The most important event of the second half of the 20th century is one that didn't happen." With those words, Thomas Schelling marked the "stunning achievement" of 50 years without a nuclear war. No one person can claim credit but Mr Schelling has as much claim as anyone to helping prevent Armageddon. He helped to prevent war because he understood it and explained it brilliantly to others, changing the intellectual climate, inspiring a generation of strategic thinkers and, almost incidentally, saving the young discipline of game theory from irrelevance.
On Monday, Mr Schelling shared the Nobel Prize in Economics with Robert Aumann, the mathematician. The prize is long overdue but also a curious reward for a man who did almost no research as such. "If you ask what he does for a living, I have to answer that he lives by his wits," James Coleman, the sociologist, once remarked.
