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Mad Men
Thomas Schelling showed that it could sometimes pay to be irrational, or at least to appear to be irrational. If they think you're crazy then in a game of chicken it's your opponent who will backdown.
It's known that Nixon understood the theory but in an frightening article in Wired we learn the insane extent to which the theory was practiced.
Frustrated at the state of affairs in Vietnam, Nixon resolved to:
...threaten the Soviet Union with a massive nuclear strike and make its leaders think he was crazy enough to go through with it. His hope was that the Soviets would be so frightened of events spinning out of control that they would strong-arm Hanoi, telling the North Vietnamese to start making concessions at the negotiating table or risk losing Soviet military support.
Much more was involved than words, at one point nuclear bombers were sent directly towards Soviet airspace where they triggered the Soviet defense systems.
On the morning of October 27, 1969, a squadron of 18 B-52s — massive bombers with eight turbo engines and 185-foot wingspans — began racing from the western US toward the eastern border of the Soviet Union. The pilots flew for 18 hours without rest, hurtling toward their targets at more than 500 miles per hour. Each plane was loaded with nuclear weapons hundreds of times more powerful than the ones that had obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Soviets went nuts but following Nixon's orders Kissinger told the Soviet ambassador that the President was out of control.
Apparently neither Nixon or Kissinger had absorbed another Schelling insight - if you want to credibly pretend you are out of control then you have to push things so far that sometimes you will be out of control. The number of ways such a plan could have resulted in a nuclear war is truly frightening. After all, Nixon was gambling millions of lives on the Soviets being the rational players in this game.
Next time you are told how a madman threatens the world remember the greatest threats have come from our own mad men.
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on March 10, 2008 at 07:47 AM in Economics, Education, History | Permalink
Comments
Great post! I'm sure some readers will call it "moral equivalency" but no, you've said that it's far worse (not equivalent) when aggressive people have thousands of nuclear weapons at their beck and call.
I sometimes catch people who are concerned about proliferation by asking, "What is the one country that has used nuclear weapons on civilians?"
Posted by: Bob Murphy at Mar 10, 2008 8:05:21 AM
Dr, Srangelove(1964) became the model for diplomacy?
Very disturbing.
Posted by: odograph at Mar 10, 2008 8:27:39 AM
I have maintained for decades that the only reason that the Cold War did not end in nuclear war is that the Russians had a realistic glimpse of what nuclear war would mean, with millions of dead, cities of rubble and starving survivors. And that glimpse was part of the largest war ever fought, which would pale before what would happen in a nuclear exchange. Having had a foretaste of the true hell that would result from nuclear destruction, even the Soviet leadership was not going to destroy itself over an ideology
Strange to think that fear prevailed over ideology, at least in the Soviet Union, while many Americans believed that 'better dead than red' was a rational response to a geopolitical struggle.
Sadly, the nation which values ideology over pragmatism, the winner of a contest involving military competition of the sort its founders had always warned against, is still armed to the teeth, and still looking for the chance to triumph over the fears lurking in its own collective soul.
Posted by: not_scottbot at Mar 10, 2008 8:42:55 AM
IMHO both Iran and North Korea understand both Schelling insights, and are applying them consciously and successfully. Both probably also realize that actually getting and openly declaring nuclear weapons would undercut their strategy, since once everyone knows you have them it is much harder to be convincingly crazy.
Posted by: DK at Mar 10, 2008 8:56:07 AM
I find that article difficult to take seriously. Is there any corroborating evidence that this event actually took place?
As for this--"Sadly, the nation which values ideology over pragmatism, the winner of a contest involving military competition of the sort its founders had always warned against, is still armed to the teeth, and still looking for the chance to triumph over the fears lurking in its own collective soul."
Yeah, whatever.
Posted by: DBrooks at Mar 10, 2008 9:13:23 AM
I sometimes catch people who are concerned about proliferation by asking, "What is the one country that has used nuclear weapons on civilians?"
I guess in that case they're silly to be concerned...?
Posted by: constant at Mar 10, 2008 9:16:48 AM
My understanding is that, at least in his later days, Nixon _really was_ out of control, messed up on pills and drink and completely paranoid, and that Kissinger told the joint chiefs that if Nixon called them and told them to do anything that sounded crazy they were not to do it until after they had called him. As much damage as Nixon did to this country (and it was a huge amount) it's scarry to think of how much more he might have done if things were only a little different.
Posted by: Matt at Mar 10, 2008 9:18:17 AM
Purple prose at its best! "Massive" bombers, with "185-foot wingspan" and "turbo engines" "racing" towards their target, no, "hurtling" "without rest" to "obliterate" their victims.
Posted by: George at Mar 10, 2008 9:34:35 AM
Since when do we look to a twenty-something trite computer magazine for serious political history?
Sorry, not buying Wired's article.
