The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War

by Fred Kaplan

In December 1968, the group produced a RAND monograph titled Rationale for NU-OPTS. It was written by a RAND analyst named James Schlesinger and supervised by Richard Yudkin, an unusual Air Force general—Jewish, bookish, with no experience as any sort of airplane pilot, having earned his three stars entirely as a military strategist. They derived their key insights from Thomas Schelling, a former RAND eminence who had written two books—The Strategy of Conflict and Arms and Influence—which applied mathematical Game Theory to modern warfare, depicting combatants as rational actors pursuing a strategy that maximized their interests, given the strategy that their opponent was most likely to pursue. Schelling imagined scenarios involving small-scale nuclear strikes: shots across the bow to demonstrate resolve, pricks of pain to convey a message to an adversary that more pain would follow unless he halted his aggression. Yudkin and Schlesinger outlined a concept built largely on Schelling’s ideas, suggesting that small-scale nuclear strikes should be built around prepackaged slices of the SIOP—a specific slice for one war scenario, a different slice for another scenario—which they labeled “Selective Attack Options.”