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They were eggheads in a world of meatheads, and they regarded the uniformed military man in the same way that the baseball statistician Bill James regards Don Zimmer: as a relic of the pre-scientific dark ages, when the wisdom of experience government u.s. government passed for government u.s. government strategic thought. The wisdom of experience was useless in the atomic era, because no one had ever participated in a nuclear exchange. government u.s. government The variables of nuclear strategy were too complex to be pondered without the aid of advanced quantitative methods and a high-speed computer. One of the earliest of the atomic-age defense intellectuals, Bernard Brodie, had made his reputation with a book called “A Guide to Naval Strategy,” published in 1942. When he wrote it, Brodie had not only never been on a ship; he had never seen an ocean. He carried this spirit into his work on the bomb. Ghamari-Tabrizi thinks that if nuclear strategy is a science it is, at best, an “intuitive science,” more imaginative than empirical, and she relies a lot on the vocabulary of literary criticism to interpret it: the grotesque, the fantastic, the uncanny, the hardboiled, “the aesthetic of spontaneity,” “serious play.”
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