Nuclear Weapons – Prisoner’s of their own Dilemma
http://www.baselpeaceoffice.org/sites/default/files/imce/articles/News/nuclear_prisoners_dillemma.pdf
On the stage of world politics, most everything is an exercise in game theory. Nations are always trying to come up with an optimal strategy that furthers their goals on the world stage. It’s very apparent in decisions made by leaders to start wars, implement policies, and even which countries they choose to talk with. However, none have the same scale and potential impact as the nuclear arms race during the Cold War. While a single war or decision might determine the fates of thousands of lives, the accumulation of nuclear weapons threatens far more than that: the fate of human life and the lives of millions of other organisms on this planet. There is probably no greater situation where a game could determine so much.
Nuclear weapon stockpiling during the Cold War is a very clear case of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Both the USA and the USSR are essentially noncommunicating entities. Relations with each other are poor and disclosing one’s strategy regarding something as sensitive as nuclear weapons is negligible. The two states for this game are to produce nuclear weapons or to not produce nuclear weapons. The optimal state for both countries is that neither produce nuclear weapons thus saving on the economy and reducing the potential for nuclear war to devastate the world. However, due to their inability/unwillingness to cooperate this leads to suboptimal results. For example from a country’s perspective the two results of not producing nuclear weapons would be to A remain at an equal standing with the other country if both do not produce or B fall behind if the other country produces. The two results of producing nuclear weapons are A to improve their military standing if the other does not produce or B to maintain their military standing if both produce. So clearly producing nuclear weapons is more beneficial since they will either improve or maintain their standing instead of not producing where they will either remain the same or lose their standing. As a result both countries produce nuclear weapons and suffer the consequences. However, when countries broke the lack of communication there was finally a drop in production of nuclear weapons for example with the SALT I and SALT II talks where USA and the USSR agreed on a strategy thereby circumventing the typical game theory model and choosing the one optimal situation out of the four for both.