Rand Corporation's Israel-Arab War Games (1967)

"So, in May, I was in the United States, as I told you. In May 1967, I was in California… By the way, I was visiting the Rand Corporation, and they were playing a war game over there: Israel vs. the Arabs. At some point, the game got to a point where Israel dropped a nuclear bomb on the Arabs. I don’t know whether it was based on CIA estimates or on Rand’s own estimates. They asked me about it and I didn’t tell them anything. And then I got a message from [redacted] to return to Israel immediately" (IDF Brigadier General Yitzhak Yaakov & Dr. Avner Cohen, 1999).

"'Yicha,' as he was called, was head of the IDF's weapons research and development program; a memoir he published during retirement had him convicted of handing over of secret information without authorization" (haaretz.com, 2013).

"Think Tanks - Billions for Brainwork: A fascinating new industry, devoted to solving "other people's problems" by the application of sheer intelligence (condensed from New York Times): Two retired generals sat in the "Red Room" and talked quietly about launching a surprise bombing raid. The electric calendar on the wall of the map-lined room showed the date: June 9, 1975. The battleground was Asia. A war game was being played at RAND Corp., the "think tank" generally credited with helping to shape U.S. military strategy for almost two decades. The games room lay behind a foot-thick bank-vault door in the basement of one of RAND's two modern oceanfront buildings in Santa Monica, Calif. Two smaller rooms, marked "Red Army" and "Blue Army," were linked to the games room by foot-square swinging panels called "Judas doors." Inside these small rooms, opposing Red and Blue officers planned their battlefield strategies for that future June 9, then passed their battle plans through the Judas doors to RAND game controllers, who evaluated the casualties and damage suffered by each side. Finally, the Red and Blue commanders were called in, separately, to learn what they had wrought in the latest of a series of "RAND wars" that have been fought every weekday for almost 20 years. Games are just one of the 200 research projects at RAND, best known of the proliferating U.S" (Reeves, 1967).