Nuclear War and Game Theory
A few years ago during Donald Trump’s presidency, there was a period of fear and unrest caused by the North Korean government showing off their nuclear weapons program. President Trump even promised “fire and fury” in response, leading to a country-wide tension similar to that of the Cold War. This article discusses how experts would go about analyzing this situation and making predictions about what could happen and how much damage could be caused. One of the reasons it is so hard to predict, however, is that any nuclear weapons used in the past are an order of magnitude less powerful than weapons which exist today. This lack of historic example leads to a difficult roadblock with little to go off of. Here is where something we learned in class could come into play and help deduce which moves could be made and how to respond to them, and that is game theory.
According to Tim Roughgarden, a professor of computer science at Stanford University, game theory has been used in military tactics since the 1940s. The same ideas that helped us understand which way a soccer player should direct his penalty kick can also help us figure out where and when an enemy might try to attack. This is because both require strategy, and game theory is a mathematical and logical explanation for which strategies might be used and what the optimal response might be. Roughgarden even mentions the prisoner’s dilemma which we went over in class since the strategies are either to confess or not confess. He compares this to the nuclear war because it can be boiled down to simple decisions as well, to attack or not to attack. Since our real-world situation is ongoing with real threat involved from both sides, he argues that through the same logic as the prisoner’s dilemma neither side will attack the other since it is in their best interest to remain neutral.