SYLVIE DOUGLIS, BYLINE: NPR.
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DARIAN WOODS, HOST:
On Sunday, Belarus threatened Ukraine with nuclear weapons. Days earlier, Vladimir Putin vowed to make new nuclear weapons and could place them close to NATO countries.
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PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN: (Speaking Russian).
WOODS: And Putin spoke in Moscow earlier this year, saying that the West is creating a threat of nuclear war that could destroy civilization.
ADRIAN MA, HOST:
And here in the U.S., the government boosted its nuclear weapons spending by 18% between 2022 and 2023. It's evident the world is closer to nuclear war than it's been in at least 40 years.
WOODS: It's scary stuff. And the situation of rising nuclear tensions has its roots in a field of mathematics that underpins a lot of economics - game theory. In this case, the game theory of nuclear standoffs. Neuroscientist Kelly Clancy says depending on this way of thinking may have led to a worrying escalation.
KELLY CLANCY: We're in for a lot of trouble because that's actually not the way humans really operate.
WOODS: This is THE INDICATOR FROM PLANET MONEY. I'm Darian Woods.
MA: And I'm Adrian Ma. Today on the show, the game theory of nuclear war - when can mathematical models help us, and when can they actually lead us astray and even to the brink of destruction?
WOODS: The man who helped shape U.S. nuclear policy and a lot of economic theory today is the mathematician John von Neumann. Von Neumann was born in Budapest, Hungary, and in 1926, he delivered a lecture that set out a mathematical description of two players playing a zero-sum game, as in, if I win, you lose and vice versa. Kelly Clancy is the author of the book "Playing With Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World."
CLANCY: It's a way of kind of describing what players will do without having to worry about what their psychology is, what they're thinking, what their plans are. It completely strips all psychology from game playing and makes it this, like, very austere mathematical project.
MA: This project or this field would be called game theory. And you can have all kinds of theories and games within this discipline apply to all kinds of questions, like, how do businesses price their goods or how does evolution in the natural world work or how do we decide whether or not to attack a country with nuclear weapons?
WOODS: Before World War II, von Neumann emigrated to the U.S., where he would join the Manhattan Project. Kelly says he was instrumental in creating some of the fundamental breakthroughs needed for the first atomic bomb.
CLANCY: Particularly, he was interested in, like, the physics of detonation. And he was also important strategically. He was on the committee that helped determine which targets they should go for, they should bomb.
WOODS: That's incredible that he was both calculating the bomb physics and the political military strategic decisions as well.
CLANCY: Yeah, he was a very smart man, and he was hawkish. So in many ways, he was somebody that the American military was happy to work with.
MA: After the U.S. drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world is left with a horrible new reality. Estimates vary, but anywhere from over 100,000 to more than 200,000 people were killed. And this could just be the start.
CLANCY: With the advent of nuclear weapons, we had a whole new calculus of war.
WOODS: So battles that once played out over months could now be decided in minutes. Von Neumann and others offer up game theory as a way to strategize. And one of the most famous ideas to come from game theory was mutually assured destruction or MAD. Basically, the idea is nobody would want to attack the U.S. or the USSR if they believed that they and the world would get annihilated straight away with nuclear weapons. In theory, the buildup of world-destroying bombs and missiles would actually create peace.
MA: But this theory had a couple of problems. First, you have to credibly commit to essentially destroying the other party and the world if you get attacked.
CLANCY: Somebody likened this to, like, two prisoners are chained by their ankles. One has to credibly threaten to push the other off the cliff, which would obviously, like, drag themselves down as well. And the way to kind of bluster this is by dancing on the edge, by acting irrationally, that, like, ultimately, this supposed, like, theory of rationality game theory is advocating for us to act kind of irrationally.
MA: I mean, think about this. In order to credibly commit, you had to act like a madman or automate the response with computers and machines. But this runs into a second problem - mistakes.
WOODS: And no discussion of nuclear folly would be complete without "Dr. Strangelove." This 1964 sci-fi satire film illustrated this problem perfectly and the speculation that Dr. Strangelove himself was, in part, inspired by von Neumann.
CLANCY: In the movie, the Soviets have taken up this idea of having an automated system in control of their nuclear arsenal so that it would just kind of automatically happen. So they put this in place, but they hadn't yet announced it to the world.
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PETER SELLERS: (As Dr. Stranglove) Is that the whole point of the doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret. Why didn't you tell the world, eh?
WOODS: In this movie, you've got this unhinged American general deciding to attack the Soviets, which puts the whole world at risk. This shows how the entire system can be destroyed by a single bad actor.
MA: By the early 1980s, as stockpiles grew, nuclear fears were permeating everyday people's lives. And it was frightening to those at the top, too.
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RONALD REAGAN: History and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire.
WOODS: President Ronald Reagan was famously hawkish against the USSR at the time.
MA: But two games would contribute to a major shift in nuclear strategy in the U.S. First, the economist Thomas Schelling organized a war game for 200 politicians and top military officials in Washington. In this game, they simulated what nuclear war around the world might look like.
CLANCY: The general consensus was horror. Most of the attacks escalated to outright nuclear war and the end of the world. The best-case scenario had 500 million people dying directly and then another 500 million people dying of nuclear fallouts.
MA: And that included scenarios where you start out with smaller, more precise nuclear weapons, as Vladimir Putin sometimes discusses in regards to Ukraine right now.
CLANCY: It still escalates to these, like, horrible numbers.
WOODS: Around the same time, a teen sci-fi movie called "WarGames" came out. It starred a young Matthew Broderick, who hacks into the military supercomputer and nearly starts a nuclear war.
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MATTHEW BRODERICK: (As David Lightman) Who should we nuke first?
ALLY SHEEDY: (As Jennifer Katherine Mack) Oh, let's see. How about Las Vegas?
BRODERICK: (As David Lightman) Las Vegas. Great.
MA: Ronald Reagan actually saw this movie. And Kelly says he was spooked both by this film and the simulated war game we mentioned.
CLANCY: It inspired the Reagan administration to A, completely change their nuclear rhetoric and also open sweeping arms negotiations with the Soviets.
MA: A couple of years later, Reagan's tone changed immensely.
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REAGAN: We will meet with the Soviets, hoping that we can agree on a way to rid the world of the threat of nuclear destruction.
WOODS: And by the late 1980s, Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed a treaty to eliminate certain nuclear missiles.
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REAGAN: On the Soviet side, over 1,500 deployed warheads will be removed, and all ground-launched intermediate-range missiles, including the SS20s, will be destroyed.
MA: But this era of reducing nuclear weapons has come to an end. Russia has pulled out of nuclear agreements, and with nine countries who now control nuclear weapons, the calculations are a lot more complex.
CLANCY: It's all very scary.
WOODS: Games helps the world out of nuclear brinkmanship. But to Kelly's eyes, von Neumann's game theory got us into it in the first place. Kelly says what's been shown through psychological research in the lab is that we play the game we think we're supposed to be playing.
CLANCY: You could have the exact same rules and the exact same structure of game, but if you call it The Wall Street game, 70% of the players will betray each other. And if you call it Community, 70% of the players will cooperate.
WOODS: Wow.
CLANCY: Game theory's unfortunately a poor model of people, and it's - I think that's a bit dangerous 'cause it can change our behaviors.
WOODS: I wonder if the war cabinet should be renamed the cooperation cabinet.
CLANCY: (Laughter) That would be nice.
WOODS: This episode was produced by Angel Carreras with the engineering by Valentina Rodríguez Sánchez. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Kate Concannon edits the show, and THE INDICATOR is a production of NPR.
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