Mutually Assured Destruction in the Cold War
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17026538
In the 1960s, nuclear warfare and therefore mutually assured destruction became major players in defense and foreign policy, particularly in the US and Soviet Union. Both the US and Soviet Union developed major arsenals of nuclear weapons, solely because each entity knew that the other had the ability to do so. If only Russia stockpiled nuclear weapons, then the US, and at the time the rest of the world, would be virtually powerless in comparison. The same goes for if only the US had a nuclear arsenal. The fact that both the US and the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons created the idea, on possibly the largest scale ever, of mutually assured destruction. The Soviet Union would not bomb the US because they knew the US had the ability to deploy their nuclear bombs and destroy the Soviet before the Soviet bombs reach and destroy the US. The same goes for if the US chose to bomb the Soviet Union first.
At first, people during the Cold War were terrified of nuclear warfare. However, I believe this is because they had yet to completely understand the implications Game Theory can provide to the situation. A payoff matrix of this situation is depicted below:
| US Attack | US peace | |
| Soviet Attack | -1,-1 | -1, -1 |
| Soviet Peace | -1,-1 | +1,+1 |
(In this example, -1 represents complete destruction and +1 represents no destruction. Additionally, we can assume that if one entity attacks, so will the other as they have the technology to detect an attack before being destroyed.)
The outcome of nuclear war is independent of whether one initiates the attack or just responds to it. Therefore, the clear dominant strategy and Nash Equilibrium is for nobody to attack. Additionally, for this theory to hold, we make the assumptions that both leaders are rational, and they are both able to ACCURATELY detect when the other has launched missiles. If one nation’s detection system were to alert them with a false positive, then that nation’s supposed “retaliation attack” would become the initiating attack for the other nation that was falsely accused of launching the missiles, resulting mutual destruction. This almost happened in the Cold War when Stanislav Petrov falsely detected a US missile in Soviet territory.
Over 20 years later, once people finally realized that it would be foolish for any leader to attack, the Cold War came to an end. There are still over 17,000 nuclear warhead on earth, yet people have been able to apply game theory to this situation unconsciously. Some people now are worried that India and Pakistan are entering into their own “Cold War” with a speculated tens of millions of lives at stake. However, because the above matrix applies to countries throughout the world, I am not too worried. Mutually Assured Destruction uses game theory to relay that it is in nobody’s best interest attack another nation with nuclear bombs. Rather, lets attack Global Warming first.