Rand Graduate School Of Policy Studies

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The Diamondback: What was the most important application of game theory in the past? Is the Cold War a good example? Schelling: Yes. Back in about the 1950’s it was argued that the main purpose of U.S. nuclear weapons was to deter any nuclear attack on the United States. The idea was that we had such a large nuclear capability mainly based in large bombers, propeller driven, that we could readily destroy. People using game theory to help them think about it discovered that most of the bombers with which we would threaten retaliation clustered on very few airfields, very unprotected. In normal time, it would take a couple of hours to get them ready to fly. If the Soviets ever thought of attacking the US, it looked as if they might be able to, with a small amount of bombers ... drop bombs on a few airfields and destroy [our] bomber force. We had to try to find weapons that couldn’t be destroyed in an attack. The great argument in favor of the submarine-based missiles was that they couldn’t find them at 500 feet under the ocean. There was no way to track them because they were invisible. The - more available