Social Scientists and Nuclear Deterrence
Green, Philip
One of the striking intellectual phenomena of the past decade is the academic literature on military strategy: a literature produced not by military planners but by social scientists writing...
...An instructive recent example of obvious long-run irrationality based on rationalizing short-run calculations is the American decision to possess a clear firststrike capability against the Soviets, who are felt to be incapable of matching our effort...
...Karl Deutsch, The Nerves of Government: Models of Communications and Control (Free Press, 1963), ch...
...has some kind of epistemological and ontological requiredness (like Kant's categories, for example), then only some—not all—values of the American people can logically be associated with the particular strategy of deterrence...
...Usually, the form in which this assumption is cast is implicitly or explicitly related to the familiar "common sense" version of rationality, which has been described by Harold and Margaret Sprout as follows...
...But the presumably scholarly essays of writers such as Morton Kaplan, A. L. Burns, Daniel Ellsberg, and Glenn Snyder cannot be similarly discounted...
...The Tacit Communicators of Thomas Schelling Recognizing the limitations of game theory but still hoping to show that there can be a more or less scientific foundation for national defense strategy, Thomas Schelling has attempted a major salvage operation, and in so doing has written perhaps the most respected treatise in this whole area...
...In both these areas Kahn uses a highly tendentious analysis to argue that, since anything can apparently happen in war (though he offers no reason to believe that any of his scenarios are likely to happen) we must devote endless resources and emotional energy to being prepared for everything...
...5. 8 Ibid., p. 120...
...Finally [there is] the assumption that the actor upon the stage and the analyst who observes and interprets from the sidelines both perceive and evaluate the milieu of the actor in substantially the same way...
...One cannot read through the copious literature of deterrence without getting the impression that these writers genuinely imagine themselves to be unable to make meaningful statements unless these be cast in the form of scientific propositions which have either been in some sense verified or are soon to be so...
...Schelling's experiments brilliantly illumine the discrepancies between formal game theory and "game-playing" in the real world, and thus may help bring about the "reorientation" of game theory for which he calls...
...It is instructive to note that Morton Deutsch, by inducing something resembling real hostility among the volunteers in similar experiments, has arrived at tentative conclusions diametrically opposed to Schelling's, conclusions which to him suggest that the likelihood of reaching long-run understandings in the Cold War universe may be dim indeed.10 Why should one "believe" Schelling's experiments, and not Deutsch's...
...in the later works, they become the best ways, and other possibilities—general and complete disarmament, for instance—are treated with disdains The total impact of Schelling's work, in sum, builds up in a steady progression from academic theory to practical policy, and to separate the two aspects of his thought one would have to imagine him to be schizophrenic...
...Motivation for the pure theory came almost exclusively from preoccupation with (and fascination with) "applied" problems...
...In my own thinking they have never been separate...
...second-strike commitment...
...2. Kahn's assumptions might be treated as data if they seemed reasonable, but one is hard put to it to find any reason for adopting this view...
...A. L. Burns, "From Balance to Deterrence: A Theoretical Analysis," World Politics IX (July 1957), pp...
...2 See especially Morton Kaplan, "The Calculus of Nuclear Deterrence," World Politics XI (Oct., 1958), pp...
...The oracular statements found in Kahn's On Thermonuclear War and Thinking About the Unthinkable, Oskar Morgenstern's The Question of National Defense, Schelling's The Strategy of Conflict and Strategy and Arms Control, Glenn Snyder's Deterrence and Defense, and in the scattered writings of Morton Kaplan, Daniel Ellsberg, Klaus Knorr, A. L. Burns, and Albert Wohlstetter, all more or less depend on this asserted connection with the expert findings of an academic discipline.2 The conclusion to which one would be led by a casual reading of their work is that those who oppose a policy of nuclear deterrence do so out of wilful bias or ignorance or both...
...12 Glenn Snyder, "The Politics of National Defense: A Review," Journal of Conflict Resolution VI (Dec...
