The Prisoner's Dilemma: World War I, The Cuban Missile Crisis, the X-Men, and arms races

Two college students decide to go on a road trip and do a little partying on the weekend before one of their final exams on Monday.  They get a little carried away and end up missing the exam.  When they go to the instructor, they admit they were out of town but say a flat tire made them late.  The instructor graciously allows them to take a make-up exam the following day.  The instructor seats them in separate rooms and hands them the test, which consists of only one question: "Which tire?"

That's an old joke/urban myth, but it's a good lead in to this entry's subject: the Prisoner's Dilemma.  The PD is a situation in which a person must make a decision based on an assumption of another person's actions.  Here's how it works (most people already understand how the PD works, but I'm recapping it anyway).  The police arrest two suspects and place them in separate rooms, and each suspect must choose whether to confess or to stay silent.  The catch is that each suspect's choice affects the other.  If both suspects keep their mouths shut, they each get one year in jail.  If they both confess, they each get a two-year sentence.  But if Suspect B keeps quiet and Suspect A confesses (ratting out B), A goes free while B serves three years; and vice versa if B confesses and A doesn't.  Here's a quick and easy explanation in picture form:

The PD's effectiveness lies in how much the two suspects trust each other, because it's set up to incentivize betrayal.  It's a useful tool for understanding and analyzing decision-making in a broad range of topics, including arms races, economic and environmental treaties, preemptive war, and nuclear weapons tactics, among other things.  I'll lay out a theoretical scenario first, then mention a few real world examples. 

Pretend there are two countries that don't really like each other.  One country gets intelligence that the other country is buying up millions of dollars worth of state-of-the-art weaponry - tanks, fighter jets, artillery, and so on, and that it's growing its army's size by 100,000 people.  Assuming the intelligence is true, Country A just got much more powerful.  Now Country B has a choice: believe the intelligence and start its own military buildup, or not believe it and do nothing.  If the intelligence is wrong and Country B rejects it, then nothing changes.  If the intel is correct and Country B rejects it, Country A gets a strong military advantage.  If the intel is true and Country B believes it, both nations have a greater destructive capacity but they're evenly matched again.  If Country B believes the intelligence even though it's wrong, then it has the military advantage now.  Now think through the scenario again, only imagine the intelligence says Country A is about to invade. John Mearsheimer summed it up well when he said "Uncertainty about the intentions of other states is unavoidable, which means that states can never be sure that other do not have offensive intentions to go along with their offensive capabilities." (The Tragedy of Great Power Politics)

This scenario is called the security dilemma, and it has been the subject of a fair amount of scholarly work.  There's a school of thought within the international relations field called realism which is based on the premise that states must not trust their neighbors because international politics is anarchic (in a way, a scaled-up version of Hobbes' state of nature), a nation's survival is the ultimate goal, and other nations' motives cannot be known or trusted.  If you're interested in learning more about realism, I recommend reading some of Mearsheimer's stuff, along with works by Hans Morthenthau and George Kennan; and if you want to go way back, try some Thucydides, Machiavelli, and of course, Thomas Hobbes.

Now for a few real world examples:

• World War I: By the time the Great War broke out, warfare had changed dramatically from the days of foot soldiers carrying spears and shields.  Industrialization, mass production, technological advancements in weaponry, and railroads had made warfighting much more complex.  The speed with which a nation could mobilize its military and the firepower it could bring to bear meant that the first nation to be ready had a substantial advantage - maybe one that could decide the war's outcome.  Although both nations mobilizing rapidly made the war much bloodier, standing down was not an option because hesitation made defeat likely.  
• The 2003 invasion of Iraq: the United States had suffered a horrible terrorist attack about eighteen months before the invasion, and was obsessed with eliminating threats before those threats could attack the country.  The US government accused Iraq's ruler, Saddam Hussein, of possessing massive stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and the (since discredited) fear of being on the receiving end of a chem/bio weapon attack prompted the US to launch a preemptive invasion.  As the Bush Administration's National Security Advisor remarked, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

So where does the Prisoner's Dilemma show up in pop culture? (AKA, Where is the fun part?) It actually serves as a reliable plot device for creating a story's central conflict.  Here are two good examples:

• Crimson Tide.  If you don't remember what this 1995 movie is about, here's a brief recap.  A nuclear-armed submarine is deployed and given a mission to preemptively launch its nukes at a Russian nuclear missile installation, if Chechen rebels who seized control of the installation appear to preparing to launch.  The sub loses communication between its higher command, and must decide whether to launch or to stand down.  The central conflict is between the sub's CO, who wants to launch, and the XO, who dissents.
• Thirteen Days.  This movie is based on the Cuban Missile Crisis, from the point of view of the participants as the events were actually happening.  Hindsight is 20/20, but remember, the people making decisions at the time didn't have all the information.

The Prisoner's Dilemma also shows up in The Dark Knight (the Joker places bombs on two ferries and gives each ship's passengers a detonator to the bombs on the other ferry) and Thor (a trio of Frost Giants invade Asgard, and Thor argues with Odin about whether the trio is a rogue faction or a precursor to an invasion, and whether Asgard should strike back or let it slide).  It also forms a core element of my second-favorite Marvel movie series (The Avengers is #1), the X-Men, although it's an imperfect fit: go back up to that graphic I posted and imagine Suspect A is humanity and Suspect B is mutantkind.  The top left square represents a war between equally matched sides, the top right represents mutant supremacy, the bottom right is an uneasy coexistence, and the bottom left is the bleak future portrayed in Days of Future Past.  You could go a step further and say that the X-Men universe's two chief ideological adversaries (Professor X and Magneto) represent the PD's two courses of action: cooperation or betrayal. 

This has been a long entry, so I'll bring it to a close by linking to a clip from LA Confidential, to show what happens when someone exploits the Prisoner's Dilemma to produce a lose/lose outcome.  Watch how Guy Pearce's character manipulates two of the suspects to make them sell each other out.  You only have to watch the first minute of this clip.

So that's the Prisoner's Dilemma.  Pretty cool stuff, huh?