Stardate 20020927.2136

(On Screen): There are cities in the US where the traffic is particularly heavy and the highways particularly bad and the drivers are particularly aggressive.

In other words, Boston. Driving on a highway in Boston during rush hour is kind of like a contest, at least for most people. The more people you pass, the sooner you get home. It's a zero-sum game, because there's a certain ability of the highway to carry cars, and if you go faster than others will go slower. Never mind that if everyone changed their driving habits, the overall capacity of the highway would rise and everyone would benefit. People in Boston don't think that way.

So you get a lot of lane changing, as people try to move from slower lanes to faster ones to get home sooner. And by the same token, if someone tries to merge in front of you then it means they're slowing you down, so you also get people deliberately trying to prevent others from changing lanes, and a lot of confrontations: "I'm changing lanes in front of you, now." "Like hell you are." And then they both drive in the same direction, and see who chickens out first. Sometimes neither does.

All of which means you get a lot of traffic accidents, and which means that Boston has the most expensive car insurance in the country.

There's a half-facetious saying there: whoever is driving the most beat-up car has right-of-way. If someone in a 25-year-old rusted out Pinto takes on someone in a new Jaguar, the Pinto wins and the Jag will back off. It's true that the collision will cost them both, but it's going to cost the Jag owner a lot more in money and hassle and in particular in anguish. Since the Pinto owner knows this, he's willing to challenge the Jag. Since the Jag owner knows that the Pinto owner knows this, the Jag owner isn't willing to challenge the Pinto.

Both sides know that the Jag owner will back down. So the Pinto makes its lane change and the Jag does back down and let him.

A deterrent is a psychological threat, and its value isn't based solely on a cold accounting of the damage. It's also based on the psychological value of the potential loss to each side, and what may be acceptable to one person may be unacceptable to another. So in a confrontation, the fact that the overt negative result may be equal for both (their cars being damaged) may not have the same psychological value to each, and if one of them knows that the other feels as if he has more to lose, then he can use the nominally-equally-bad result as a threat against the other.

In fact, even if the nominal damage to him is greater, if the psychological value of the other guy's damage is higher then there may still be a valid threat there. If I'm willing to spend $500 to cost you $200, then that may be a valid threat if $200 is worth more to you than $500 is to me.

Deterrence can work, but only if it's carefully calculated. We went through forty years of the Cold War without any of the great powers using nuclear weapons on one another. The primary reason for that was the development (primarily by John Von Neumann) of the concept of "mutually assured destruction" (which became known by its initials, MAD). The idea was that we would create an unstoppable force of missiles aimed at military and civilian targets on the other side in sufficient quantity, maintained at sufficient readiness, that if anyone actually attacked us, we would in response inflict unacceptably high damage to him. And the entire point of it, the very basis of it, was that the response would not be proportional. Any use of nuclear weapons against us would cause maximum response.

Pacifists and humanists and a lot of religious people were appalled; they felt that the idea that we'd be willing to kill a hundred million people in the Soviet Union, especially civilians, at a moment's notice was immoral and unacceptable. The entire idea was decried as a suicide attack, and the inevitable comments were made that MAD was madness. But they misunderstood Von Neumann's logic: he didn't want to kill anyone. On the contrary, his goal was to make sure that no nuclear exchange ever took place and that no one ever used a nuclear weapon in war. This wasn't the first time that deterrence had been used, but it was the largest and most public example of it in history, and its success rested on several foundations.

First, we actually had to have the weapons and it had to be believed that they'd work as advertised. The warheads would have to actually go off. The missiles would actually have to carry the warheads to where we said they were.

Second, the quantity had to be sufficient.

Third, the enemy had to believe that we'd actually fire our second strike if we ourselves were attacked, and that we truly would fire them all.

Fourth and last, the expected damage of such an attack had to be considered intolerable by the other side.

All of which, when taken together, meant that any potential enemy would know that a nuclear attack on us, no matter how or why it happened, would cause them such drastic destruction in return as to make it the worst result they could conceive of. Therefore they would never risk such a thing.

By proposing institutional ruthlessness of this magnitude, Von Neumann was actually accomplishing a noble and merciful goal of preventing nuclear weapons from being used. It's hardly surprising to learn that Von Neumann established the mathematical field of game theory; his ideas about MAD