...This is especially striking when one comes to question Kahn's pollyannaish extrapolations of genetic damage from nuclear attack...
...1I...
...Conclusion The ease with which the Academic Strategists leap from a world of inappropriate or unverified theorizing into the world of national policy augurs poorly for the future of the social sciences...
...Kahn's analysis is, as the scientists say, non-replicable, because there is no apparent principle behind his choice of data in any given instance...
...The prospect of opponents agreeing on a solution were correspondingly greater...
...His findings—to over-simplify greatly—were that on the contrary the experimentees often reached agreement, without overt communication, on the division of spoils...
...4 Ibid., p. 468...
...Instead, he has made some very complicated extrapolations based on arbitrary assumptions chosen by himself and his colleagues...
...With this kind of "data," one can prove anything...
...1962), pp...
...To put it simply, since a player does not automatically win what his opponent loses (or vice-versa) he cannot be sure that the strategy from which he gains the most is the one that satisfies him the most, if only because he also has an interest in the size of his opponent's gains (and vice-versa...
...The so-called "expertise" of these writers is inextricably bound up with a specific political posture vis-a-vis the Cold War —the posture, roughly speaking, of what Mills described as "the power elite...
...Thus, like Kahn's analysis, the analyses of these writers turn out to be ways of logically describing—but not of validating—policies they have previously chosen to support...
...A disciplined mind, it is implied, leads one infallibly in the direction they have taken...
...I think it fair to assert that, with the exception of classified material, there is superficially nothing in the discussion of strategic issues that is beyond the level of any competent intellectual...
...massive retaliation...
...This is not however, the position in which informed public opinion currently places the academic deterrence strategists...
...Certainly, Schelling's version of game theory is more impressive than the formal version, from the perspective of practical affairs...
...But assumptions are personal opinions too, until one gives some reason for extending credence to them...
...he hardly ever repeats the same figure...
...and see also C. W. Sherwin, "Securing Peace Through Military Technology," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists XII (May 1956), pp...
...The fact is that Schelling has imported into the structure of his experiments the one thing it was necessary for him to demonstrate independently if his work is to have valid reference to the world crisis: his experimentees are so culturally homogeneous that it is impossible to tell whether their tacit communication consists of an appreciation of the inherent nature of conflict situations, or merely of the meeting of minds which had already met in every essential long before Schelling put them in a laboratory...
...International action does not simply consist of freely taken decisions by national and international actors, but is rather constrained by an historical process that may have decisive results long before a specific "decision" has actually been taken...
...In the short run, those charged with protecting the nation's military interests will usually find it "rational" to take any military action that clearly promises a positive pay-off, whether the question be to initiate a situation of belligerency or to "escalate" the level of violence involved (vide President Eisenhower's recent statement that he favored using A-bombs in Korea if Red China did not agree to a truce) . But in the long run, the accretion of such actions may lead to the destruction of international order or to an all-out nuclear war...
...909-23...
...Are the great powers historically capable of being rational in the way that deterrence theory demands...
...it would appear that a conclusion is more substantial if it has been mathematically calculated from premises than if merely presented as a personal opinion...
...science" can not...
...In sum, Kahn's "science" is spurious, and as a prophet he apparent ly does not convince even himself...
...But the "scientist," unwilling to believe that such limited forms of wisdom can be given analytical meaning, is forced to offer only the absolute wisdom of "science...
...This and other more complicated experiments involving the communication of threats were intermingled by Schelling with comments about the possibility of setting tacit limits on war, implementing informal arms control agreements, making "brinkmanship" work, and deterring arms control agreements, making "brinksmanship" work, and deterring pose distinctive choices similar to the ones posed in the experiments: e.g., the "obvious" distinction between the use and non-use of nuclear weapons in limited war paralleled the "obvious" distinction between a 50-50 split and any other...
...9 See, e.g., Schelling and Halperin, Strategy and Arms Control (Twentieth Century Fund 1961...
