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Here's something I was pondering the other day...

The nuclear strategists at RAND, some of whom went on to become McNamara's Whiz Kids, were significantly influenced by neoclassical economics. Partly this is just a natural overlap since both RAND nuclear strategy and neoclassicism use game theory. But there's more to it than that - national leaders are utility-maximizing rational actors, different outcomes are expressed as numeric utility values, etc.

This makes me wonder: what would a nuclear strategy inspired by a different branch of economics be like? For example, what would a Keynesian strategy look like? Or one based on behavioral economics?

A behavioral strategy strikes me as particularly interesting, although it would obviously require considerable tinkering with history to have it around by the 50s. I'm imagining strategists that take a very empirical approach, looking through history to see how leaders and societies respond to extreme stress and mass casualties. Or lock undergrads in a room with a telephone, tell them they're the leaders of the free world and the commies want Berlin, and see how they react.

This may not have a huge direct effect on the world. But if McNamara still recruits his aides from RAND, it could have interesting repercussions for defense procurement and policy in the 60s.
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