The Magazine

First Lady of Intelligence

Roberta Wohlstetter, 1912-2007.

Jan 22, 2007, Vol. 12, No. 18 • By ROBERT ZARATE
Single Page Print Larger Text Smaller Text Alerts

One might be tempted to think of Roberta Morgan Wohlstetter as simply the wife of the late nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter. However, it would be just as accurate to think of Albert as Roberta's husband--she did, after all, get him a job in 1951 at a relatively new defense think tank where she worked called the RAND Corporation. In the following decade there, both would do work that continues profoundly to influence thinking about intelligence and nuclear war.

At RAND, the Wohlstetters leveraged their diverse educational backgrounds--Albert had studied mathematical logic, law (briefly), economics, and the philosophy of science, and Roberta, English literature, law (briefly), and criminal psychology--to tackle the nascent nuclear age's most pressing strategic puzzles. Working with a number of sharp-minded colleagues, they transformed the way national security types think and talk--with concepts like "first-strike" and "second-strike" nuclear capability, "signal-to-noise ratio" in intelligence analysis, "fail-safe" bomber operation, and "hardened" missile silos.

Their research helped inspire the Swiss-born political scientist Fred Iklé to design a way of preventing the accidental and unintentional use of nuclear weapons ("permissive action links"), and a Hungarian-born engineer named Paul Baran to think of more survivable ways of communicating information ("hot-potato routing," known today as "packet-switching," and "distributed networking"--the building blocks of the Internet). For all this, and a host of other things they did after they left RAND in the early 1960s, Albert and Roberta were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan in 1985.

To read more, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber

We're Sorry,

the rest of this article is available only to subscribers.

You have two options:

Subscribing today will provide you with immediate, complete access to the current issue, as well as to all back issues on the site. Each week you will be able to read articles from the newest issue even before print copies are mailed!

Privacy Policy