Prominent among the growth industries of the Cold War epoch are the “think factories” that have sprung up to meet the insatiable bureaucratic appetite for pre-packaged, quick-frozen ideas. The best known is the Air Force’s RAND in Santa Monica. Most universities that are at all in the swim have an auxiliary think factory open for contracts, and there are others more frankly commercial that manage to extract a tidy net profit per idea delivered.
Some studies carried out by these enterprises are straightforward solutions of technical problems that arise, or might plausibly be expected to arise, in the protracted conflict: how many spare galoshes ought the Navy keep in reserve supply? what is the optimum evasion course for a Polaris submarine? what happens to leaflets dropped into a big city? But these humdrum and necessary researches are by no means enough to keep the think factories operating at full output, or to satisfy the loftier browed among both producers and customers.
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