Brodie, Bernard (1910–1978)

Military strategist who was the main proponent of the strategies of nuclear deterrence. Known as “the American Clausewitz,” Bernard Brodie shaped the American debate on national nuclear strategy for half a century.

Born in Chicago, Brodie received his Ph.D. in international relations from the University of Chicago in 1940. He served in the office of the chief of naval operations from 1943 to 1945, and, after World War II, he taught at Yale University, where he was an associate professor of international relations and director of graduate studies. In 1951, Brodie joined the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, where he worked on defense and nuclear strategy until 1966. He joined the Department of Political Science at UCLA in 1963 and retired in 1977.

Although his first publications were on naval warfare (Layman's Guide to Naval Strategy in 1942 and Seapower in the Machine Age in 1943), Brodie became famous for his work on nuclear strategy. He was the first scholar of strategic studies to innovate the field, revisiting concepts and theories of warfare in the light of the new nuclear context. In his 1946 book The Absolute Weapon, Brodie anticipated the concept of massive retaliation of the 1950s. He was also the first to recognize the strategic significance of nuclear weapons.

Other books of Brodie's dealing with nuclear strategy include The Atomic Bomb and American Security (1945), Strategy in the Missile Age (1959), Escalation and the Nuclear Option (1966), and From Crossbow to H-Bomb, which he wrote in 1973 in collaboration with his wife, Fawn M. Brodie, a prominent historian. In 1973, Brodie also published War and Politics, a volume on the relations between military affairs and statecraft. In it, he examined the history of World Wars I and II and the Korean and Vietnamese Wars, and looked at the changing attitudes toward war, theories on its causes, nuclear weapons, and the nature of strategy itself.

Brodie always kept a sense of proportion and humanity on war. He advocated a strong policy that enabled the United States to defend itself and deter aggression, but he opposed arms races and excesses in military technology expenses.