Assurance
We may now combine our analysis of PDs [Prisoner’s Dilemmas] and commitment devices in discussion of the application that first made game theory famous outside of the academic community.
The nuclear stand-off between the superpowers during the Cold War was exhaustively studied by the first generation of game theorists, many of whom worked for the US military... Both the USA and the USSR maintained the following policy. If one side launched a first strike, the other threatened to answer with a devastating counter-strike. This pair of reciprocal strategies, which by the late 1960s would effectively have meant blowing up the world, was known as ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’, or ‘MAD’. Game theorists objected that MAD was mad, because it set up a Prisoner’s Dilemma as a result of the fact that the reciprocal threats were incredible.Don Ross, 20141
Some writings on international cooperation have applied game theory - particularly the Prisoner’s Dilemma game - to security issues to identify the conditions under which cooperation is likely to emerge... [S]ecurity dilemmas... are often modeled as single play Prisoner’s Dilemma.
Joseph S. Nye Jr. and Sean M. Lynne-Jones, 19882
In the late 1940s and 1950s, defense intellectuals developed game theory to anchor military strategy in scientific analysis. The last chapter discussed how game theorists developed strategic rationality as a comprehensive science of decision making, which entailed plausibly identifying “a set of rules for each participant which tell him to behave in every situation which may conceivably arise,” and which was immediately developed for application to military and nuclear strategy.3 Analysts
1 Don Ross, “Game Theory,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2014.
2 Joseph S. Nye Jr. and Sean M. Lynne-Jones, “International Security Studies,” International Security (1988) 12:4, 5-27, at 19.
3 John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1944, 1947, 1953), 31.
69 perceived that military strategy could not be contained by zero-sum game theory and John von Neumann’s minimax concept of securing the least bad outcome for oneself. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma model of bargaining, John Mayberry discovered that threatening the adversary with the worst outcome that one could credibly muster was the superior approach.
In i960, Thomas Schelling used a Prisoner’s Dilemma model to defend the nuclear strategy of mutual assured destruction (MAD). The Prisoner’s Dilemma model of the nuclear security impasse implies that one actor’s self-defense necessarily compromises the other’s security because each has the first preference of achieving supremacy through preferring the outcome least acceptable to the opposition. Schelling’s hope was that in addressing the worst-case scenario for achieving security, MAD would provide a blueprint for achieving peaceful coexistence in a nuclear age. Schelling’s allegiance to strategic rationality and his attendant acceptance that the pursuit of mutual security was best represented by a Prisoner’s Dilemma game made his approach to international security and economics consistent with the neoliberal school of international relations theory as well as with neoliberal theory as generally understood. In addressing the worst-case scenario and limiting himself to game theory, Schelling sought to provide a strong foundation for rescuing a classical liberal world order rooted in reciprocal security and mutual prosperity.
However, the PD model of security departs from classical liberalism in suggesting that the pursuit of security is an antagonistic exercise pitting competitors against each other. Schelling’s approach to security set a precedent in international relations as well as in political economy and civil society.[167] The Prisoner’s Dilemma model seemed germane to reflect both the ultimate unknowability of another actor’s intentions and actors’ instrumental imperative to compete for scarce resources required to realize goals.[168] However, Schelling’s double concession - first to the overarching relevance of strategic rationality, and second to the PD model of the security dilemma - made it impossible for him to salvage classical liberalism.
Thus, as the pages ahead discuss, MAD ultimately capitulated to pro-nuclear-use theory, and a strategy of offering the assurance of cooperative intention yielded to one of deterring predators by adopting their stance. Thus, during the 1970s, deterrence would replace classical liberal assurance, incentives would replace reasons and legitimacy, and coercive threats would replace shared normative expectations.Although consequential and intensely riveting, the hard-fought nuclear security debate between MAD proponents and nuclear utilization targeting selection (NUTS) enthusiasts is barely known to anyone aside from nuclear security experts. Even though MAD guided US nuclear strategy through the end of Robert S. McNamara’s tenure as Secretary of Defense, MAD increasingly lost the nuclear security debate to NUTS from the late 1960s until the Carter administration’s 1980 adoption of countervailing strategy formalized in Presidential Directive 59. Whereas MAD relied on bilateral deterrence, NUTS promoted asymmetric deterrence, escalation dominance, coercive bargaining, and hegemony. NUTS is predicated on sustaining the intent and capability to fight and win nuclear war among superpowers.[169] Rather than promoting the assurance of reciprocal no-harm, NUTS maintains asymmetric leverage of the power to harm at all levels of conflict as the basis for achieving US security independently from that of its superpower rivals. The intellectual ascendancy of NUTS over MAD logically followed from Schelling’s double admission of the exhaustive reach of game theory and its implicated Prisoner’s Dilemma model of the security dilemma.
