The Bernard Brodie Prize
Bernard Brodie lecturing, by Walter Sanders for Life Magazine, September 1946
Contemporary Security Policy is honored to announce the winner of the annual Bernard Brodie Prize, given for the outstanding article appearing in the journal the previous year. The Bernard Brodie Prize of 2010 goes to:
The Fourth Wave in Deterrence Research, Jeffrey W. Knopf, April 2010
Dr. Knopf is Associate Professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. The prize was announced at the International Studies Association conference in Montreal on 19 March 2011.
The award is named for Dr. Bernard Brodie (1918-1978), author of The Absolute Weapon (1946), Strategy in the Missile Age (1958) and War and Strategy (1973). Brodie's ideas remain at the center of security debates to this day. One of the first analysts to cross between official and academic environments, he pioneered the very model of civilian influence that Contemporary Security Policy represents.
Although it is not a requirement of the prize, it is especially striking that this year's prize was awarded for contributions to the study of nuclear deterrence, the subject where Brodie made many of his greatest contributions to international studies.
The jury for this year's prize, members of the journal's editorial board, was led by Professor David S. Sorenson of the U.S. Air War College. We thank David and the anonymous jurors for their work making the prize possible. The prize includes a cash award of $1000, made possible by the generosity of the College of Arts and Letters at Old Dominion University. We are honored to acknowledge the permission of Brodie's son and executor, Dr. Bruce R. Brodie, to use his father's name for the award.
The other nominees for the 2010 prize were:
- Realism at the Limits: Post-Cold War Realism and Nuclear Disarmament, Halit Mustafa Emin Tagma, April 2010
- Unavoidable Tensions: The Liberal Path to Global NATO, Tobias Bunde and Timo Noetzel, August 2010
- To Arms Control or Not: Lessons of Focused Case Comparisons, Barry Steiner, December 2010
- Peacebuilding after Afghanistan: Between Promise and Peril, David H. Ucko, December 2010
This was the second Bernard Brodie prize. The first, for the outstanding article of 2009, went to Professor Diane E. Davis of MIT for her article, Non-State Armed Actors, New Imagined Communities, and Shifting Patterns of Sovereignty and Insecurity in the Modern World, Vol. 20, No. 2 (August 2009).


