconsistencies in Brodie’s new position that were sparked more by events in his personal life than by objective ruminations on strategy. However, the change in thinking was hardly without a solid intellectual base. For as Brodie departed from the traditions of his past, he opened himself up to new streams of thought. Not least was the idea, mainly inspired by the French strategists and discussions with Nathan Leites, that in a major war the Soviets might not follow America’s “signals” to keep the battle confined to a certain set of rules or constraints that would serve NATO’s advantage, that this fundamental premise to the strategic analysis of the preceding decade was a wish not at all supported by hard evidence.
“Everything we know about Soviet military thinking,” Brodie wrote as early as February 1963, “indicates rejection of those refinements of military thought that have now become commonplace in this country, concerning, for example, distinctions between limited war and general war, between ‘controlled’ and ‘uncontrolled’ strategic targeting, and between nuclear and non-nuclear tactical operations.” Even apart from considerations of Soviet doctrine, Brodie was coming to conclude that “violence between great opponents is inherently difficult to control, and cannot be controlled unilaterally…. Once hostilities begin, the level of violence has in modern times tended always to go up.”
More important, Brodie also believed that the Soviets simply had no inclination to invade Europe, so why spend hundreds of billions of dollars to correct a problem that didn’t exist? To Brodie, the very existence of nuclear weapons and an unequivocal policy to use them on the battlefield in the event of a large invasion were the best guarantees to prevent war from breaking out in the first place. What disturbed him about McNamara’s conventional-war strategy was that it “tends to displace upward the level at which deterrence seems to be really important. The time to deter wars is most emphatically before they break out, which is entirely feasible so long as we don’t spin too thick a cocoon around each nuclear weapon.”