Now that yet another book (number 19, I think) has appeared to challenge my Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, first published in 1976 with several subsequent editions also in Hebrew, Chinese, and lesser languages—and there is also a very critical wiki entry—the time has come to confess how I came to write the book.
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. 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.
