Schelling, Thomas

Thomas Schelling is a Nobel Prize–winning economist, best known for his groundbreaking work applying game theory to questions of nuclear strategy and national security. This entry looks at the career and writings of Thomas Schelling, focusing on his views on game theory and his contributions to military strategy.

Schelling was born on April 14, 1921, in Oakland, California. He received a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1944 and completed his PhD in economics at Harvard University in 1951. In 1953, Schelling became associate professor of economics at Yale University, where he spent the next 5 years. During this period, he began working as an adjunct fellow with the RAND Corporation, and in 1958, he left Yale to spend a year at RAND as a full-time researcher. His tenure at RAND proved extremely influential as he developed a general theory of strategy that could be applied to current problems of national security. In 1959, he returned to academia at Harvard University with a joint appointment in the Department of Economics and the Center for International Affairs. Throughout the late 1950s, Schelling produced a number of papers on bargaining and strategy that would form the basis of his most famous work, The Strategy of Conflict, published in 1960.

Schelling argued that the existing game theory, which emphasized zero-sum games (conflict scenarios where one player wins all and the other loses all), did not fully take into account more complex situations where players used bargaining techniques such as threats, promises, and even cooperation to achieve their objectives. He applied his modified game theory to a range of problems faced by the U.S. military and national security community during the Cold War, including brinkmanship, deterrence, and the arms race.

In the late 1950s, the increasing nuclear parity between the United States and the Soviet Union called into question America’s Cold War strategy, specifically the reliance on nuclear deterrence and massive retaliation. The Soviets’ successful test of the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile and launch of the satellite Sputnik in the fall of 1957 made it clear to American strategists that the United States was increasingly vulnerable to a surprise attack. In The Strategy of Conflict, Schelling argued that since both the United States and the Soviet Union had already built up massive arsenals of nuclear weapons, stability could only be achieved by maintaining the ability of both sides to retaliate in the event of a nuclear attack. Therefore, any arms control measures had to promote stability, which Schelling defined as a “balance of deterrence.”

Schelling’s idea of nuclear stability presented a dilemma for military strategists: If neither side could deliver a lethal first strike and if massive retaliation meant mutual suicide, how could nuclear weapons be used as a deterrent to more conventional Soviet aggression? Schelling’s answer to this problem lay in his concept of uncertain retaliation, or, as he put it in The Strategy of Conflict, “The Threat That Leaves Something to Chance.” He argued in favor of putting pressure on the Russians through the use of graduated force and increasing threats targeting civilians. These measures, Schelling asserted, would deter Soviet aggression, because they would make the Soviets believe that the United States was capable of escalating conflict to the point of using nuclear weapons. This strategy of consciously using force to appear irrational in order to force one’s opponent into backing down is one of Schelling’s best known theories, and his ideas would have a direct impact on U.S. foreign policy in Vietnam in the early 1960s.

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