...For what it really demands is that most decision-makers most of the time, in all the major nuclear powers, act rationally toward the specific ends of a deterrence policy and no other ends, and be effectively knowledgeable specifically in the ways that will serve a working deterrence policy, and no other...
...1959), pp...
...At various points, he posits the result of a "likely" nuclear attack as between 2 and 90 million dead...
...Now it is a fact of modern life that in a given area of knowledge "experts" command both more prestige and higher salaries than do "amateurs...
...Econ...
...Second, the informationgathering and communications processes in government, far from being in tune with "the operational environment," are subject to all the irrationalitybreeding cold war pressures which I have already mentioned, to say nothing of simple human frailty...
...The traditional tasks of the scholarly political analyst: to clarify alternatives systematically...
...they are not emotionally or ideologically involved in the games...
...Thus they are dangerously cast adrift, without a firm principle to guide them in the uses of an expert knowledge which is really extremely limited from a practical point of view...
...might be more likely to come to tacit agreements in situations presenting such distinct choices than the nature of the conflict between them would make seem likely...
...To see how unlikely is this general claim, one need only note two points...
...practically speaking, how much a given nuclear power will put up with in a crisis is a matter for sober scholarship in the field of world politics (if such is possible) and for the inspired guesswork of statesmen...
...Unless the idea of deterrence (as opposed to disarmament, first-strike, etc...
...to point to the underlying implications of common-sense statements, and the conjectural element in what is ordinarily assumed to be knowledge...
...This defect is so obvious, and has been pointed out so clearly by writers such as Anatol Rapoport, Karl Deutsch, and the mathematical economists, Luce and Raiffa, that I will merely note a few fundamental difficulties...
...211-34 (and see Note 3 below...
...Studying the literature of deterrence, one finds that this latter view of the rationality assumption is endemic, even where the analysis is not cast in as rigorous a form as it is by the writers I have mentioned...
...5 Ellsberg tries to do what Morgenstern only coyly suggests...
...Essentially, the purpose of his The Strategy of Conflict was to point to ways in which the theoretical disabilities of game theory can be overcome in actual practice...
...and the clarification of theoretical ideas was absolutely dependent on an identification of live examples (p...
...Such are the results when undisciplined "theory" and "science" are let loose...
...but to adduce game theory in support of this redundant proposition is pretentious...
...For example, two persons would be told, separately, to divide $100 into two piles representing their own share and the others...
...In most cases, the various factors, ratios, correspondences, and other mathematical calculations with which he "demonstrates" his findings, are entirely figments of his imagination...
...The weight of professional expertise is implicitly or ex plicitly asserted to favor the particular national strategy of nuclear deterrence...
...if their divisions agreed they got the shares they had agreed on...
...13 David Truman has argued in The Governmental Process that "ac cess" to governmental decision-making organs, through available techniques of petition and pressure, is what chiefly defines the ability of different social groups to participate effectively in the democratic political process...
...Perhaps more important, the relationship between the players is simple, impersonal, and fragmentary...
...The others all attempt to pass off their use of the language and methodology of game theory as merely academic examples of strategic reasoning...
...For while his purported subject is the operation of civil defense in nuclear war, he has not in fact studied either of these phenomena separately or in tandem—since neither has ever existed...
...This aspect of his work is useful, though without apparent public impact...
...5. Having thus assembled out of his imagination all the material necessary to cook his results, Kahn fails completely to do what he has promised: analyze survival in a nuclear war...
...s Anatol Rapoport, Fights, Games, and Debates (Michigan, 1960...
...To mention only a few points: the stakes of the experimental games are minuscule or imaginary...
...nor is it the position in which they wish themselves to be placed...
...This is due not to his inadequacy as a theoretician but simply to the impossibility of being prophetic about social and technological change in the "scientific" manner which systems analysis prescribes...
...This literature has had a two-fold effect on the social sciences...
...1, 1961...
