Henry Kissinger: This particular book grew out of something I encountered in foreign relations, in New York. Harvard only played a very indirect role in the sense that one of my colleagues and I were debating about nuclear strategy in the way amateurs do; I didn’t know anything much about it. But I wrote him my observations, and he sent them to “Foreign Affairs,” and “Foreign Affairs” published them. On the basis of that, I was asked to be study director of a group of very senior people. And that produced this book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, which became sort of a standard work. The point of that book was, but it is now fairly commonplace, but in those days the official policy of the United States was massive retaliation, which was no matter how the war started, we would respond with the massive use of nuclear weapons. I took the position that this was not possible as a national strategy of a democracy; that the loss of human life was too vast and that in the end we would paralyze ourselves by adopting such a strategy because we would never wish to carry on. The thing for our strategy was that we would be blackmailing ourselves and if we didn’t, we would be doing something that would produce such consequences that the world would never be the same. That became more or less the adopted doctrine as the decades went by. But in the 50s, it was relatively new.