Dr. Reid Pauly, the Dean's Assistant Professor of Nuclear Security and Policy at Brown University joins Andrew for a conversion about Cold Wargaming. Reid has spent significant time in different archives, trying to reconstruct the decision making processes inside games being played at the Pentagon during the Cold War. In this episode Andrew and Reid focus on the legacy of a particular set of Cold Wargames and the way they still shape the way we think about geopolitics today.

Key Points

Wargaming is a particularly useful tool for those in the nuclear field, where we lack real world data on use cases but still want to understand risks and escalation pathways. Wargames allow us to study nuclear war in simulated environments. This method was also popular in the U.S. Defense Department during the Cold War for the insights they could bring on potential nuclear crises.
Thomas Schelling and Lincoln Bloomfield played a series of wargames at MIT and with the Department of Defense, exploring topics such as nuclear deterrence, compellence, and brinkmanship. Their games were more political than previous military-only games, driving at topics like the effects of nuclear weapons on interstate competition
Schelling and Bloomfield walked players through several different problem sets and geopolitical crises, including conflict in Europe, strategies to end the war in Vietnam, and responses to events on the Korean Peninsula. In these games, Schelling and Bloomfield introduced new design choices, including not telling players when rounds would end and adding more politics and diplomatic options to games.

Reid’s Reading Recommendations

Reid Pauly’s “Would U.S. Leaders Push the Button? Wargames and the Sources of Nuclear Restraint,” International Security (2018)
John Badham’s 1983 film WarGames
The Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative at the Hoover Institute, directed by Dr. Jacquelyn Schneider, and its publicly available wargaming archive.

A reading list to accompany this podcast series can be found at: https://brsl.berkeley.edu/podcasts/