>>14832348
>>>14832333
>
>For some reason, I never really believed it.
MAD is apparently problematic in the Game theory analysis:
In the conventional telling of the tale, the nuclear stand-off between the USA and the USSR attributes the following policy to both parties. Each threatened to answer a first strike by the other 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 at the time objected that MAD was mad, because it set up a PD [Prisoner's Dilemma -anon] as a result of the fact that the reciprocal threats were incredible. The reasoning behind this diagnosis went as follows. Suppose the USSR launches a first strike against the USA. At that point, the American President finds his country already destroyed. He doesn’t bring it back to life by now blowing up the world, so he has no incentive to carry out his original threat to retaliate, which has now manifestly failed to achieve its point. Since the Russians can anticipate this, they should ignore the threat to retaliate and strike first. Of course, the Americans are in an exactly symmetric position, so they too should strike first. Each power recognizes this incentive on the part of the other, and so anticipates an attack if they don’t rush to preempt it. What we should therefore expect, because it is the only NE of the game, is a race between the two powers to be the first to attack. The clear implication is the destruction of the world.
This game-theoretic analysis caused genuine consternation and fear on both sides during the Cold War, and is reputed to have produced some striking attempts at setting up strategic commitment devices. Some anecdotes, for example, allege that President Nixon had the CIA try to convince the Russians that he was insane or frequently drunk, so that they’d believe that he’d launch a retaliatory strike even when it was no longer in his interest to do so. Similarly, the Soviet KGB is sometimes claimed, during Brezhnev’s later years, to to have fabricated medical reports exaggerating the extent of his senility with the same end in mind. Even if these stories aren’t true, their persistent circulation indicates understanding of the logic of strategic commitment. Ultimately, the strategic symmetry that concerned the Pentagon’s analysts was complicated and perhaps broken by changes in American missile deployment tactics. They equipped a worldwide fleet of submarines with enough missiles to launch a devastating counterattack by themselves. This made the reliability of the US military communications network less straightforward, and in so doing introduced an element of strategically relevant uncertainty. The President probably could be less sure to be able to reach the submarines and cancel their orders to attack if prospects of American survival had become hopeless. Of course, the value of this in breaking symmetry depended on the Russians being aware of the potential problem. In Stanley Kubrick’s classic film Dr. Strangelove, the world is destroyed by accident because the Russians build a doomsday machine that will automatically trigger a retaliatory strike regardless of their leadership’s resolve to follow through on the implicit MAD threat but then keep it a secret. As a result, when an unequivocally mad American colonel launches missiles at Russia on his own accord, and the American President tries to convince his Soviet counterpart that the attack was unintended, the Russian Premier sheepishly tells him about the secret doomsday machine. Now the two leaders can do nothing but watch in dismay as the world is blown up due to a game-theoretic mistake.
This example of the Cold War standoff, while famous and of considerable importance in the history of game theory and its popular reception, relied at the time on analyses that weren’t very subtle. The military game theorists were almost certainly mistaken to the extent that they modeled the Cold War as a one-shot PD in the first place. For one thing, the nuclear balancing game was enmeshed in larger global power games of great complexity. For another, it is far from clear that, for either superpower, annihilating the other while avoiding self-annihilation was in fact the highest-ranked outcome. If it wasn’t, in either or both cases, then the game wasn’t a PD. A cynic might suggest that the operations researchers on both sides were playing a cunning strategy in a game over funding, one that involved them cooperating with one another in order to convince their politicians to allocate more resources to weapons.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/game-theory/#Mot