Warner R. Schilling

Warner Roller Schilling (May 23, 1925 – October 20, 2013) was an American political scientist and international relations scholar at Columbia University (1954–1957, 1958–1996, emeritus 1997–2013), where he was the James T. Shotwell Professor of International Relations. He was director of the university's Institute of War and Peace Studies from 1976 to 1986.

Biography Schilling was born in Glendale, California, but grew up in Greater St. Louis. He served as a radio operator with the United States Army Air Forces from 1943 to 1946. He was part of an era of students motivated to study international relations following World War II because, as he later said, "We thought that by studying international politics and foreign policy we might have a part in moving the world in happier directions." The couple raised two sons and lived in Leonia, New Jersey, and in surrounding Bergen County.

Schilling (second from right) at a 1969 conference for the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency; his wife Jane P. M. Schilling was also present (far left)

Schilling was the co-author of the book Strategy, Politics and Defense Budgets (1962) along with Paul Y. Hammond and Glenn H. Snyder. Writing for the journal Defense Analysis in 1989, Michael D. Yaffe wrote that 25 years later the three authors' "insights about defense planning still ring true" and that the book was a landmark of defense-policy literature. Schilling's portion, The Politics of National Defense: Fiscal 1950, was an examination of the process by which the U.S. defense budget was arrived at during a time of fundamental change for U.S. security policy and an analysis of the forces at play that made rational choice so difficult. Robert J. Art has labeled Schilling, along with contemporaries Richard Neustadt, Roger Hilsman, and Samuel Huntington, as part of the "first wave" of scholars of foreign policy making.

He was also co-author of American Arms and a Changing Europe: Dilemmas of Deterrence and Disarmament (1973) and co-editor of European Security and the Atlantic System (1973). In addition, he published a number of scholarly articles. One of those was regarding the decision by the President Harry S. Truman and the U.S. government to proceed with development of the hydrogen bomb in 1950; in the mid-1950s Schilling interviewed virtually every participant in that decision, and gave public lectures on the subject, but a book-length treatment of the decision did not incorporate these interviews until after his death. He was recipient of one of the Guggenheim Fellowships awarded in 1964.

At Columbia, he became a full professor in 1967.

During the Columbia University protests of 1968 that split the faculty and campus, Schilling was considered one of the more vocal of the conservative faculty members, opposing the demonstrators and their spokesperson Mark Rudd and supporting the position of the university administration. That evening, he spoke to a large gathering of like-minded students and faculty at Wollman Auditorium and gained applause after proclaiming, "if Mark Rudd is still at Columbia in the fall, I will not be." On the evening of April 26, he was part of a press conference in which several faculty members endorsed a moderate student group called the Majority Coalition that wanted to prevent the granting of amnesty to the occupying students; Schilling said he had "high admiration for [the] conduct" of the counter-demonstrators. He was one of several professors to propose that the faculty themselves cordon off Low Library to prevent free entry and exit of the demonstrators and seize the university identification cards of those leaving. On April 28, he was part of a line of faculty formed outside Low Library that sought to prevent violence among students. Schilling subsequently faulted colleague Alan Westin, leader of a faculty group more sympathetic to the demonstrators, and others in that group, for engaging in behavior that turned what he thought would have been a manageable student-administration conflict into "a disaster".

He served as director of the university's Institute of War and Peace Studies from 1976 to 1986, taking over from Professor William T. R. Fox, who had founded the institute twenty-five years earlier. ) As director, Schilling endeavored to keep the institute's funding sources and physical space from being encroached upon by other parts of the university. He also served as a consultant for the U.S. Department of State and Department of Defense, as well as for the U.S. Senate's Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery. on National Educational Television's debate-style Court of Reason in 1963, to discuss Western alliance policy regarding nuclear weapons; appearances on the nationally distributed Columbia Lectures in International Studies, for instance in 1964 to talk about "The Likelihood of Limited War"; on New York local television station news and public affairs programs to discuss international events; and on the CBS Morning News in 1982 to discuss the ongoing Falklands War. He was quoted in newspapers over several decades, often emphasizing the need to appreciate a broad sweep of history to understand current developments. A 1986 front-page story in the Portland Press Herald displayed his quote, "Statesmen very rarely decide to have a war – they usually decide to risk a war," meaning that miscalculations in those risk assessments sometimes result in wars taking place that they never would have chosen. A panel session at the International Studies Association 2009 annual conference in New York commemorated his teaching and mentoring contributions in the field of security studies. As Stacie E. Goddard, one of the organizers of the session, said, "We all felt it was important to recognize the influence Warner has had on our teaching."

In a 2003 profile by The Christian Science Monitor, Schilling said that students were more oriented towards academic careers than they had been in years past, but were less knowledgeable about history and geography and less personally vulnerable to decisions about war and peace. After his death, unfinished works of his – regarding assassination as an instrument of foreign policy, and his interviews and conclusions regarding the aforementioned H-bomb decision – were published in collaboration with other authors and scholars. The latter project took the form of the book Super Bomb: Organizational Conflict and the Development of the Hydrogen Bomb and was written by British academic Ken Young. A review in Foreign Affairs characterized the result as "a compelling book" that presented "a fresh look at the defeat" of those opposing the weapon, a review for the Association of College and Research Libraries found value in the "illuminating contemporaneous interviews" that Schilling had conducted, and a review in Perspectives on Politics pointed to the "sixty years of gestation" back story behind the book as "highlight[ing] why it constitutes a unique contribution to the historical literature and to our understanding of bureaucratic politics".

Publications Books Strategy, Politics and Defense Budgets (Columbia University Press, 1962) [co-author with Paul Y. Hammond and Glenn H. Snyder] American Arms and a Changing Europe: Dilemmas of Deterrence and Disarmament (Columbia University Press, 1973) [co-author with William T. R. Fox, Catherine M. Kelleher, and Donald J. Puchala] European Security and the Atlantic System (Columbia University Press, 1973) [co-editor with William T. R. Fox] Super Bomb: Organizational Conflict and the Development of the Hydrogen Bomb (Cornell University Press, 2019) [co-author with Ken Young]

Selected articles "Civil-Naval Politics in World War I", in World Politics Vol. 7, No. 4 (1955), pp. 572–591. "The H-bomb Decision: How to Decide Without Actually Choosing", in Political Science Quarterly Vol. 76, No. 1 (1961), pp. 24–46. "Scientists, Foreign Policy, and Politics", in American Political Science Review Vol. 56, No. 2 (1962), pp. 287–300. "All You Ever Wanted to Know About MIRV and ICBM Calculations But Were Not Cleared to Ask", in Journal of Conflict Resolution Vol. 17, No. 2 (1973), pp. 207–242. [co-author with Lynn Etheridge Davis] "U.S. Strategic Nuclear Concepts in the 1970s: The Search for Sufficiently Equivalent Countervailing Parity", in International Security Volume 6, No. 2 (1981), pp. 48–79. "Decision Making in Using Assassinations in International Relations", in Political Science Quarterly Vol. 131, No. 3 (2016), pp. 503–539. [co-author with Jonathan L. Schilling]