James Carafano: New START Will Lead to Disaster
An excerpt of James Carafano’s latest Washington Examiner column:
“John Forbes Nash Jr. had a beautiful mind. Ron Howard said so.
“Howard directed ‘A Beautiful Mind,’ the 2001 film about the prize-winning mathematician. The movie was artful. (Much of the story line was ‘cinematized,’ Howard explained, because ‘Nash is not particularly communicative about that sort of thing [his life].’ But what Nash can do with numbers is fine art indeed. The letter of recommendation a professor wrote to get Nash into graduate school was one sentence long — ‘This man is a genius.’
“What earned Nash notoriety and a place on the silver screen was his work on game theory. Game theories attempt to understand how competitions unfold. Here, ‘game’ is a metaphor for a structured model designed to evaluate how competitors make choices.
“During the Cold War, U.S. analysts used gaming exercises to evaluate the nuclear stand-off with the Evil Empire. Games let them examine — without risking real-world nuclear war — how nuclear deterrence might play out if one side or the other changed strategies.
“Cold War games involved only two players — us and them. Nash analyzed how to manage outcomes when several players were all operating independently: the Nash equilibrium. It earned him the Nobel Prize.
“My Heritage Foundation colleague Baker Spring built on this concept to game what might happen in a world with numerous independent nuclear powers. Many experts believe that, once North Korea and Iran become established nuclear weapons nations, other regional powers will go nuclear too. And fast.”
Tags: James Carafano, START