What Obama Could Learn From America's Greatest Unknown Nuclear StrategistGet out of the hothouse from time to time.

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"It's the king's game," Kaufmann once told me, with a reedy chuckle, in explaining the allure of this inner sanctum.

But then, in the early '80s, when Ronald Reagan came to office, Kaufmann got out of the hothouse (nobody asked him to stay on), and he suddenly saw his old world from a fresh perspective.

In the intense ambience of RAND or the Pentagon, he told me, "it was easy to get caught up in the whole nuclear business. You could eat and breathe the stuff. … Then you'd move away from it for a while, look at it from a distance, and think, 'God, that's a crazy world.' "

Even on the theory's own level, flaws stood out blaringly. In one conversation we had around this time, he listed several problems: "How do you get your surveillance and post-attack reconnaissance? How do you know what's been hit and what's left? How do you end the war? How do you get the two sides together?"

Kaufmann and most of his like-minded colleagues had always held some of these reservations about the concept, but they stuck to it, again, as an alternative to the instant holocaust of the pre-1960s nuclear-war plan.

The novelty—and shock—of the Reagan administration, especially in its first term, was that, for the first time, high-level officials were talking about "limited nuclear options" and "prevailing" in a "protracted nuclear war" in public and with gusto, as if the notions were real and even appealing.

At this point, ensconced at the Brookings Institution, Kaufmann became an outspoken critic of defense planning and policies, attacking the feasibility of the nuclear notions and calling for a 50 percent reduction in the military budget.

Gradually, he abandoned the ideas about nuclear war that he'd once practically invented. They "may sound reasonable—or may not, depending on your viewpoint," he once told me, "but they have no operational substance. … My guess is they're just not worth the trouble, even assuming they are feasible, which I question."

The Cold War and preoccupations with nuclear-war strategy are, of course, long over. So what lessons does Kaufmann's evolution hold for the incoming Obama administration? Every subculture, especially every bureaucratized subculture, has a set of unquestioned assumptions—bits of "conventional wisdom," as John Kenneth Galbraith once called them. The key to preserving one's sanity and wisdom is not to fall prey to their assumptions, not to fear sounding stupid by questioning them—to stay an inside player without losing a common-sense outsider's perspective.

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Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and the author of Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power. His 1983 book about the nuclear strategists, The Wizards of Armageddon (which deals extensively with Kaufmann, among others), is still in print. He can be reached at .

Photograph of Barack Obama on Slate's home page by Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images.

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