North Korea and Evolutionary Game Theory
https://www.ft.com/content/27a20c72-d472-11e7-8c9a-d9c0a5c8d5c9
North Korea claims missile puts all of US in range, Financial Times
Despite the fact that the United States and several neighbour countries kept making strong oppositions and warning North Korea of its possible aftermath if it continued its missile test, North Korea didn’t stop its nuclear development plan. According to the recent missile test of North Korea, North Korea has already gained the capability to put all of the United States territory inside of its missile range. Based on traditional international politics logic, strong opposition signal and possible harsh punishment can help deter countries from taking certain actions. However, such logic seems to be not applicable in the North Korean nuclear crisis case.
Thinking from an Evolutionary Game Theory angle might help explain why nuclear weapons are so attractive for North Korea. Although a shared agreement on nuclear nonproliferation was formed in the past one or two decades, most of the major players in the current world have nuclear capacity. Consider the situation that most of the players have nuclear weapons and only a small factions of players don’t, in which it is possible that the payoff of countries that have nuclear weapons is at least equal to if not larger than the payoff of countries that do not have nuclear weapons. Moreover, because of the lack of mutual understanding, countries don’t have an actual table of payoff as the one we get in problem sets. Then, North Korea’s anticipation of payoff may be generalized from previous history cases. The fact that most of the countries that tried to acquire nuclear weapons didn’t suffer from harsh punishment and that some of them even gained a stronger leverage and higher international status also give North Korea the strong incentive of acquiring nuclear weapons, despite the possible punishment of the United States.