...However, the simple fact is that the new "scientists" of society have as yet no science or even the hope of one, but only the hope of the hope of one...
...2, Princeton 1959...
...12 But this argument clearly rests on the peculiar bias of the postwar liberal internationalist, and on the historicist (and patronizing) idea that, say, a Goldwater would "have" to act with the liberals' version of rationality once he had the President's "responsibility...
...But I think something else must be added to this...
...2. All the writers in this field are agreed that war is an example of a "non-zero-sum-game...
...3. An even more decisive objection is that game theory is a static theory...
...But since it is a bargain that is being undertaken, one cannot analyze the process without having, as Luce and Raiffa put it, a complete psychological and economic profile of the opponents.8 Needless to say, no deterrence theorist has any such guide at hand...
...494-529...
...Naval Ordnance Test Station, China Lake, California, October 1961 (distribution of which is unfortunately restricted...
...This is the domain of the mathematical theory of games of strategy...
...In the whole history of intellectual controversy the following passage from On Thermonuclear War is surely the most graphic example of self-declared inadequacy: But perhaps what is most important of all, we did not look at the interaction among the effects we did study...
...But since the examples invariably demonstrate the beneficent effect of deterrence doctrines with which these authors are otherwise associated, one can hardly take the attempt seriously...
...Knorr and Thornton Read, Praeger, 1962...
...And there is a further negative effect on the public life of a democracy...
...of total war, is truly astonishing...
...The pseudo-science of the deterrence experts is thus not only a disservice to the scholarly community...
...4. 7 Op...
...The basic questions in this field—minimum deterrence vs...
...the actor's psychological environment is assumed to correspond in essential respects to the operational environment in which his decisions are executed...
...Schelling and Kahn, by contrast, conceive of it more or less informally and rely on it only implicitly...
...1. The purpose of systems analysis is, in the words of Wohlstetter, to apply "the method of science to the analysis of political-military strategic alternatives...
...1961...
...Only the prophetic literary imagination can discover the historical future...
...Moreover, the entire discussion of nuclear strategy seems at first glance to be primarily political, so that one's choice among possible strategies (including strategies of disarmament) would seem to be dictated in part by the picture of the world one hopes to see realized...
...10 Morton Deutsch and Robert M. Krauss, "Studies of Interpersonal Bargaining," Journal of Conflict Resolution VI (March 1962), pp...
...Irresponsible" does not seem too strong a word to apply to this kind of theoretical "brilliance...
...He offers his advice as the limited wisdom of one whose only claim is to be more thoughtfully intelligent about such matters than the average man...
...And I do not think that this is merely a case of Kahn's unwillingness to face the demon he has conjured up...
...5 See Note 2 above...
...R. D. Luce and H. Raiffa, Games and Decisions (Wiley, 1957...
...The scholar without pretentions to "science" has not nearly as great a problem...
...Albert Wohlstetter, "The Delicate Balance of Terror," Foreign Affairs 37 (Jan...
...The root assumptions of the RAND Report appear to involve the expected size of an attack in a nuclear war, the expected number of dead, the expected number of genetic casualties, and the expected effects on our economic institutions...
...None of these authors knows anything of the kind...
...But the piece of systems analysis upon which Kahn's theorizing is based—RAND Report R-322-RC, A Report on a Study of Non-Military [Civil] Defense (July 1, 1958) —is quite devoid of the saving virtues of systematic scholarly work...
...they could not have less to do with a wise choice of national policies...
...These agreements were made possible by the fact that the conflict situations contained within themselves simple psychological elements which coerced agreement between opponents...
...The question of values is the primal question of deterrence theory, and must continually be confronted...
...Daniel Ellsberg, The Crude Analysis of Strategic Choices, RAND P-2183, 1960, and "Theory of the Reluctant Duelist," Amer...
...With both sides in this two-pronged utility analysis, the result is not one "best" outcome, but rather what economists call a "negotiation set," within which there are several or many possible solutions over which the players must bargain...
