Interview with Thomas Schelling, 1986

Item Information

Title:
Interview with Thomas Schelling, 1986
Description:
Thomas Schelling is a scholar of foreign affairs, national security, nuclear strategy, and arms control, who served in the White House and Executive Office of the President from 1951-1953. During the Kennedy administration he was a consultant to the State Department and previously worked at the RAND Corporation. He begins with a discussion of his own early strategic interests and the state of thinking among other strategists in the latter 1950s, pointing out, among other things, that the credibility of Mutual Assured Destruction was already well on the decline by then. The more credible deterrent, he believes, is simply the widely recognized awareness that even a localized conventional conflict can go nuclear. This leads to a discussion of how to utilize a nuclear threat. In his conception, there is no reliable method to control use of nuclear weapons, there is only the hope of keeping them from being used "in a way that everybody would regret instantly." In this sense, Robert McNamara's Ann Arbor speech in 1962 reflected the objective of preventing a major escalation. It was not a war-fighting strategy, but more a reflection of McNamara's fear of nuclear weapons. He then speculates on why it is difficult for a secretary of defense to implement his preferred strategic policies -- one of the reasons being the uniformed military's sense that war-fighting is part of their sphere. He discusses concepts of command-and-control and weapons refinements as they evolved in the 1960s, then continues with a lengthy consideration of aspects of the no-cities doctrine. He speculates on the likelihood of a nuclear conflict under certain conditions; relates in depth his experiences with designing war games in the early 1960s around the Berlin crisis; and follows up with certain thoughts about the nature of the flexible response doctrine.
Interviewee:
Schelling, Thomas C., 1921-
Date:
March 4, 1986
Format:
Film/Video
Location:
WGBH
Collection (local):
WGBH Open Vault
Series:
War and Peace in the Nuclear Age
Subjects:
Vietnam War, 1961-1975
Soviet Union
Unites States
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Nuclear warfare
Mutual assured destruction
Rand Corporation
Berlin (Germany)
Nuclear weapons
Flexible response (Nuclear strategy)
Korean War, 1950-1953
Berlin (Germany)--History--Crisis, 1961
Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917-1963
Johnson, Lyndon B. (Lyndon Baines), 1908-1973
McNamara, Robert S., 1916-2009
Eisenhower, Dwight D. (Dwight David), 1890-1969
Churchill, Winston, 1874-1965
Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeevich, 1894-1971
Dulles, John Foster, 1888-1959
Places:
France
Extent:
01:15:28:26
Link to Item:
http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_5293F77426B84C68A360BD6283ACF4FC
Terms of Use:
Rights status not evaluated.
Contact host institution for more information.
Publisher:
WGBH Educational Foundation
Identifier:
V_5293F77426B84C68A360BD6283ACF4FC