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1 " Against defenseless people there is not much that nuclear weapons can do that cannot be done with an ice pick. And it would not have strained our Gross National Product to do it with ice picks. "
― Thomas C. Schelling , Arms and Influence
2 " If one really believed in the reliability and permanence of an international arrangement, such schemes for providing the authority with 'hostages' might be more efficient, even more humane, than providing it with bombers and shock troops. One could even go further and let the force have a monopoly of critical medicines to use for bacterial warfare on a transgressor country. As soon as it starts an epidemic, it send its medical units in to make sure that no one suffers who cooperates. "
― Thomas C. Schelling
3 " And there is escaping things the knowledge of which makes one unhappy. If "truth" is what we know and are aware of, in the most engrossing fiction we escape truth. Whatever else it is, drama is forgetfulness. We can forget and forget that we are forgetting. It is temporary mind control. If memories are pain, fiction is anesthesia. "
4 " Military strategy...has become the diplomacy of violence. "
5 " I define game theory as the study of how rational individuals make choices when the better choice among two possibilities, or the best choice among several possibilities, depends on the choices that others will make or are making. "
― Thomas C. Schelling , Micromotives and Macrobehavior
6 " Nuclear weapons can do it quickly. That makes a difference. "
7 " This is a difference between nuclear weapons and bayonets. It is not in the number of people they can eventually kill but in the speed with which it can be done, in the centralization of decision, in the divorce of the war from political processes, and in computerized programs that threaten to take the war out of human hands once it begins. "
8 " Furthermore, theory that is based on the assumption that the participants coolly and “rationally” calculate their advantages according to a consistent value system forces us to think more thoroughly about the meaning of “irrationality.” Decision-makers are not simply distributed along a one-dimensional scale that stretches from complete rationality at one end to complete irrationality at the other. Rationality is a collection of attributes, and departures from complete rationality may be in many different directions. Irrationality can imply a disorderly and inconsistent value system, faulty calculation, an inability to receive messages or to communicate efficiently; it can imply random or haphazard influences in the reaching of decisions or the transmission of them, or in the receipt or conveyance of information; and it sometimes merely reflects the collective nature of a decision among individuals who do not have identical value systems and whose organizational arrangements and communication systems do not cause them to act like a single entity. "
― Thomas C. Schelling , The Strategy of Conflict
9 " let me remind you of the particular characteristics of all of these behavior systems that I am trying to focus on. It is that people are impinging on other people and adapting to other people. What people do affects what other people do. "
10 " The generic name for behaviors of this sort is critical mass. Social scientists have adopted the term from nuclear engineering, where it is common currency in connection with atomic bombs. "
11 " If a model meets the criterion of simplicity it will often, like the thermostat-controlled heating system, describe physical and mechanical systems as well as social phenomena, animal behavior as well as human, scientific principles as well as household activities. An example is “critical mass. "
12 " If the option of taking the course pass-fail (without a letter grade) is available to all students, it is usually observed that there are some who will elect pass-fail no matter how many others do, some who will elect letter grades no matter how many elect pass-fail, and an intermediate group who will elect pass-fail if enough do but will choose letter grades if pass-fail is uncommon. Notice that the first and second groups’ behavior is independent of how the third group chooses, but not vice versa; the people whose behavior is uninfluenced nevertheless influence others. "
13 " Because people vary and because averages matter, there may be no sustainable critical mass; and the unravelling behavior, or initial failure to get the activity going at all, has much the appearance of a critical mass that is almost but not quite achieved. This is therefore a kindred but separate family of models. "
14 " Earlier wars, like World Wars I and II or the Franco-Prussian War, were limited by termination, by an ending that occurred before the period of greatest potential violence, by negotiation that brought the threat of pain and privation to bear but often precluded the massive exercise of civilian violence. With nuclear weapons available, the restraint of violence cannot await the outcome of a contest of military strength; restraint, to occur at all, must occur during war itself. "
15 " We want to deter an enemy decision to attack us—not only a cool-headed, premeditated decision that might be taken in the normal course of the Cold War, at a time when the enemy does not consider an attack by us to be imminent, but also a nervous, hot-headed, frightened, desperate decision that might be precipitated at the peak of a crisis, that might result from a false alarm or be engineered by somebody’ s mischief—a decision taken at a moment when sudden attack by the United States is believed a live possibility. "
16 " Coercion depends more on the threat of what is yet to come than on damage already done. The pace of diplomacy, not the pace of battle, would govern the action; and while diplomacy may not require that it go slowly, it does require that an impressive unspent capacity for damage be kept in reserve. "
17 " Models tend to be useful when they are simultaneously simple enough to fit a variety of behaviors and complex enough to fit behaviors that need the help of an explanatory model. "
18 " The principle of critical mass is so simple that it is no wonder that it shows up in epidemiology, fashion, survival and extinction of species, language systems, racial integration, jaywalking, panic behavior, and political movements. "
19 " Measles vaccination shares some crucial features with the thermostat system but differs in important respects. A measles-epidemic model without vaccination will be different but recognizable as a member of the family. And "
20 " Models often overlap. The measles epidemic is usually a critical-mass process.4 A succession of epidemics, with intervening periods in which the pool of susceptibles renews itself, corresponds to a cyclical model. "
