CONCLUSION
Schelling’s legacy should have been winning the nuclear security debate in favor of MAD, thereby limiting the US arsenal of nuclear weapons to second-strike counterforce missiles on submarines.
Instead, even with the competent although less well- known Jervis perpetuating Schelling’s case in the 1970s, MAD lost the policy debate to NUTS during President Carter’s detente-minded administration.[243] Schelling’s greatest impact thus lies in how he set the precedent for mobilizing game theory and the Prisoner’s Dilemma to represent the international relations security dilemma of achieving peaceful coexistence of nations in a state of anarchy.Glenn Snyder’s powerful essay “‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ and ‘Chicken’ Models in International Politics” (1971) popularized the idea that the Prisoner’s Dilemma appropriately models the fear of preemptive nuclear attack, arms racing, and other problems associated with uncertainty throughout international politics. Linking Schelling’s landmark “Reciprocal Fear of Surprise Attack” to Robert McNamara’s 1967 assessment of American nuclear strategy, Snyder forcefully argued that the Prisoner’s Dilemma exemplified the high-stakes Cold War standoff. Quoting McNamara at length, Snyder conveys that uncertainty over the other’s intentions is sufficient to spark an arms race:
In 1961, when I became Secretary of Defense, the Soviet Union possessed a very small operational arsenal of intercontinental missiles... [and very little technological and industrial capacity to augment their military capability.]
Now, we had no evidence that the Soviets did in fact plan to fully use that capability. But as I have pointed out, a strategic planner must be “conservative” in his calculations; that is, he must prepare for the worst plausible case...
Since we could not be certain of Soviet intentions - since we could not be sure that they would not undertake a massive buildup - we had to insure against such an eventuality by undertaking ourselves a major buildup of the Minuteman and Polaris forces...
Clearly, the Soviet buildup is in part a reaction to our own buildup since the beginning of this decade. Soviet strategic planners undoubtedly reasoned that if our buildup were to continue at its accelerated pace, we might conceivably reach, in time, a credible first- strike capability against the Soviet Union.
This was not in fact our intention. Our intention was to assure that they - with their theoretical capacity to reach such a first-strike capability - would not in fact outdistance us.
But they could not read our intentions with any greater accuracy than we could read theirs. And thus the result has been that we have both built up our forces to a point that far exceeds a credible second-strike capability against the forces we each started with...
It is futile for each of us to spend $4 billion, $40 billion, or $400 billion - and at the end of all the spending, at the end of all the deployment, and at the end of all the effort, to be relatively at the same point of balance on the security scale that we are now.[244] [245] [246] [247]
Snyder concludes that this regrettable situation is best captured by the Prisoner’s Dilemma model: “Thus, the Secretary of Defense, with remarkable clarity, and in a tone which can only be described as wistful frustration, expounded the essence of the prisoner’s dilemma in the nuclear age,,,115 a state of frustration driven by both sides’ “belief that one’s own country is peaceful... [and that] one’s own arms are only defensive reactions to the other’s threat. ”116 Mysteriously, despite the fact of MAD and the inability to win the nuclear arms race, still strategists viewed the Cold War nuclear security dilemma as a virulent Prisoner’s Dilemma.
Secretary McNamara’s interpretation of the dynamics fueling the Cold War were inseparable from Schelling’s early game-theoretic application of the Prisoner’s Dilemma to nuclear war and his solution (to this otherwise mutually suboptimal situation) of deterrence in the form of a second-strike, counter-city capability. Following Schelling’s analysis, McNamara understood that nuclear weapons forever altered warfare by guaranteeing that the destroyed nation could itself launch a devastating counterattack on the would-be victor.
Also following Schelling, Snyder asserts that the security dilemma - which, by definition, must be populated only by pure security-seeking agents, who, nonetheless, are haunted by the specter that the other is seeking to get the upper hand - is best captured by a Prisoner’s Dilemma: “It provides a more complete portrayal of the consequences of anarchic system structure because it allows for the possibility of illusory conflict engendered by mutual suspicion and fear and for the possibility of actual incompatibilities of interest and aggressive intent not motivated by security considerations.”117 And because it is impossible “ever to be sure of the other party’s intentions” and guessing wrong can have terrible consequences, uncertainty without any actual predatory intent is sufficient, according to PD-security dilemma logic, to mimic real incompatibility of interests.118Thomas Schelling’s and Glenn Snyder’s use of the Prisoner’s Dilemma model shows how game theory, also known as rational deterrence theory, coevolved with the US deployment of nuclear forces to maintain a nuclearized form of sovereignty. Strategists developed rational decision theory to maintain US security by providing deterrence with a formal basis that theorists subsequently used to revisit human relations throughout society much more broadly. This chapter has provided evidence to sustain the following points:
1. After World War II through to the present, nuclear warfare has been a nonempirical subject ideal for applying purely analytic models of strategic rationality.
2. These strategists, and those who followed, deferred to game theory as the standard for rational action and established the norm of treating the high- stakes nuclear security dilemma and arms race in terms of a PD game.
3. Consistent with neoliberal theory, Schelling set out to salvage what he could of classical liberalism and sought to defend the bilateral position of mutual assured destruction.
Yet, instead, as the next chapter explains, his initial concession to strategic rationality, and its entailed acceptance of the PD model, made it logically impossible to vindicate MAD against the more aggressive war fighting strategy of NUTS.4. This game theoretic framing of the nuclear security dilemma, although logically impeccable, has the implication of giving sole credence to strategic rationality to imbue action with coherence. Furthermore, it cedes reciprocal respect and the assurance of cooperation based on upholding the no-harm principle in favor of viewing the other as a relentless strategic combatant who must be countered with coercive bargaining and asymmetric deterrence.
Part II, “Government,” shows how social scientists extended this nuclearized exercise of national sovereignty into the interstices of civil society when they accepted the overarching reach of strategic rationality and lifted its core logical puzzle of the Prisoner’s Dilemma from the domain of the nuclear security dilemma and applied it to the social contract. Therefore, strategists’ tendency to “adopt... the stance that there is an enemy or an opponent, and that whenever there is a choice between maximizing our values and his, we maximize ours even if that involves injuring him” was normalized throughout markets and government when social scientists and policy analysts adopted rational decision theory as the comprehensive understanding of intelligible behavior.119
11 8 Ibid., 74.
119 Quote is from Philip Green, Deadly Logic, 1966, 213.