...91-2.] If this is the nature of "systems analysis," we could clearly do with less of it...
...And fundamental to both difficulties is a defect in the whole concept of "decision-making" as a way of analyzing political behavior: a concept on which the notion of rational deterrence is implicitly based...
...No doubt a large part of the explanation of this phenomenon is the desire of certain persons to be influential, even at the cost of misusing their claims to professional competence...
...One should therefore expect that an understanding of these games would be helpful...
...6 1. The first requirement for using game theory is that one be able to give numerical weight to values, so as to be able to compare expectations from different strategic choices...
...Klaus Knorr, "Foreword" to Kahn's On Thermonuclear War, and "Limited Strategic War," in the volume of the same name, ed...
...There are conflicting arguments on this point, but the reader is left in the dark as to the justification for the figures Kahn has chosen...
...and the U.S.S.R...
...pp...
...The contours of the real "game" of conflict are always changing, and one never knows at a given moment whether one is stating a policy (values) , a strategy, or a tactic—nor even perhaps what the game is, or who the players...
...20-43, and Some Problems in the Strategic Analysis of International Politics, Center of International Studies Research Monograph No...
...That is, rather than one side automatically winning what the other loses (as in a zero-sum game such as two-handed poker) , each side can win something (as in the joint preservation of peace with honor), or each side can lose (as in a mutually destructive nuclear war), etc...
...Yet the contradictory conclusion that we should instead look desperately for ways to disarm so obviously suggests itself that one wonders why Kahn has not considered it...
...Seen in this light, deterrence theory rests on an heroic assumption...
...Snyder reference is to Deterrence and Defense (Princeton 1961...
...In the case of the deterrence strategists, the obvious dangers have been unhappily realized...
...In the work of the game theorists rationality is conceived formally and relied on explicitly...
...1 "The War Thinkers," Joseph Kraft, Esquire, September, 1962, p. 103...
...Although von Neumann and Morgenstern have demonstrated that this is theoretically possible, there is no reason to believe that it can be done practically with regard to the kind of "goods" that are involved in national survival...
...Herman Kahn, Systems Analysis, and Civil Defense The most well-known of the attempts to infuse deterrence doctrine with the stuff of "science" is that of Herman Kahn, who wishes to demonstrate that a version of deterrence which includes an American firststrike capability is feasible...
...Thus the temptation for those who are intelligent and interested in a given field is to become "experts" in it...
...1956), pp...
...This suggestion is strengthened when we see the uses to which the academic strategists have put von Neumann's and Morgenstern's games theory...
...V1...
...But there is an even more crucial point here...
...firststrike capability vs...
...1 " The relationship between this doctrine, known familiarly as the theory of nuclear deterrence, and the body of academic social science is very strange...
...To say, then, that a strategy of deterrence is "rational" implies that one knows exactly what American value patterns are...
...IV...
...We have Schelling's own word: The essays are a mixture of "pure" and "applied" research...
...Much work is being done on problems that once were almost completely outside the range of social scientists...
...limited retaliation vs...
...The answer is that he has not really considered alternatives —and indeed it is inconceivable to imagine his having done so, given the inadequacy of systems analysis for studying even one system...
...The "examples" of The Strategy of Conflict are merely put forward as possible ways in which the international situ ation might be better organized...
...Finally, there are two more important points about the conceptual foundations of deterrence theory...
...One of the striking intellectual phenomena of the past decade is the academic literature on military strategy: a literature produced not by military planners but by social scientists writing from within the academy or from such havens as the RAND Corporation...
...it is only as a propagandist-salesman (he is fond of citing "objective studies") that he can honestly be said to carry real conviction...
...Rather, expectations modify values, and values modify expectations...
...More important, what kind of "social science" is it that leaps from such tenuously established hypotheses to policies involving the fate of the nation and the world...
...the players' environments are not truly hostile...
...That is a nice way of putting it...
...Again, then, it becomes important to look at the uses of this particular example of modern social science...
