M Y T H O F T H E N U C L E A R S E C U R I T Y S TAT E

You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst1

BLINDNESS TO THE REAL - INCOMPUTABILITY OF RARE EVENTS

Nuclear weapons have not been used since 1945 and there's never been a nuclear, or
even a nonnuclear, war between two states that possess them. This past history is
believed to be a sound basis to imagine that the lack of nuclear war was caused by
nuclear deterrence. This is the narrative fallacy that uses retrospective determinism to
explain the past. That is, there were no nuclear wars in the past 64-years because of nu-
clear deterrence. Might this realist perspective represent a hubristic illusion of under-
standing of current events combined with the contagion of Panurge’s sheep?

Imagining that along with the other assumptions of nuclear deterrence: (1) approxi-
mate parity so that neither side has an advantage for First Use, (2) both sides have
enough information that they can make informed, rational decisions as the game
progresses, and (3) the players are rational (the rational choice theory), that this strat-
egy can be employed indefinitely through time is the stationarity or statistical regress
fallacy. This fallacy believes that the structure of reality can be deterministically
mapped (developed and described) from a historical data set. Thus, the probability of
an event occurring in the future can be calculated without a retrospective distortion
of historical events to fit current socially acceptable ways of describing reality. For
example, maintenance of existing military budgets, jobs, or civilian contracts would
never enter into assumptions as to the usefulness or viability of nuclear deterrence.

The rational choice theory is always operative. This the ludic fallacy that a normal Gaus-
sian distribution probability curve describes probabilistic states and mistakes simple
models of reality with the Real. That is, in the event of war, the decision-maker’s set
of decisions for whether or not to push the red button can be fully calculated and
would fall within a normal distribution. The nuclear decision maker would rarely
make a move that was far outside the norm for that situation. No fat tails allowed -
situations of low probability but very high consequences (defined by Cauchy curves). 2

Together, these three fallacies result in the Platonic myth, the tendency for humans to
become more comfortable seeing reality as something structured, ordinary, and com-
prehensible (i.e. rationally explainable). Thus, although the nuclear security state may
have been originally designed to protect our society from human evil, it now may
have become a great evil itself that abridges human freedom, perverts democracy,
promotes corporatism over capitalism, diverts attention and resources, and limits our
imagination as to what is possible within the realm of human civilization and history.

1 Italio Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979) in William Poundstone, Prisoner’s Di-
lemma (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 53.

2 Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) presents these common fallacies in his Fooled By Randomness
(2001) and The Black Swan (2007) where he outlines Mendelbroit’s proofs of the incomputability
of the probability for consequential rare events from empirical observations ("Black Swans").

LYLE A. BRECHT 410.963.8680 DRAFT 1.5 CAPITAL MARKETS RESEARCH --- Friday, October 9, 2009 Page 1 of 1