The strategy of conflict

“Coercive deficiency” is the term Arthur Smithies uses to describe the tactic of deliberately exhausting one’s annual budgetary allowanceso early in the year that the need for more fundsis irresistibly urgent.

The concept of role in sociology, which explicitly involves the expectations that other. have about one’s behavior, as well as one’s expectations about how others will behave toward him,can in part be interpreted in terms of the stability of “convergent expectations,” of the same type that are involved in the coordination game. Oneis trapped in a particular role, or by another’s role, because it is the only role that in the circumstances can be identified by a process of tacit consent.

While one’s maneuvers are not unambiguous in their revelation of one’s value systems and may €ven be deliberately deceptive, they nevertheless have an evidential quality that mere speech has not. The uncertainty that can usually be pr

There was a time, shortly after the first atomic bomb was exploded, when there was some journalistic speculation about whether the earth’s atmosphere had a limited tolerance to nuclear fission; the idea was bruited about that a mighty chain reaction might destroy the earth’s atmosphere when somecritical number of bombs had already been exploded. Someone proposed that, if this were true and if we could calculate with accuracy that critical level of tolerance, we might neutralize atomic weapons for all time by a deliberate program of openly and dramatically exploding » — 1 bombs.

The ordinary healthy high-school graduate, of slightly below average intelligence, has to work fairly hard to produce more than $3,000 or $4,000 of value per year; but he could destroy a hundred times that much if he set his mind to it, according to the writer’s hasty calculations.

The usual idea that a trip wire either does work or does not work, that the Russians either expect it to work or expect it not to work, is mistaking two simple extremes for a more complicated range of probabilities.

A warning system may err in either way: it may cause us to identify an attacking plane as a seagull, and do nothing, or it may cause us to identify a seagull as an attacking plane, and provoke our inadvertent attack on the enemy. Both possibilities of error can presumably be reduced by spending more money and ingenuity on the system. But, for a given e%- penditure, it is generally true of decision criteria that a tightening of the criteria with respect of one kind of error loosens them with respect to the other.

On some questions, emphasis on the surprise-attack problem May lead to a downright reversal of the answer that one would get from moretraditional “disarmament” considerations. Consider the Case of a limitation on the number of missiles that might be allowed to both sides (if we ever reached the point in negotiations With Russia where an agreement limiting the number of missiles Were pertinent and inspection seemed feasible). Suppose we had decided, from a consideration of population targets and enemy incentives, that we would need a minimum expectation of to missiles left over after his first counter-missile strike in order to carry out an adequately punitive retaliatory strike — that is, to deter him from striking in thefirst place. Forillustration suppose his accuracies and reliabilities are such that one of his missiles has a 50-50 chance of knocking out one of ours. Then, if we have 200, he needs to knock out just over half; at 50 per cent reliability he needs to fire just over 200 to cut our residual supply to less than roo. If we had 400, he would need to knock out three-quarters of ours; at a 50 per cent discount rate for misses and failures he would need to fire more than twice 400, that is, more than 800. If we had 800, he would have to knock out seven-eighths of ours, and to do it with so per cent reliability he would need over three times that number, or more than 2400. And so on. Thelarger the initial number on the “defending”side, the larger the multiple required by the attacker in order to reduce the victim’s residual supply to below some “safe” number.

The book has had a good reception, and many have cheered me by telling me they liked it or learned from it. But the response that warms me most after twenty years is the late John Strachey’s. John Strachey, whose books I had read in college, had been an outstanding Marxist economist in the 1930s. After the war he had been defense minister in Britain’s Labor Government. Some of us at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs invited him to visit because he was writing a book on disarmament and arms control. When he called on me he exclaimed how much this book had done for his thinking, and as he talked with enthusiasm I tried to guess which of my sophisticated ideas in which chapters had made so much difference to him. It turned out it wasn’t any particular idea in any particular chapter. Until he read this book, he had simply not comprehended that an inherently non-zero-sum conflict could exist. He had known that conflict could coexist with common interest but had thought, or taken for granted, that they were essentially separable, not aspects of an integral structure. A scholar concerned with monopoly capitalism and class struggle, nuclear strategy and alliance politics, working late in his career on arms control and peacemaking, had tumbled, in reading my book, to an idea so rudimentary that I hadn’t even known it wasn’t obvious.