”I want the North Vietnamese to believe that I’ve reached the point that I might do anything to stop the war.  We’ll just slip the word to them that for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism.  We can’t restrain him when he’s angry, and he has his hand on the nuclear button, and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.” – Richard Nixon

It was October, 1969 and the future of the Vietnam conflict looked grim.  Peace talks had been fruitless, more than 4,500 American soldiers had died in the first 6 months of the year, and the Vietnamese had pledged to concede nothing.  Richard Nixon’s first year as President did not go as planned or as promised; during his campaign in 1968, he planned to end the conflict and begin removing troops.  Nixon, along with national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, quickly began devising a plan that would hopefully intimidate the Soviet Union and force them to back down and, in turn, convince the North Vietnamese to concede defeat.

On October 27, the plan was set in motion: 18 B-52’s, each with a payload of nuclear weapons hundreds of times more powerful then those used at the end of WWII, began their journey across the Pacific en route to Moscow.  At the heart of this plan, codenamed Giant Lance, lies the basic tenets of the “madman theory.”  It was Nixon and particularly Kissinger’s belief that “faked, finger-on-the-button rage could bring the Soviets to heel.”

This theory is based on a unique real-world application of game theory.  Kissinger, a Harvard-educated strategic theorist proposed the idea and set the plan in motion.  The Cold War, an era where strategic bluffs and carefully formulated diplomatic actions were even more important than battlefield tactics, saw game theory become an essential component of everyday decision making.  Game theory laid the foundation “for what became in the ’60s and ’70s the doctrine of “flexible response”: Washington would respond to small threats in small ways and big threats in big ways.”

The madman theory extends this concept even further.  Kissinger proposed that, instead of letting an opponent see a pattern in your decision making, trick them into thinking that every option and response is left on the table.  Even small actions by an opponent must be responded to with massive threats of retaliation, thus making your opponent believe you are crazy, and hence the “madman” moniker. 

The plan can be thought of in much simpler terms through game theorist Thomas Schelling’s example. The example relates the madman theory to the simple two-person coordination games we have reviewed in class.  Imagine two people chained together, standing at the edge of a cliff.  When one person gives in, both will be released and the person who remained silent will be given a large prize.  One tactic that will increase the odds of one person crying uncle is for the other person to act erratic and reckless.  If a person (person 1) believes the person they are chained to (person 2) is perhaps insane and liable to jump off, they will rather give in then risk their life trying to get the big prize.  By acting like a madman, person 2 will get the prize.

The plan, of course, did not lead to full-scale war nor did it lead to the Soviet Union backing down anytime soon after.  It did, however, reinforce the unpredictable nature of U.S. foreign policy to the Kremlin and some believe it led to favorable arms-control deals in the early 1970s.  It remains, however, a very clear, though considerably rash, historical example of applied game theory.

Sources:

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/16-03/ff_nuclearwar

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/06/14/nixons_madman_strategy/