New Left Review I/42, March-April 1967

Rosalind Delmar

The Big Fist

Arms and Influence [1] Thomas C. Shelling, Arms and Influence, Newhaven and London, Yale University Press, 1966. presents an American view of present international relationships. It is a world of a permanent contest of nerves, in which nations have to use all methods at their disposal to persuade other nations to behave in desirable ways; a world potentially without rules, but from which rules have to be extracted only to be explicitly imposed. The ideological tool-kit used to isolate the rules compounds industrial negotiation, games theory, communications theory, behaviourism and child psychology. The instruments are nuclear weapons and conventional forces.

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