...It becomes all too likely that some of them, having a strong personal interest in the fate of society, will put a distorted version of their knowledge and thus their professional reputations at the service of whoever can command their loyalty...
...The purpose of systems analysis, according to Kahn, is to analyze dynamically the way the nature of a strategic system changes over time due to an opponent's reactions to it (and one's own reactions to his reactions...
...4. Underlying all these objections is the obvious fact that human beings are neither rational nor knowledgeable in the way that the inhabitants of the game theorist's universe are...
...In the real world there are no utilities, probabilities and expected payoffs fixing the parameters of a given "game" until it has been played out...
...52-76...
...if they disagreed, they got nothing...
...to sweep it under the rug so casually is to do society a major disservice...
...In his influential The Question of National Defense Morgenstern is explicit about the link between deterrence theory and the theory of games: The parallelism of these efforts with what goes on in games such as poker is apparent...
...In spite of the many uncertainties of our study we do have a great deal of confidence in some partial conclusions—such as, that a nation like the United States or the Soviet Union could handle each of the problems of radioactivity, physical destruction, or likely levels of casualties, if they occurred by themselves...
...But only a very cautious reader can think that this exploration is what The Strategy of Conflict is really about...
...But Kahn has violated this purpose by fixing his analysis on a given stage of the nuclear arms race...
...it can hardly be applied usefully to the dynamics of conflict in world history...
...The result is that available information is often not only inadequate but tendentious (if not simply distorted), as was so clearly revealed in the case of the fabulous missile gap...
...And while it may take a Herman Kahn to think of some especially subtle ways of posing them, the issues Kahn raises are not at all subtle...
...cit., ch...
...From this perspective the academic strategists should be seen merely as technicians pointing out the implications for practical action of different world-views, without being able to effect basic policy choices...
...Schelling concluded that the U.S...
...They are assumptions useful for exploring the logical implications of prominent terms in the theorist's vocabulary...
...What has all this to do with the Cold War, the specific situation Schelling is interested in...
...3. Kahn's presentation is largely unaccompanied by any reference to scholarly authorities, and this calls to mind the striking fact that On Thermonuclear War (as well as the original RAND Report) is completely devoid of the kind of documentation that has traditionally been required of reputable scholarly work...
...to separate the descriptive elements of a proposition from the ethical ones—such tasks seem no longer to interest those who would be practical physicists of the political realm...
...the threats made are not real threats, etc...
...If becoming such an "expert" requires not only a special education but also the adoption of a particular political stance, the potential effect on political life is both obvious and ominous...
...V. The Rational Universe of Deterrence In all the instances I have so far discussed, there is a common assumption: that the political process is by and large rational...
...As for his economic analysis, it consists of the single remarkable proposition that an industrial economy is in no way an organic phenomenon, so that destruction of any part of it would not seriously affect the functioning of the rest, nor the general destruction of key industrial and service centers prevent full-scale recuperation for very long...
...But, just as in the cases mentioned above, the deterrence theorist has had to distort the obvious meaning of his "scientific" material in order to arrive at the political conclusions of deterrence theory...
...And for the first time social science has become important in national policy-making...
...This "sounds paradoxical," but "It is possible to give a rigorous proof...
...In Schelling's case, the various criticisms that can be made of his work really reduce to one—but a basic one: at no point has he made any effort to provide convincing linkages between the world of his experiments and the real world of international conflict...
...The complicated essays of Ellsberg and Kaplan, and the uncomplicated rhetoric of Morgenstern, merely demonstrate that if one posits a national value system in which the values particularly associated with deterrence are the only values, then it is rational to attempt to deter...
...3 Albert Wohlstetter, "Scientists, Seers and Strategy," Foreign Affairs 41 (April 1963), p. 478...
...Emphasis added.] But if all these things happened together and all the other effects were added at the same time, one cannot help but have some doubts...
...13 One writer, J. David Singer, has trenchantly criticized deterrence theory by using the theorists' own vocabulary and mode of reasoning to show that there are basic contradictions in the theory...
