policy, nuclear weapons could indeed be assessed without serious security problems. For the important role of secretary of this group, responsible for guiding its flow and writing up a full report, Armstrong and George Franklin were responsible for selecting a young Harvard professor, recommended by Arthur Schlesinger, McGeorge Bundy, and William Yandell Elliott, whose images ranged from liberal to hard-line. The result was the emergence of Henry Kissinger as an important figure on the national stage.

Coming into the project after it was already well underway, he progressively took charge and turned it in effect into an operation in support of his own writing of a book, which at most fitted roughly the emerging trend of thought within the group itself. Kissinger came down to work at the Councilin the 1955-56 academic year, and the following year produced Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, which reached the best-seller lists for several months and attracted enormous attention. That the analysis was brilliant was generally agreed, but as time went on there came to be greater skepticism about the validity of the most striking conclusion, that there was such a thing as a "limited nuclear war," for which the United States should have the capability and the will.

Half a dozen years later, in a book stemming from another Council group on the security of Western Europe, Kissinger was to reverse field and conclude that there was no feasible firebreak in the real world once the use of nuclear weapons had been initiated, hence no realistic possibility of a "limited"