CONCLUSION
In conclusion, several points are evident:
1. By 1980, the Prisoner’s Dilemma fulfilled multiple functions: it captured the toughest case security dilemma as well as more mundane ones besides, it reflected the arms race, and it thus came to represent the state of anarchy and the puzzle of emerging from it.
2. The PD is a core logical puzzle at the heart of noncooperative game theory and it is reinforced by game theorists’ assumption that actors pursue fungible scarce resources in competition with each other, and the fact that insecurity in an Assurance Game makes it appear indistinguishable from a Prisoner’s Dilemma to external observers.
3. The PD representation of the paradox of nuclear deterrence reinforced the view that deterring an aggressor requires threatening punitive damage that mimics suckering the other actor by defecting, recommends coercive bargaining to ensure one’s most favorable settlement, and transposes the exercise of ensuring one’s own cooperation into threatening sanctions on others to secure their compliance.
4. Within the paradigm of strategic rationality, NUTS must win the nuclear security debate because it sustains the practice of issuing credible threats, engaging in coercive bargaining, and using flexible nuclear forces to exert escalation dominance. MAD relies on the manifest fact of essential equivalence, building a common recognition of the futility of full-scale thermonuclear war and the high probability of uncontrollable escalation should nuclear confrontation break out, and it deters via counterattack instead of flexible escalation using evolving nuclear options.[348]
5. Noncooperative game theory carries the claim of exhaustive validity over all decision making and renders focal the Prisoner’s Dilemma by its own theoretical structure. Thus, viewing relations through its lens necessarily negates categories of action that have alternative means of legitimation.
President Carter’s conversion from MAD to NUTS demonstrates how offensive neorealism consistent with noncooperative game theory secured a logical victory for escalation control and flexible response that attempted to defy the “life condition” of mutual assured destruction by demonstrating the intent and capability to prevail in prolonged nuclear conflict and to secure flexible nuclear military capability to address varying levels of conflict.[349] [350]James Schlesinger stands witness to President Carter’s moral stance evident in his affirmation that, “Why, of course, if we made the promise to them we have to enter into an agreement to fulfill another administration.” Even at Schlesinger’s prompting that reneging on an agreement with allies could give the United States extra bargaining leverage, Carter replied that, “Of course we have given our word. ”161 However one evaluates the exigencies of international politics, we can recognize that strategic rationality contradicts the practice of making agreements and keeping them. It recommends the building of social order out of threats, coercive negotiation, and individual maximization without regard for others instead of reciprocal respect, assurance of one’s cooperative intention, and the good will to make at least one person better off and no one worse off.