...Nothing, one is tempted to say, will come out of nothing...
...overkill" capacity...
...Indeed, in many of the games—including the one I have described—there is no real conflict...
...However, when Singer attempts to put deterrence logic to his own uses as a "disarmament intellectual," its effect is entirely destructive, leading him to make a better case against reasonable proposals for nuclear disarmament than the one he makes for them...
...46 (Dec...
...No doubt...
...159-64...
...for a more thorough bibliography see the discussion by Richard C. Snyder, Deterrence, Weapon Systems, and Decision-Making, U.S...
...Sidney Verba, "Assumptions of Rationality and Non-Rationality in Models of the International System," World Politics XIV (Oct...
...On the contrary, what is novel is their insistence that a proper understanding of their expert opinion forces the rational reader or policy-maker to prefer one policy alternative...
...No doubt, since Morgenstern is more frankly a propagandist than most of those writing about deterrence (a virtue under the circumstances), his references to game theory can be discounted as hyperbole...
...That is to say, he calculates rationally the opportunities and limitations implicit in his operational environment...
...Kahn's forays into second-hand historical analysis, and the creation of "war games" and "scenarios," offer a case in point...
...The "fundamental lesson" drawn from the theory of games is that it is in the interest of the U. S. for Russia to have an invulnerable retaliatory force and vice versa...
...Their great contribution has been to spell out "a coherent body of doctrine: a theory of war and peace in the nuclear age...
...The theorists of deterrence have made not the slightest effort to confront this overriding issue in world politics...
...When supposedly scientific reputations are really based on a test of political acceptability, opposing viewpoints must more and more be arbitrarily blocked from getting a hearing...
...The argument is complicated and difficult...
...The Formal World of Game Theory The impact of Kahn's work on other deterrence theorists, and the willingness of the latter to confuse salesmanship with science, suggest that some general process of intellectual obscurantism is at work...
...The false attribution of expertness to an intellectual elite which is essentially a supporter of partisan policies, narrows rather than enlarges the channels of access...
...complete relevant knowledge of one's own values and expectations and one's opponent's predictability: these exist only in the dream world of game theory...
...of a new element in the counsels of American government: the Academic Strategists...
...The constant spurious references (the adjective is harsh but accurate) to a workable theory (or theories) of strategy can only have the effect of distorting genuine public debate...
...Purely instrumental choice unhindered by emotional or ideological blocks...
...and Thomas C. Schelling, The Stability of Total Disarmament, Institute for Defense Analyses Study Memo No...
...Despite Kahn's efforts to be "pessimistic," his estimates of the megatonnage that might be delivered in an all-out nuclear war are already outdated...
...First, even at times of greatest "rationality" the American government alone has the aspect of a battlefield in which the warfare between differing conceptions of what the "national interest" requires is fought out, often with no holds barred...
...Rather, what is revealed here is the hollowness of the idea of a dynamic scientific analysis of "political-military" strategic systems...
...It has, indeed, produced rules of behavior which are directly applicable to military problems of the kind outlined here...
...By overwhelming the reader with these fictitious calculations, Kahn hides the fact that the analysis of strategic systems in nuclear war involves almost total ignorance, and demonstrates nicely that one can prove anything at all if one uses the right numbers...
...This bibliography is of course highly selective...
...In the more polemical writings on arms control which have succeeded The Strategy of Con ffct, Schelling has not been quite so nice...
...Actually, however, the rationality assumption of deterrence theory is far more complicated and demanding than this description suggests...
...The chief problem is that for a given "game" there is usually not one clearly "rational" solution...
...But as Luce and Raiffa point out in their authoritative work, the theory of non-zero-sum games is at present a very fragile and tenuous structure...
...A social science which subjects the most problematical questions of values to raison d'etat, and thinks that this is a sufficient treatment of the matter, is no science at all—it is merely an ingenious form of propaganda...
