Bernard Brodie (military strategist)

Bernard Brodie (born May 20, 1910 in Chicago , † November 24, 1978 in Pacific Palisades ) was an American political scientist and military strategist. He is considered the "architect" of the US nuclear strategy and is known as the "American Clausewitz ".

Life

Bernard Brodie was the son of the fruit merchant Max Brodie and his Esther, b. Bloch, who immigrated to the USA from Russia . In the family home was Yiddish spoken. He studied political science at the University of Chicago and took his bachelor's degree in 1932 . After his marriage in 1936, he received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1940 in the political science discipline International Relations . He was then a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University and a lecturer at Dartmouth College . In 1943 he joined the United States Navy Reserve . In 1945 he took part in the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco as a technical expert for the US delegation . In the same year he began his career as a university lecturer and military strategist.

Brodie taught at Yale University and the National War College , was assistant to the chief of staff of the US Air Force and from 1951 to 1966 employee of the RAND Corporation , for which he wrote numerous strategy papers. Since 1963 he has taught as a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles , and in 1978 he retired .

Brodie was one of the realists in international relations . The point of nuclear weapons is not to use them, but to threaten their possible use. During the Cold War he was an advocate of the second strike theory , according to which deterrence is only possible through the credible threat of a massive second strike.

In 1975 Brodie was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Fonts (selection)

• Sea power in the machine age. Major naval inventions and their consequences on international politics, 1814-1940 . Princeton University Press, Princeton 1941.
• The absolute weapon . Yale institute of international studies, New Haven 1946.
• Implications of nuclear weapons in total . Rand Corporation, Santa Monica 1957.
• Strategy in the missile age . Princeton University Press, Princeton 1959.
• Escalation and the nuclear option . Rand Corporation, Santa Monica 1965.
• with Henry Kissinger : Bureaucracy, politics, and strategy . University of California, Los Angelese 1968.
• War and politics . Macmillan, New York 1973.

Web links

• Bernard Brodie, Political Science: Los Angeles , Calisphere, University of California
• Bernard Brodie, American military strategist , Enzyclopaedia Britannica
• Entry on Bernard Brodie in the personal lexicon of international relations , Institute for Social Sciences at the Technical University of Braunschweig

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on Bernard Brodie in the Personal Lexicon of International Relations , Institute for Social Sciences at the Technical University of Braunschweig , accessed on January 2, 2016.
2. ↑ Unless otherwise stated, information on biography is based on: Entry on Bernard Brodie in the personal dictionary of international relations , Institute for Social Sciences at the Technical University of Braunschweig , accessed on January 2, 2016.