Game Theory Applied to the Nuclear Standoff Between the USA and North Korea
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-to-win-a-nuclear-standoff/
The author of this article from FiveThirtyEight.com explains how the current tensions between the USA and North Korea can be modeled using game theory. The current political climate between these two nations is one of escalating bluster. Both sides continue to posture and threaten increasing militaristic action. The author of this piece describes how this situation can be roughly modeled as a game where both players are playing to win $100. Each player chooses a number between 0 and 100, and the player who chooses the higher number wins the $100. However, the lower number is then used to determine the percentage chance that both players must pay $10,000. To map this game to real world politics, as the author says, “The $100 prize becomes the concession of some international demand — a piece of disputed territory, say — while the $10,000 potential cost becomes untold death and destruction, nuclear winter and the very fate of our species and planet.”
The author goes on to explain that we can use game theory to determine which strategies the players should use. Using game theory, social scientists can analyze each player’s motivations and how those motivations interact with each other to transform a real life occurrence into a solvable mathematical object. In fact, he notes that game theory has been used in reasoning about military conflict since at least 1832 and is a crucial piece of modern sociopolitical analysis. In the type of game described above, game theory is harder to apply because the crucial piece of information that shapes each player’s decision making, how risk-averse or risk-taking his or her opponent is, is unknown. The other issue with this situation is that both players have intense motivations to not back down. This confluence of factors leads to a situation where both sides continue to posture and threaten despite the fact that neither benefits from the increased risk of hitting a negative payout (i.e. nuclear war).
In the real world, it is hard to directly apply game theory and models to actual situations. The facts that there is no clearly defined goal that the USA and North Korea are playing for, North Korea clearly has much less to lose, and there are many other players with stakes in this conflict makes it quite difficult to formulate an optimal path forward. Nonetheless, there is hope that game theory can be used to continue to analyze each side’s actions in order to help both players make informed decisions that will result in avoiding total nuclear war.