It is not usually supposed that intellectuals possess significant political or social power.
However, the circumstances linking the atomic bomb and the American state have given specific academics and intellectuals more power than is usually recognized. The bomb was an intellectual project.
Its very feasibility was suggested to Roosevelt by Einstein as a counter to a possible Nazi bomb. Subsequently, a scientist became head of the Manhattan Project and Oppenheimer and others then attained enormous power through the Atomic Energy Commission. But what is even more unusual is that social scientists acquired significant power within the US state... Many of these were European emigres whose experience of totalitarian regimes in Europe gave them strong reasons to support the ideology of the US style liberalism. The new global responsibilities of the US and the security dilemmas created by the bomb greatly increased the intellectual work needed in the area of policy advice and guidance...There was a need for a mode of discourse which removed such anxiety from nuclear speculation. Anxieties about nuclear security are not just a matter for the general population; they also pervade political elites... The nuclear state in the United States did secure a consensus on nuclear security, and a key element in the articulation of the nuclear security consensus has been the discourse of the civilian intellectuals who fashioned a cohesive ideology of nuclear rationality... Hegemony was attained by a liberal/technocratic discourse creating a fusion of “reasonableness” with scientism and instrumental rationality.
Philip K. Lawrence, 19961
Neoliberal researchers strive to place the institutions of free markets and democratic governance on a firm foundation based on rigorous analysis of human behavior. However, these theorists, who employ game theory to defend a social order reminiscent of classical liberalism, make two concessions that cannot be reconciled with the classical liberal worldview.
First, game theorists propose that standard strategic rationality captures the only available logic of action for1 Philip K. Lawrence, “Strategy, Hegemony and Ideology: The Role of Intellectuals,” Political Studies XLIV (1996), 44-59, at 44, and 45-47.
65
explaining behavior.[163] And second, over the past half-century, they have argued that the security dilemma, social contract, arms race, and collective action have the structure of a Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) game. It may appear that it would be possible to maintain the first assumption but reject the second, thereby possibly rescuing classical liberalism’s mutually beneficial free market system regulated by appropriate governance. However, the PD game represents the central paradox within game theory: that strategic self-interest demonstrably does not result in mutual benefit, as Adam Smith had proposed.[164] Thus, accepting strategic rationality as one’s sole understanding of coherent choice and action will necessarily make the Prisoner’s Dilemma the focal social challenge to resolve.[165]
Strategic rationality condemns the rationality of promising and voluntarily abiding by consensual agreements and recommends instead that subjects influence each other’s actions by applying incentives. Actors who perceive themselves to be limited to strategic rationality and caught in a Prisoner’s Dilemma payoff scheme pursue their interests by displacing costs onto others. In the attempt to avoid the mutually destructive outcome, deterring the other from defecting will depend on the issuance of credible threats rather than the assurance of cooperative intention. Reassuring the other of one’s intent to cooperate fails because it contradicts one’s preference for dominance, which in the PD is reflected as seeking foremost to defect while the other cooperates. Instead of contributing to a mutually constituted normative order, such as is evident in the modern traditions of capitalist contracting and international maritime law, rational actors must take self-help in an anarchic world to an extreme, pursuing their self-interest at the expense of others.[166] When cooperation does emerge, according to this analysis, it can only be the result of punitive institutions or individual policing of others’ conduct through endogenous Tit for Tat punishment if the Prisoner’s Dilemma scenario is indefinitely and perfectly repeating.
Chapter 3, “Assurance,” and Chapter 4, “Deterrence,” trace the nuclear policy debate between two strategic plans for maintaining US military security. Mutual assured destruction (MAD) attempted to keep the United States in a posture of reciprocal deterrence reminiscent of classical liberalism. Breaking with this tradition, nuclear utilization targeting selection (NUTS) placed the US deterrent footing on the pursuit of escalation dominance and strategic bargaining. Thomas Schelling pioneered modeling the security dilemma, which he proposed was populated by hopeful cooperators, as a Prisoner’s Dilemma game. This seemed to be a good choice to win over military hard-liners to his position of limiting nuclear warheads to undetectable submarines that would withstand a first strike and thereby maintain a secure deterrent second-strike posture with minimum deterrent power. Chapter 3 concludes that Schelling’s neoliberal defense of MAD should have won the nuclear security debate. Assured destruction seemed to mimic the classical liberal assurance of the intention to cooperate after the other party had already done so, by threatening to retaliate if the other attacks.
