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With a new Preface by the author
THOMASC. SCHELLING
“In eminently lucid and often charming language,
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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Wecanall be thankful that Appendix A is not out of date.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 con-
cerned 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 par-
ticular 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
