Would U.S. Leaders Push the Button? Wargames and the Sources of Nuclear Restraint

Abstract

Why since 1945 have nuclear weapons not been used? Political scientists have cited five basic reasons: deterrence, practicality, precedent, reputation, and ethics. Scholars attempting to weight these factors face a dearth of empirical data. Declassified records of political-military wargames played by U.S. policymakers, however, open up new avenues for theory testing. An investigation of the willingness of U.S. “strategic elites”—experts with experience in diplomatic or military strategy—to use nuclear weapons in a sample of twenty-six political-military wargames reveals that elite players were reluctant to cross the nuclear threshold against both nuclear-armed and nonnuclear-armed adversaries. The only uses of nuclear weapons in the sample occurred in two wargames with nuclear adversaries. Players’ arguments for restraint in the wargames invoked reputational aversion: decisionmakers feared the opprobrium they would face if they used nuclear weapons. Wargame records also strongly support the power of deterrence and basic practicality—whether conventional weapons could accomplish the same goals—as reasons for widespread hesitation to use nuclear weapons. Precedent and ethical aversions to using nuclear weapons were less common. Finally, players also demonstrated some conformity to what they thought the president expected of them.

How Moral Foundations Shape Public Approval of Nuclear, Chemical, and Conventional Strikes: New Evidence from Experimental Surveys

“…Second, the majority of the existing research on the nonuse of nuclear weapons has primarily examined the perception of the norm among either the political and military elite (Bentley 2017;Pauly 2018;Tannenwald 2007) or the general public (Haworth , Sagan, and Valentino 2019;Press Sagan, and Valentino 2013;Sagan and Valentino 2017). There are, however, valid reasons to suspect that there are substantial differences in the public-elite positionsamong other things, due to the different level of socialization with international norms in certain elite positions in the governmental or military organizations.…”

How moral foundations shape public approval of nuclear, chemical, and conventional strikes: new evidence from experimental surveys

“…Second, the majority of the existing research on the non-use of nuclear weapons has primarily examined the perception of the norm among either among the political and military elite (Tannenwald 2007;Bentley 2017;Pauly 2018) or the general public (Press, Sagan, and Valentino 2013;Sagan and Valentino 2017;Haworth, Sagan, and Valentino 2019). There are, however, valid reasons to suspect that there are substantial differences in the public-elite positions -among other things, due to the different level of socialization with international norms in certain elite positions in the governmental or military organizations.…”

Wargaming for International Relations research

“…These data, from a golden age of senior policymaker participation in wargames run by social scientists, are ripe for political science theory testing. Data from more recent games run by government agencies, think tanks, NGOs, and scholars are also often publicly available, including those published by the RAND Corporation, Naval War College, Naval Postgraduate School, Harvard Belfer Center, and increasingly in periodical replication materials (Pauly, 2018; Schneider, 2017).…”

“…Yet data about decision-making, especially involving rare events and the elite decisionmakers associated with security and foreign policymaking, can be difficult to obtain. In recent years, there has been a revival of interest in wargaming as a way to both generate and obtain these behavioral insights (Bartels, 2020; Colbert et al, 2017; Dorn et al, 2020; Hirst, 2020; Jensen and Valeriano, 2019; Pauly, 2018; Reddie et al, 2018; Schneider, 2017). 1 Long the territory of policymakers, IR scholars are beginning to leverage archival data from historical wargames and have also fielded their own games to test theories on decision-making and conflict dynamics.…”