Abstract In the 1950s, a new intellectual figure emerged in American strategic debates: the nuclear strategist. Drawn largely from the RAND Corporation, these thinkers—such as Bernard Brodie, Albert Wohlstetter, and Thomas Schelling—constructed a new field of knowledge: nuclear strategy. While their direct influence on U.S. war planning remains debated, this article argues that the nuclear strategists’ primary impact lay in their ability to create a structured discourse that rendered nuclear deterrence intelligible and actionable. Building on works in epistemic and ontological security, this article conceptualizes deterrence theory as a “script,” an action-oriented construct that transforms unverifiable effects into perceived certainty and provides actors with a sense of control over events. Through ritualized knowledge production, nuclear strategists addressed the radical uncertainty of nuclear policy, acting as “magicians” who linked cause and effect by reference to the deterrence script. This article takes the oft-made comparison between these strategists and “wizards” seriously and shows how their epistemic authority was indeed grounded in relation to magic. Those actors possessed the magicians’ features—liminality, esoteric craft, and secrecy—and were engaged in a practice similar as the one of magicians: sealing over the uncertainties of high-risk activities. The combination of these features granted them with unique epistemic authority over a consequential field of knowledge. In doing so, those “magicians” made the practice of nuclear deterrence sensible, and thus possible.
Thomas Fraise (Thu,) studied this question.