Posted by: liberty at Mar 10, 2008 9:35:46 AM
Next time you are told how a madman threatens the world remember the greatest threats have come from our own mad men.
Alex,
Your epistemic arrogance is, suffice to say, a disappointment. Neither you nor I have complete knowledge of the 'greatest threats' to have threatened the world.
Posted by: Varangy at Mar 10, 2008 9:43:48 AM
Anybody have anything credible to say or to link to, to help me decide whether to believe this or not?
Posted by: josh at Mar 10, 2008 9:55:29 AM
Wired is far over the top writing about everyday subjects. I would take anything they wrote about nuclear deterrence at such a large discount, it's probably not even worth reading the article.
Posted by: Zach at Mar 10, 2008 10:01:38 AM
The Wired article includes several original documents obtained by FIFA requests, look especially at the "Notes." For what it is worth, Suri is a young but well respected historian with a new book on Kissinger
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/SURHEN.html
He was recently profiled in the Smithsonian magazine as a leading innovator.
http://history.wisc.edu/people/faculty/faculty_files/suri_smithsonian_fall07_2.pdf?Id=17
Alex
Posted by: Alex Tabarrok at Mar 10, 2008 10:08:42 AM
Shenanigans. I believe Alex's entire post beginning with the sentence, "It's known..." is a game of irrationality, and it's surprising to see some posters have bought into it. Alex isn't buying into Wired's incredibly awfully written and incorrect story but wanted to create the appearance of such a belief. His ultimate purpose was to illicit responses, particularly those in agreement with Alex (such as not_scottbot's), but the personal attacks, like Varangy's, are also a bonus. Alex 1, not_scottbot 0, Varangy -1.
Posted by: Shaun M. at Mar 10, 2008 10:09:30 AM
Nixon was supposed to be an excellent poker player. If true, this was a awfully large bluff though. Perhaps he realized that the Russians would realize he was just bluffing and that if they thought he thought this was a reasonable gambit then they would start to think he really was crazy though.
Posted by: mike p at Mar 10, 2008 10:10:19 AM
but what if the Russians new that he knew that they'd know he's bluffing; so clearly I can not drink the wine in front of me.
Posted by: josh at Mar 10, 2008 10:24:54 AM
How do you know this true? There is so much disinformation about that I confess myself unpursuaded.
Posted by: critic at Mar 10, 2008 10:57:17 AM
Some years ago I read a similar-sounding post about Dick Cheney written by John Perry Barlow. It could have been this one. It was a scary idea at the time, but I think the scarier truth is that Cheney is too disconnected to be a rational actor.
Posted by: Eduardo S at Mar 10, 2008 11:01:28 AM
This is scary. Why hasnt this been uncovered and dealt with in a serious historical text/book?
Posted by: Radman at Mar 10, 2008 11:18:32 AM
Does this mean that in the sequence JFK-LBJ-RMN, LBJ was the sane one who wasn't disabled by drugs? That is scary.
Posted by: dearieme at Mar 10, 2008 11:48:09 AM
We have known since 1980 that a readiness exercise took place in the fall of 1969 and the evidence for the article was published years ago
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB81/index2.htm
Posted by: joan at Mar 10, 2008 12:01:07 PM
Scary? Those frightened by the past (or a fantasy of the past) are condemned to perpetual quivering. Yesterday cannot hurt you. Are y'all afraid dinosaurs will eat your babies, too? And, nobody, I mean nobody, expects the Spanish Inquisition!
George: Amen. The writer clearly had an agenda which made even presentation of relevant historical fact an inferior consideration.
Posted by: foxmarks at Mar 10, 2008 12:01:15 PM
I just looked out the window and pigs are flying.
This is nonsense.
Posted by: jorod at Mar 10, 2008 12:11:34 PM
"Nixon was gambling millions of lives on the Soviets being the rational players in this game"
And all to save face...this is the economy of politicians. It's hard not to let loose unfiltered language when discussing these people.
I'm reminded of the Rush song "Heresy" and the line, "all around this great big world, all the crap we have to take, all the bombs and basement fallout shelters, all a big mistake."
Socialism was a big mistake. Assuming it could take over the planet (and that we had to go to the brink to avoid it) was our mistaken response to it.
So, our leaders such as Nixon had the big picture wrong, and they have the small picture wrong as we lose backwater war after war.
Posted by: Andrew at Mar 10, 2008 12:28:41 PM
For those pooh-poohing the Wired story, verification is important, but the point is the story is believable.
As "we" (and I use "we" in the mistaken sense that our unhinged political "leaders" are us) won't even take nukes off the table when dealing with third-world non-threats who don't yet have The Bomb, but will surely try to get it, or ally with those who do.
Today's leaders have mutually assured destruction and nuclear deterrence exactly bass-akwards.
Posted by: Andrew at Mar 10, 2008 12:33:09 PM
