Albert Wohlstetter
| Albert Wohlstetter | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | December 19, 1913 New York, New York, USA |
| Died | January 10, 1997 (aged 83) Los Angeles, USA |
| Alma mater |
City College of New York Columbia University |
| Occupation | |
| Known for | The Delicate Balance of Terror[2] |
| Spouse(s) | Roberta Wohlstetter (née Morgan) |
| Children | Joan Wohlstetter-Hall |
Albert James Wohlstetter (December 19, 1913 – January 10, 1997) was an influential and controversial nuclear strategist during the Cold War. He was of German ancestry. He and his wife Roberta Wohlstetter, an accomplished historian and intelligence expert, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan on November 7, 1985. He was one of the inspirations for the film Dr. Strangelove.
Albert Wohlstetter's paternal grandparents were cosmopolitan Jews who immigrated to the United States from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Albert's father, Philip, was born in the United States about twenty years later.
Albert was born on 19 December 1913, the fourth and youngest child of Philip Wohlstetter and Nellie (née Friedman). Albert's older siblings were William (1902–1967), Helene (1906–1974) and Charles (1910–1995). Albert's brother Charles was an accomplished businessman who would help Albert get his start as a young man. Charles also employed Helene at one of his companies, ConTel, where she was killed in a shooting by a disgruntled employee in 1974.
The Wohlstetters lived in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. Philip Wohlstetter had attended City College of New York was an attorney and the Chief Legal Council to the Metropolitan Opera Company. In 1912 he founded one of the early phonograph companies, the Rex Talking Machine Corporation. Luminaries of the performance world were regular guests in the Wohlstetter home. The Rex company was taken over and its Wilmington, Delaware factory converted to war production during the First Word War. Philip died of a heart attack in 1918 when Albert was four years old.
Wohlstetter started at City College of New York in 1931 through a scholarship in modern dance, earning a B.A. in 1934.
Wohlstetter started at Columbia Law School on a fellowship in 1934. It was in a class there that he met Roberta Morgan. Wohlstetter was bored by the law and left the program after only one year. But he stayed at Columbia to pursue a Ph.D. in mathematical logic and the philosophy of science. He studies under Abraham Wald where he was a peer of Jacob Wolfowitz. After a thesis titled Language and Empiricism earned him an M.A. in June 1937, several fellowships allowed him to work on is dissertation. He had a fellowship with the Social Science Research Council on a project to incorporate modern mathematical methods into economics and business cycle research. From 1941–1942 he was a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
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