Neocons: the men behind the curtain: undeterred by their encounters with reality, the strategists who pushed for war in Iraq believed then, and still believe, that their moment has come.

READING THE CALLS TO WAR with Iraq, one was reminded of Cato the Elder, who spent his retirement urging the Roman generals to remove the thorn of Carthage permanently from Rome's side so it could never again defy Roman might.

The United States has had its share of Catos--the American quest for an impregnable defense and military supremacy has a long and distinguished history. Today the effort is embodied by Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld in the Defense Department, key players in the Bush administration. To understand what appears to many as a revolutionary shift in U.S. foreign policy, it is useful to realize that a large part of their thinking derives from concerns with threats from weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles.

Deterrence: The minimalist school

Bernard Brodie, the pioneer strategist of nuclear war, was among the first to consider the complexities of war-fighting strategy in the nuclear age. Looking into World War II strategic bombing campaigns for lessons, Brodie glimpsed an iron law of nuclear war: A good defense is not good enough.

British defenses against German V-1 rocket attacks had been remarkably successful. Close to 2,300 rockets were reported to have targeted the city of London in a period of 81 days. At their peak, British air defenses shot down 97 of 101 approaching V-1 rockets, a truly impressive number. But, Brodie noted, "If those four had been atomic bombs, London survivors would not have considered the record good." In the nuclear age, defenses need to have zero margin of error.

This realization helped forge a consensus about the futility of surprise attack or total victory between nuclear-armed adversaries. Brodie argued that no victory in a nuclear conflict could be worth the price, because retaliation in kind would be assured. In such a world, the primary purpose of the American defense establishment would be to survive a nuclear attack and preserve the capacity to retaliate--thus instilling in the enemy the same realization of the futility of conflict. "Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them." (1) The foundations of deterrence as the strategic doctrine guiding America's deployment and treatment of nuclear weapons were laid.

Deterrence in the early years of the Cold War had to operate on three levels: There was the pressing obligation to deter the enemy from thinking about attacking American territory with nuclear weapons. There was the need to deter friends and allies from pursuing nuclear weapons programs of their own by extending the American nuclear umbrella over them. And there was the continuing relevance of conventional forces, which had to be maintained to prevent military adventures from escalating into nuclear exchanges. What combination of these three different elements, with what mix of hardware and deployment posture, would most effectively do the job at the least cost?

Enter the specialists

Given these bewildering complexities, nuclear war-fighting doctrine began to attract the interest of specialists from outside the uniformed services. The Rand Corporation emerged as the site most suited for this type of work, and a network of analysts gravitated there. They have left an indelible stamp on America's relationship with the rest of the world.

James Schlesinger, who served as defense secretary in the Nixon administration, was at Rand. So was Herman Kahn, famous for arguing that the United States could fight and win a nuclear war (and for being caricatured as Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick's film by the same name). There was Albert Wohlstetter, the Columbia-trained mathematician described by Henry Kissinger as a "brilliant strategist," and Andrew Marshall, whose network in the defense establishment reads today like a who's who of the Bush cabinet. There was Alain Enthoven, the leader of the "Whiz Kids," a team that advised Robert McNamara on the conduct of the Viemam War. And there was Daniel Ellsberg, who broke ranks by going public about the nature of his work.

Together these men introduced assumptions and techniques into the study of nuclear war that resonate to this day.

Project Rand began in 1945 as a platform to connect research and development with military planning. It was conceived by Gen. H. H. "Hap" Arnold of the U.S. Army Air Force to retain the scientific experts who had worked for him during wartime. In 1948, with legal and financial help from the Ford Foundation, Rand was separated from its base in industry and incorporated as a nonprofit organization headquartered in Santa Monica, California.

The other services did not lag far behind in creating think tanks. The army established the Operations Research Office at Johns Hopkins University, the navy its Operations Evaluation Group at M.I.T. The Institute of Defense Analysis and the Stanford Research Institute came later.

Much of Rand's research was designed to help decision-makers analyze complex, multivariable situations and make decisions under conditions of extreme uncertainty. A network of researchers was pulled in from universities--M.I.T., Princeton, and the California Institute of Technology, for example--to work together with the most advanced labs in private industry.

Rand was at the cutting edge of theories on deterrence and nuclear war-fighting in the 1950s. Leading the charge was Albert Wohlstetter.

Wohlstetter: Upping the ante

Wohlstetter joined Rand's Economics Division in 1951 and began by studying the overseas basing patterns of the Strategic Air Command (SAC), which had been tasked with maintaining the nuclear retaliatory force. Working with a small team of analysts, he challenged the prevailing conviction that fear of retaliation in kind rendered surprise attacks obsolete between nuclear-armed adversaries. (2)

It was only logical to Wohlstetter that any first strike by the enemy would target the U.S. nuclear arsenal and its delivery capabilities, which at that time meant SAC. Wohlstetter closely studied what combination of strikes, by what quantity of bombers, flying along which trajectories, would most effectively cripple SAC in the opening phases of a conflict.

If a first strike took out a substantial portion of SAC, the United States would be unable to deliver a sufficiently damaging retaliatory strike, particularly if the Soviet Union maintained enough reserve capability to strike again at secondary targets, such as cities. To understand the …