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STRATEGY CO THOMASC. SCHELLING | THE STRATEGY Oey With a new Preface by the author THOMASC. SCHELLING “In eminently lucid and often charming language, Professor Schelling’s work openstorational analysis a crucialfield of politics, the international politics of threat, or as the current term goes, of deterrence.In this field, the author's analysis goes beyond what has been donebyearlier writers.It is the best, mostincisive, and moststimulating book on the subject.” —Annals of the American Academy “An important contribution to understanding the conductof the ambiguous conflict between the communist bloc on the one hand and the United States and its Free World Allies on the other.” —Journalof Politics Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England ISBN O-&74-84031-3 90000 Coverdesign: Virginia J. Mason 9 "780674°840317 THE STRATEGY OF CONFLICT THOMAS C. SCHELLING HARVARD UNIVERSITY CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS LONDON, ENGLAND © Copyright 1960, 1980 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College 20 19 18 17 «+16 £5 I4 £3 12 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 60-11560 ISBN 0-674-84031-3 (paper) PREFACE TO THE 1980 EDITION WhenI learned that Harvard University Press was going to issue a paperbackedition of this book, I wondered what parts of it would be so embarrassingly obsolete that I would need to delete or rewrite them,or at least to apologize for them in a new preface. It’s twenty years since The Strategy of Conflict appeared. I don’t often reread it; parts of it I hadn’t looked at in more than a decade. Some of the things I said must have becometrite, or irrelevant, or wrong. Some have. But on the whole I can cheerfully report that, though occasionally quaint in its examples, the book is mostly all right. Comments in Chapter 1 about the low estate of military strategy in universities and military services are now so obviously wrong that they can safely be left for their historical value. A more serious issue is whether students — and students may bethe only ones nowa- days who read the book for the first time — will recognize names like Quemoy, Khrushchev, and Mossadeq or will know how Miss Rheingold used to be chosen. Wecanall be thankful that Appendix A is not out of date. It was written on the premise that atomic weapons had not been used since Nagasaki. May the book enjoy manynew printings with that premise intact. Someof the ideas that I thought original in Chapter ro have since become fashionable. Some have even gone on to become unfashion- able. There is now a vast literature on arms limitation, including some things I’ve written, but Chapterrostill says as much in relation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, and says it as clearly, as any other twenty-five pages I have found. A reader who wants to pursue my thoughts on strategy and arms control can see the book by that name that I wrote with Morton H. Halperin, published by the Twentieth Century Fund in 1961, or my Arms and Influence, Yale University Press, 1966. The theoretical contents, not the foreign policy, may be what most people use this book for now. In putting these essays together to make the book, I hoped to help establish an interdisciplinary field vi PREFACE TO THE 1980 EDITION that had then been variously described as “theory of bargaining,” “theory of conflict,” or “theory of strategy.” I wanted to show that some elementary theory, cutting across economics, sociology and political science, even law and philosophy and perhaps anthropology, could be useful not only to formal theorists but also to people concerned with practical problems. I hoped too, and I now think mis- takenly, that the theory of games might be redirected toward applica- tions in these several fields. With notable exceptions like Howard Raiffa, Martin Shubik, and Nigel Howard, game theorists have tended to stay instead at the mathematical frontier. The field that I hoped would becomeestablished has continued to develop, but not explosively, and without acquiring a nameofits own. A few journals, especially the Journal of Conflict Resolution, have played an important role in developing this field, but except for bits of jargon like “non-zero-sum game” and “payoffs,” even the most elementary theory gets little explicit use in journals oriented toward policy makers and practitioners. (Only a few years ago, in writing about alternative Soviet and American attitudes toward particular weapons that might be subject to arms control, I used a few 2 XK 2 matrices to help readers of the article see the differences. The editor of the journal, which I shall not name, insisted on my deleting the matrices to avoid intimidating an audience that, though less sure of my meaning, would be more comfortable with only theslightly tortured verbal description.) The book has had a good reception, and many have cheered me by telling me they liked it or learned from it. But the response that warms me most after twenty years is the late John Strachey’s. John Strachey, whose books I had read in college, had been an out- standing Marxist economist in the 1930s. After the war he had been defense minister in Britain’s Labor Government. Some of us at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs invited him to visit be- cause he was writing a book on disarmament and arms control. When he called on me he exclaimed how much this book had donefor his thinking, and as he talked with enthusiasm I tried to guess which of my sophisticated ideas in which chapters had made so muchdiffer- ence to him. It turned out it wasn’t any particular idea in any particular chapter. Until he read this book, he had simply not compre- hended that an inherently non-zero-sum conflict could exist. He PREFACE TO THE 1980 EDITION Vii had known that conflict could coexist with common interest but had thought, or taken for granted, that they were essentially separable, not aspects of an integral structure. A scholar concerned with monopoly capitalism and class struggle, nuclear strategy and alliance politics, working late in his career on arms control and peacemaking, had tumbled, in reading my book, to an idea so rudimentary that I hadn’t even knownit wasn’t obvious. With modesty and dignity he confessed it to me. You never know whatwill comeof writing a book. Tuomas C. SCHELLING Cambridge, Massachusetts CONTENTS ELEMENTS OF A THEORY OF STRATEGY 1. The Retarded Science of International Strategy 3 2. An Essay on Bargaining 21 3. Bargaining, Communication, and Limited War II. A REoRIENTATION OF GAME THEORY 8r 4. Toward a Theory of Interdependent Decision 83 5. Enforcement, Communication, and Strategic Moves 119 6. Game Theory and Experimental Research 162 III. STRATEGY WiTH A RANDOM INGREDIENT 173 7. Randomization of Promises and Threats 175 8. The Threat That Leaves Something to Chance 187 IV. Surprise ATTACK: A Stupy rin Mutuar Distrust 205 g. The Reciprocal Fear of Surprise Attack 207 10. Surprise Attack and Disarmament 230 APPENDICES 255 A. Nuclear Weapons and Limited War 257 B. For the Abandonment of Symmetry in Game Theory 267 C. Re-interpretation of a Solution Concept for ‘“‘Noncooperative” Games 201 INDEX 395