Brodie felt that anything short of this seriously eroded the concept of deterrence and might lead to situations where one side might enter hostilities believing it could remain non-nuclear.

His dissertation was titled Sea Power in the Machine Age: Major Naval Inventions and Their Consequences on International Politics, 1814–1940.

He married Fawn McKay Brodie – who became a well-known biographer of Richard Nixon, Joseph Smith, Thomas Jefferson and others – on August 28, 1936.

His most important work, written in 1946, was entitled The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order, which laid down the fundamentals of nuclear deterrence strategy.

The virtual abandonment of first strike as a strategy made Brodie suggest investment in civil defense, which included the "hardening" of land based missile locations to ensure the strength of second-strike capability.

"[6] Similar sexual imagery was liberally used in Stanley Kubrick's film Dr. Strangelove, a satire of Cold War nuclear strategy.

Brodie was also responsible, along with Michael Howard and Peter Paret, for making the writings of the Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz more accessible to the English-speaking world.

Brodie's incisive "A guide to the reading of On War" in the Princeton translation of 1976 corrected most of the misinterpretations of the theory and provided students with an accurate synopsis of the vital work.