In hindsight, the loss of MAD to NUTS in intellectual debate seems puzzling. As international relations theorist Robert Jervis insists, MAD is a stubborn, practical fact, whereas NUTS relies on the fantasy that it is possible to win an all-out nuclear conflict.[170] Many nuclear strategists concede that stockpiling more nuclear warheads than those already sufficient to destroy civilization to demonstrate the intent and ability to prevail in nuclear war is ultimately counterproductive.[171] Even theorists holding the view that international security is inherently antagonistic agree on the self-defeating implications of NUTS.[172] Not only will this offensive strategy contribute to proliferation, especially if regimes crumble and weapons are unaccounted for, but it also fails to acknowledge the potential threats that errors of judgment and technical accidents pose to all actors.[173] [174] Nevertheless, despite the practical impossibility of being victorious in a nuclear conflict among superpowers, the aggressive NUTS strategy managed to win over even the liberal- minded Carter administration.
This triumph of NUTS over the classical liberal MAD invites thorough exploration.11 Not only do actors fail to secure the status quo, but they further
devote precious resources to pursing an arms race by engaging in the ceaseless and costly development of armaments. This chapter explores the implications of Schelling’s dual concession to the PD game and to strategic rationality and, more broadly, seeks to understand why this framework was adopted in the first place.
The chapter is divided into five sections and a conclusion. The first two, “A Brief History of Game Theory” and “Rational Deterrence and Game Theory’s Ascendance,” recount the development and early reception of game theory. Examining the original applications of orthodox game theory, which subsequently has been accepted as humanity’s most authoritative statement of rationality, helps us understand the current role rational choice theory plays throughout the social sciences and professional programs. Game theory was devised to provide a comprehensive theory of all multi-person decision making involving competition over scarce resources, independent of empirical examples. Rational deterrence theory is equivalent to rational decision theory or rational choice theory and can be used as a descriptive model, a normative theory of rationality, and a prescriptive policy tool.
The next two sections introduce Herman Kahn’s and Thomas Schelling’s strategic postures of NUTS and MAD, respectively. These two nuclear strategies, only two of four possible positions (the others being nuclear disarmament and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s massive retaliation), predominated over nuclear policy debates throughout the 1960s and 1970s. These two sections present the MAD vs. NUTS security debate in light of their original expositors, who were both luminaries in the field of nuclear deterrence.12 The fifth section discusses US nuclear defense policy from the beginning to the end of Robert S. McNamara’s tenure as Secretary of Defense.
This section makes evident that McNamara developed the policy of mutual assured destruction to maintain the US’s deterrence posture in view of the Soviet’s achievement of destructive parity.Review of the Literature, 1945-1985,” Analyse and Kritik (1987) 9, 7-46; John Mueller raises the question of why the constant obsession with security at a cost that far outpaces returns; see Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Cold War revisionists understand “American policy not as a response to an expansionist Soviet Union but as growing out of internally generated forces, with Soviet policy as a reaction to American intelligence” (104). This revisionist position leaves room to grant to Mikhail Gorbachev a similar acknowledgment on the part of the USSR, accepting that “the belligerent Soviet security policies had been responsible for the Cold War and that an unambiguously defensive posture could increase Soviet security” (fn 8, p. 122). Furthermore, along these lines of communicating the recognition of the hopelessness of waging nuclear war, President Ronald Reagan “was ready to sign an agreement to abolish nuclear weapons” (p. 115). All three quotes are from Robert Jervis, “Security Studies: Ideas, Policy, and Politics,” in The Evolution of Political Knowledge: Democracy, Autonomy, and Conflict in Comparative and International Politics, ed. Edward D. Mansfield and Richard Sisson (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 100-126.
12 Patrick Morgan, “New Directions in Deterrence Theory,” in Nuclear Weapons and the Future of Humanity, ed. Avner Cohen and Steven Lee (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1986).
The “Conclusion” acknowledges Schelling’s legacy in theoretical analyses of the nuclear security dilemma and in discussions on security dilemma scenarios throughout international relations and civil politics. Schelling’s approach is driven by the analytic structure of game theory and his objective of countering the worst-case scenario. In his application of the Prisoner’s Dilemma model to both nuclear security and social contract theory, Schelling unhesitatingly accepts that hopeful cooperators must adopt the first preference of taking advantage of all other actors. He ignores the option already available in classical liberalism of offering assurance of cooperation backed by the threat of sanctions. Both MAD’s focus on the mutual assurance of destruction and NUTS’s asymmetric threats of deterrence, escalation dominance, and coercive bargaining depart from classical liberalism.