Ask HN: Why Hasn't the Doomsday Clock Advanced?
I wrote an article about nuclear armageddon under the guise of writing about game theory, and the truth is that it&#x27;s extremely unlikely something will happen. Taking the liberty to quote myself,<p>&gt; However, the implications of MAD aren’t what most people expect. Our current interpretation is a mutation of the original premise, as von Neumann examined the situation mathematically and arrived at a two-party version of Nash’s Equilibrium (John Nash generalized it to n-parties).<p>&gt; More precisely, nuclear annihilation is not an iterated dilemma; therefore, it is completely logical for a first strike to be the best strategic option in this scenario. If State A destroys State B and removes any capacity for State B to strike A, then State A is able to guarantee its future existence and “wins” the game.<p>&gt; The policy of nuclear retaliation, or a second strike, is an attempt to change the payoff function of this game and add a cost to this form of defection. It adds one more iteration to the game where the player is punished for their defection&#x2F;first strike. Thereby making sure that the win-state is not attained.<p>&gt; However, this rationale&#x2F;version of MAD starts to break down the longer that you look at it. What incentive do the submarine commanders have to launch, given that the homeland that they’ve received their orders from has already been destroyed? It is not a rational policy from the survivor’s standpoint to destroy what is left of the world and end their own existence in the process. Therefore they have an incentive to not carry out the second strike, resurrecting the first-strike problem once again.<p>&gt; From this perspective, and from the technology that existed in 1950, game theory predicts only one solution — strike first; strike hard. As he famously put it9,<p>&gt;    “If you say why not bomb [the Soviets] tomorrow, I say, why not today? If you say today at five o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?”<p>&gt; And yet, we’re still here. Despite many, many, many close calls. Including the times when the US accidentally, almost, nuked the Carolinas. Twice.  (that we know of.)<p>&gt; Why?<p>---<p>&gt; All told, there have been 16 “close calls.” That we know of. The world has faced nuclear annihilation 16 times, and all 16 times, multiple people have refused to press the button despite (seeming) orders and procedures to the contrary.<p>&gt; Their actions are not rational. These outcomes fly against the predictions of game theory. All actors involved understood the dominant strategy and why it was the best strategy, and they chose not to play it. <i>They chose not to end the world.</i><p>&gt; Dr. Thomas Schelling calls this “the event that didn’t occur,” and he devoted his Nobel prize lecture to the invalidation of von Neumann’s and game theory’s predictions by our 50+ years of applied experience.<p>Sources etc are in my essay, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;1517.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;the-limits-of-game-theory" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;1517.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;the-limits-of-game-theory</a><p>---<p>Essentially, every single time there has been an escalation, people who have to carry out the orders, people in the chain of command have refused to be the ones to end the world.<p>Tactical nukes are really bad as weapons. Nukes aren&#x27;t a magic wand that can make an unwinnable war winnable. Freeman Dyson et al pointed this out in their report about the use of tactical nuclear weapons in the Vietnam war.<p>Getting a bigger bomb doesn&#x27;t actually change the tactical situation on the ground. Sure you can make the thing go boom, but you still won&#x27;t be able to hold the territory. And now the locals will resist you even harder.<p>If they could have won us a war, we&#x27;d have used them by now. But between the lack of desire to be the one who ends the world and their uselessness as day-to-day weapons. Nukes are, for the most part, a non-factor in modern conflict once it starts. Of course, their <i>presence</i> changes the calculus of whom a state should invade or not invade.