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Thomas Schelling was my undergraduate thesis adviser and then doctoral dissertation adviser at Harvard about thirty years ago.  He was also a mentor and friend in the years ahead.  Like many others, my heart breaks at the news of his death.  He was so kind and so brilliant, with a curiosity that was endless.  His insights were profound, as were his contributions to society.  Consider the example of nuclear weapons.  As he expressed in his 2005 Nobel Prize address, “What's so astonishing about the last sixty years?  What’s the most important event that didn’t happen?  [Since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki] there has been no nuclear weapon used in anger, in warfare, in over sixty years.  Nobody in 1945, 1950, 1955, or 1960 could ever possibly have had any confidence or any belief that we would complete the century with no more use of nuclear weapons, even though nuclear weapons had been acquired by at least eight nations since then.”  For the role that his thinking about strategic interaction played in helping to maintain that nuclear peace alone, our world owes him a profound debt.  It owes him many other debts too.  I pray that his family will find comfort, and that his curiosity, kindness, and ethic of public service will continue to inspire us all.
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