He sneered: "So I suppose you mean to write a dissertation on the research and development of the Minuteman ballistic missile?" No, I replied, my subject is… The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire (stringing together the most resonant, most grandiloquent words I could think of). On my first day visiting the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus I was stopped by a young professor who somehow knew I was the author of the aforementioned booklet, which evidently he disliked intensely (it was a tad cold-blooded about the end of the world). At the time I was mostly interested in strategic nuclear weapons and had just published a booklet on "the strategic balance" that went beyond missile inventories to operationalize them, to see who would come out on top by attacking not cities but missile silos. With the profitable family factories in Italy still going strong and absolutely no interest in earning a living, after going to Israel as a war volunteer just in time for the 1967 war but left at loose ends by an ill-timed 1970 ceasefire, I responded to the invitation of two genteel and distinguished Johns Hopkins University professors to spend two years in the United States signed up as a graduate student while writing a dissertation, without any tiresome coursework or classes and with tuition paid and even a scholarship.
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