Brilliant Pebbles and its original braintrust of physicists -- the mercurial Edward Teller, lead co-inventor of the H-bomb, and his creative proteges, defense theorists Lowell Wood and Greg Canavan -- are entwined in the public memory of the Reagan Strategic Defense Initiative. In the early 1980s, Teller sold Reagan on the technical feasibility of making nuclear war obsolete, then assembled Wood and Cavanan month after month in 1986 for strategic thought exercises, based on John Nash game theory. Wood played attacking Soviet forces, the red team; Canavan played the American defenders, the blue team; Teller refereed. Canavan stretched his imagination...