Book excerpt: An illuminating insight into the work of Thomas Schelling, one of the most influential strategic thinkers of the nuclear age. By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the United States' early forays into Vietnam, he had become one of the most distinctive voices in Western strategy. This book shows how Schelling's thinking is much more than a reaction to the tensions of the Cold War. In a demonstration that ideas can be just as significant as superpower politics, Robert Ayson traces the way this Harvard University professor built a unique intellectual framework using a mix of social-scientific reasoning, from economics to social theory and psychology. As such, this volume offers a rare glimpse into the intellectual history which underpins classical thinking on nuclear strategy and arms control - thinking which still has an enormous influence in the early twenty-first century.