Books

New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966. First edition of this "exemplary text on the interplay of national purpose and military force" (Book Week). Octavo, original red cloth. Boldly signed by Thomas Schelling on the title page. Near fine in a very good dust jacket with some rubbing to the spine. A very nice example of an important book, that is uncommon signed. In Arms and Influence, Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling argues that bargaining power, and the exploitation of this power, for good or evil, to preserve peace or to threaten war, is diplomacy—the diplomacy of violence. The author concentrates in this book on the way in which military capabilities—real or imagined—are used, skillfully or clumsily, as bargaining power. He sees the steps taken by the U.S. during the Berlin and Cuban crises as not merely preparations for engagement, but as signals to an enemy, with reports from the adversary's own military intelligence as our most important…