The Cold World They Made: The Strategic Legacy of Roberta and Albert Wohlstetter by Ron Robin (review)

The job of writing a thorough study about once influential but now forgotten historical figures is always fraught with danger and best approached with trepidation, lest rancorous tensions and disagreements reemerge. The task becomes doubly difficult when examining the life and influence of a married couple whose intellectual journey from Trotskyism to neoconservatism coincided with the deep societal transformation of the United States from the 1930s to the 1980s—from an isolationist, institutionally racist society to a racially integrated, global superpower obsessed with the threat posed by its chief rival, the Soviet Union.

Yet just such an insightful work is exactly what Ron Robin has accomplished in The Cold World They Made: The Strategic Legacy of Roberta and Albert Wohlstetter. The book amply describes how, for roughly a decade from the 1950s to the mid-1960s, the Wohlstetters, through their writings and personalities, from their intellectual perch at the RAND Corporation, the think tank based in Santa Monica, held center stage as defense intellectuals—a now largely vanished (and often sorely missed) breed. They were conceivably the main architects of U.S. strategic nuclear policy until the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson. Through numerous disciples such as Paul Wolfowitz and Zalmay Khalilzad, their influence was felt as late as the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Although Albert, a brilliant mathematician, convivial epicure, and charming conversationalist, gained the most renown for his theories on defense preparedness and nuclear deterrence, it was his wife Roberta who laid the theoretical foundation for all of Albert's work. Roberta's groundbreaking treatise on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, became the template for Albert's concerns about a Soviet Union out for world conquest, whose sneak attack on Western democracies could happen at any given moment. "The Wohlstetters embraced a teleological understanding of history in which one assumed—rather than proved—that the events of World War II were part of a recurring human pattern, rather than sui generis, and that little had changed since then. One could always expect a totalitarian power to have maniacal ambitions. The past, therefore, offered instructions on how to stymie the predictable ambitions of this formulaic adversary" (p. 109).

Those instructions amounted to a variation on the old dictum "peace through strength." Albert preached to the end of his life in 1997 the need for the United States and its allies to maintain enough nuclear capability to be able to engage in a second strike that would make the enemy think twice about striking first. He also posited that analysts like himself and his wife were the best to decide matters of nuclear deterrence, insofar as politicians typically vacillated in Hamlet-like fashion in the face of danger and could not be relied on to respond adequately. As he wrote about Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and the then prevailing theory of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), "the only way to prevent a nuclear conflagration 'was by assuring an adversary that not only could you retaliate, but you would retaliate. I think [McNamara] found it hard to think about that after his experience in the [Cuban] Missile Crisis'" (p. 112)

Likewise Albert described another secretary of defense, Harold Brown, as "being another one of those mealy-mouthed politicians who 'oscillated between the MAD dogma' and a recognition that the Soviets would never endorse an 'implicit pact for mutual suicide'" (p. 113).

Robin skillfully tracks the development of the Wohlstetters' theories, with their emphasis on continual military preparedness and almost fetishistic view of the Soviet Union as the source of all evil, views echoed by their great admirer, Ronald Reagan, who awarded the Wohlstetters a Medal of Honor. Unfortunately, Robin fails to mention the crucial role Albert played in the election of John F. Kennedy when the Wohlstetters and other RAND analysts leaked information about a so called missile gap to the campaign, which became one of Kennedy...