orthonormal comments on Thomas C. Schelling's "Strategy of Conflict" - Less Wrong

81 Post author: cousin_it 28 July 2009 04:08PM

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Comment author: Wei_Dai 29 July 2009 02:03:41PM *  3 points [-]

I'd give the following announcement: "People of the UK, please vote your government out of office and shut down your nuclear program. If you fail to do so, we will start nuking the following sites in sequence, one per day, starting [some date]." Well, I'd go through some secret diplomacy first, but that would be my endgame if all else failed. Some backward induction should convince the UK government not to start the nuclear program in the first place.

Comment author: UnholySmoke 29 July 2009 02:38:44PM 13 points [-]

I can think, straight away, of four or five reason why this would have been very much the wrong thing to do.

  • You make an enemy of your biggest allies. Nukes or no, the US has never been more powerful than the rest of the world put together.
  • You don't react to coming out of one Cold War by initiating another.
  • This strategy is pointless unless you plan to follow through. The regime that laid down that threat would either be strung up when they launched, or voted straight out when they didn't.
  • Mutually assured destruction was what stopped nuclear war happening. Setting one country up as the Guardian of the Nukes is stupid, even if you are that country. I'm not a yank, but I believe this sort of idea is pretty big in the constitution.
  • Attacking London is a shortcut to getting a pounding. This one's just conjecture.

Basically he was about ruthlessness for the good of humanity.

Yeah I think the clue is in there. Better to be about the good of humanity, and ruthless if that's what's called for. Setting yourself up as 'the guy who has the balls to make the tough decisions' usually denotes you as a nutjob. Case in point: von Neumann suggesting launching was the right strategy. I don't think anyone would argue today that he was right, though back then the decision must have seemed pretty much impossible to make.

Comment author: orthonormal 29 July 2009 06:41:52PM 21 points [-]

Case in point: von Neumann suggesting launching was the right strategy. I don't think anyone would argue today that he was right, though back then the decision must have seemed pretty much impossible to make.

Survivorship bias. There were some very near misses (Cuban Missile Crisis, Stanislav Petrov, etc.), and it seems reasonable to conclude that a substantial fraction of the Everett branches that came out of our 1946 included a global thermonuclear war.

I'm not willing to conclude that von Neumann was right, but the fact that we avoided nuclear war isn't clear proof he was wrong.

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