15 Quotes by Thomas C. Schelling

Military strategy...has become the diplomacy of violence.

Against defenseless people there is not much that nuclear weapons can do that cannot be done with an ice pick. And it would not have strained our Gross National Product to do it with ice picks.

If one really believed in the reliability and permanence of an international arrangement, such schemes for providing the authority with 'hostages' might be more efficient, even more humane, than providing it with bombers and shock troops. One could even go further and let the force have a monopoly of critical medicines to use for bacterial warfare on a transgressor country. As soon as it starts an epidemic, it send its medical units in to make sure that no one suffers who cooperates.

Coercion depends more on the threat of what is yet to come than on damage already done. The pace of diplomacy, not the pace of battle, would govern the action; and while diplomacy may not require that it go slowly, it does require that an impressive unspent capacity for damage be kept in reserve.

And there is escaping things the knowledge of which makes one unhappy. If “truth” is what we know and are aware of, in the most engrossing fiction we escape truth. Whatever else it is, drama is forgetfulness. We can forget and forget that we are forgetting. It is temporary mind control. If memories are pain, fiction is anesthesia.

Military strategy... has become the diplomacy of violence.

Models tend to be useful when they are simultaneously simple enough to fit a variety of behaviors and complex enough to fit behaviors that need the help of an explanatory model.

The generic name for behaviors of this sort is critical mass. Social scientists have adopted the term from nuclear engineering, where it is common currency in connection with atomic bombs.

Earlier wars, like World Wars I and II or the Franco-Prussian War, were limited by termination, by an ending that occurred before the period of greatest potential violence, by negotiation that brought the threat of pain and privation to bear but often precluded the massive exercise of civilian violence. With nuclear weapons available, the restraint of violence cannot await the outcome of a contest of military strength; restraint, to occur at all, must occur during war itself. This.