...4. There are other ways to prove anything one wants...
...Disarmament and "surrender" (surely one simple way of surviving), having received no "scientific" attention, merit only Kahn's contempt, whereas the fantasy of civil defense is treated as sober, serious stuff...
...I will take up only a few of the more obvious deficiencies in this report...
...3 Kahn's essay leaves one in doubt that this can " be done...
...It is also] assumed that the individual applies his environ mental knowledge rationally to the choice of ends achievable with the means at his command, and to the choice of appropriate means to achieve possible ends...
...Kahn's assumptions about casualties in a nuclear war are similiarly worthless...
...In most cases a 50-50 split was agreed on, and Schelling reasoned that such a division recommended itself in the nature of things...
...it makes use of notions of the mathematical theory of games of strategy...
...Undoubtedly there is scholarly value in this work...
...David Singer, Deterrence, Arms Control and Disarmament (Ohio State, 1962...
...to force the political actor to see that his simplified version of reality does not exhaust the possibilities...
...It is thus with some surprise that one notes how defective game theory is for the purpose of justifying a particular policy choice...
...11 Harold and Margaret Sprout, "Environmental Factors in the Study of International Politics," Journal of Conflict Resolution, I (1957), p. 316...
...To some extent the two can be separated...
...Thus he concluded that in a non-zero-sum (or partially cooperative) bargaining game—which is one way of describing Soviet-American relations—there were really fewer relevant variables necessary to the prediction of a "rational" solution than the formal theory of non-zero-sum games suggested...
...it is ultimately a disservice to the democratic process as well...
...His method was to put volun teers into experimental (non-zero-sum) conflict situations in which their imperfect rationality and imperfect knowledge should theoretically have resulted in a failure to coordinate their strategic choices around a single point in their "negotiation set...
...short-run results modify long-run results...
...the game situations are without a historical or political context...
...He thus unwittingly demonstrates the obvious fact that deterrence expertise was not designed to produce realizable disarmament proposals: the expertise remains tendentious, despite his efforts to neutralize it...
...For when arguments are based on a "science" that is really non-existent, reasoned discussion is impossible...
...p 78...
...Of what use is "the method of science" when there are no data upon which it can operate...
...Second, the tacit acceptance by virtually all deterrence theorists of the "rationality" (and thus morality...
...the relationship between civil defense and alternative strategies—are grasped without too much difficulty once they have been posed...
...First, it is not at all clear that shortrun and long-run rationality are invariably the same, and deterrence theorists offer no guide as to which may be expected to motivate nations...
...It is thus with great bafflement that one sees Knorr praise Kahn for his "masterly command of method," and Wohlstetter chide the original Pugwash conferenciers for daring to set themselves up as authorities on nuclear war even though "not one to my knowledge had done any empirical study of military operations likely in a nuclear war"—as though the use of computers made studies like Kahn's any more "empirical" than Bertrand Russell's views.4 III...
...We shall have an opportunity to draw at least one fundamental lesson later...
...And so they are, probably: so that the next logical step for them is to move the arms race up a notch by developing some new super-weapon that will be destructive enough, and "invulnerable" enough, to unbalance the arms race all over again by destroying the security of America's retaliatory force (and also of any conceivable civil defense plan) . Herman Kahn, of course, is the theorist largely responsible for this attack of hubris, and it is interesting to note that no other prominent deterrence theorist has taken issue with this policy—which would seem to indicate that as far as "rational calculation" goes, the blind are leading the blind...
...If there is any evidence for the belief that to predict such consistent behavior of political decision-makers is better than a coin-tossing proposition, no deterrence theorist has seen fit to make it public...
...371-2...
...Some of the theorists have suggested that the concept of "national interest" may act as a special disciplining factor in international political behavior...
...As Joseph Kraft has written in Esquire, "Collectively [Herman Kahn, Albert Wohlstetter, Henry Kissinger and Thomas Schelling] are the vanguard...
Vol. 11 • January 1964 • No. 1