Chapter 4 recounts how Schelling’s defense of MAD lost the nuclear security debate during the 1970s, both as an argument waged in the form of rational deterrence theory and as a policy during Jimmy Carter’s presidency. Prior to Carter’s administration, as Secretary of Defense under President Richard Nixon, James R. Schlesinger had already compromised MAD’s counter-city targeting scheme pursing flexible response and treating nuclear warheads as conventional weapons without prohibitions for first use. Carter additionally adopted the NUTS pursuit of escalation dominance and the capability to prevail in protracted nuclear war by integrating the offensive MX missile into the US war plan. Thus, instead of offering the assurance of recognizing the insurmountable futility of fighting thermonuclear war, Carter sought to supersede the existential condition of mutual assured destruction through developing the capability and credibility of issuing nuclear threats.
As a set of purely intellectual arguments, MAD lost the nuclear security debate to NUTS because strategic rationality cannot change course from its initial assumptions: individualistic competition despite others; single criterion valuation of outcomes, typically in terms of a scarce tangible resource; and a consequentialist framework that negates ethical conduct, the logic of appropriateness, or commitment. Furthermore, Schlesinger, a seasoned US Department of Defense official and long-term proponent of flexible response, played a formative role on Carter’s national security team. Schlesinger advocated US hegemony among allies and escalation dominance over opponents. Thus, MAD was outflanked logically and pragmatically.
Part I offers the following insights. First, rational deterrence theory is the same as rational decision theory, which was initially developed as the science of military decision making. Although this coincidence may appear to be mere happenstance, in fact noncooperative game theory represents a relentlessly combative decision technology. It proved its usefulness in providing a means to project US nuclearized military force in a rational manner with the added benefit of blurring the distinction between human actors and artificial intelligence that could execute the sovereign’s commandments throughout the mayhem and confusion of atomic war. Second, Prisoners of Reason argues that the development of neoliberal governance and markets is inseparable from game theory’s rise to become the established methodology in social science. This late 1970s development followed two decades of entanglement of US strategic policy with rational deterrence theory. In the 1960s, Thomas Schelling offered what was essentially a neoliberal defense of MAD and simultaneously established the precedent of using the Prisoner’s Dilemma game to model the security dilemma underlying international relations anarchy and the social contract. In the 1970s, rational deterrence theory failed to marshal an argument for MAD because strategic rationality did not permit offering assurances of cooperation as a means to solve the nuclear security dilemma modeled with the PD.
Instead, the only logical solution was to credibly signal the awesome intent and capability of fighting nuclear war, and to maintain escalation dominance over every level of military engagement.President Jimmy Carter’s endorsement of the nuclear war-fighting posture demarcates both the preeminence of strategic rationality and the US embrace of military ascendance as the primary means to maintain security. Carter’s presidency is characterized by an illiberal capitulation from his early commitment to win the Cold War by enticing the East to recognize the superiority of free markets, democratic governance, and Western culture, and maintain a secure second strike nuclear capability consistent with assured destruction. We can best understand the widespread acceptance of strategic rationality, and its default fixation on the Prisoner’s Dilemma imbroglio, as the noble attempt to maintain classical liberal values in the late-modern era. Proponents of game theory, from Thomas Schelling and Robert Axelrod to Ken Binmore, strove to secure the foundations of a familiar classical liberal social order on what they perceived to be the more secure building materials of strategic rationality.
However, as Part II argues, the embrace of strategic rationality as the exemplary subjectivity of citizens and consumers, and the superior means to model not only security but also markets, governance, and collective action, yields a neoliberal order. This world order, like NUTS’ ascendancy over MAD, is one in which no actor can ever exit the state of nature. The NUTS’ protocol of escalation dominance and coercive bargaining consistent with noncooperative game theory appears to be required for survival and success and therefore displaces alternative logics from action from actors’ range of possibilities.