The Nuclear Disarmament Game

@amorrow2 Here is what you can actually do:
You need to accumulate one of three things, power, authority or money. You can do that by either joining the current administration of the US and clawing your way up, organize a massive movement of hundreds of thousands of people or make lots of money, 10 million at least.
Before you do one of that, none of your ideas matter, since no one is gonna listen or take them seriously. After you do that, no matter how stupid the idea, people are going to listen and you actually got a chance to implement it.

I remember seeing an interview with Schultz where he says he fully supported Reagan's rejection of Gorbachev's offer to try to eliminate nuclear weapons at Rekjavik in 1986. I really admire Schultz but I think he was wrong about that. Reagan missed the opportunity of a lifetime when he rejected Gorbachev's offer. Sure, the idea might not have succeeded in bringing nukes down to zero in the short term, but such an effort could have really sped up the reduction in the total number of nukes that there are. Who knows how much progress could have been made? Could we have gotten the number down to 1000 nukes by 2021? That would have made Reagan a much more significant president.

Reagan missed the opportunity of a lifetime.

I don't recall any insults.

As for your commentary on my tone and my approach, ram that back into the recta; sphincter from which you extracted it. Alternatively, wait for the next person who happens by and actually gives a flying fuck what you think about it and feel free to tell them all the fuck abut it.

Either way, I'm not interested in your whiny concern-trolling, fuck you very much.

Duck and cover.

John Oliver on nukes

The only thing that Reagan and Gorbachev did accomplish was the INF treaty.


and Trump withdrew the USA from that in 2019.

It might be 20, 50, or even 100 years before an opportunity like that comes along again.

Which is why you should join Greenpeace today amorrow and start protesting against nukes and for nuclear disarment. Do it for me, I have gotten too fat and old to protest.

Any other organisation working on that would work, can give you a few more suggestions if you like.

You know, with a president like Trump who pulled us out of the INF treaty and who did nothing to pull US troops out of Afghanistan, I can understand your pessimism about nuclear disarmament and peace efforts in general. Yeah, we are going to be stuck with Putin for a while. I still think that there is a rational basis for optimism. I look forward to a future where the INF treaty is put back in force.

OK, I have done more research and now I understand that Russia has significantly increased it's number of tactical nuclear weapons. For instance


So I am less optimistic that the INF treaty is coming back any time soon. Thanks for giving me a clue about this.

amorrow2 said:

What I am looking for is a goal and a pathway. How about this as a goal: a repeat of what has just happened over the past 40 years. Between 1985 and 2020, the number of nukes have fallen from 60K to 15K. It is now only 25% of what it was. Let us set a goal of repeating that. So the goal is by around 2060 that we reduce the total number of nukes to around 4K.

We could still talk about the disarmament game and publish the document that lists the rounds of the game (what country's turn it is to destroy a nuke that day) and imagine that the nuclear powers are, in a sense, playing the game.

Who knows? The idea might catch on. And when the number gets down to 1000 or 250 or something like that, who knows? If we have a century or two of World Peace, maybe the nuclear powers will just take the game seriously and play the game right down to the final round.

Click to expand...

Here's the issue again, amorrow2

Your discovery or attempted discovery of a goal or a pathway is basically irrelevant because your ideas have no force in the world. You are not in a position to have the relevant parties participate. That's fine, you can just toss out ideas anyway, regardless of the fact that none of them will come to fruition.

But what's actually problematic is that you seem to nest your ideas in the space where they have no purchase on reality, and because they are not bound by reality, your ideas simply waltz off into the blue horizon. And at that point, you then start saying things like 'who knows?' as if we've wandered far enough away from the bonds of reality that literally anything goes.

For example, you are STILL talking about the leaders of nuclear nations sitting down and playing a game you contrived which would entail them losing their nuclear armaments at random / by chance.

Why would any rational agent involved in geopolitics submit to playing such a game? It's like you don't want to address this - it's outside the scope of your idea - yet your idea is wholly contingent on the notion that the world's leaders would submit to participate.

Further, I already pointed out that there are existing means of disarmament, for example nuclear disarmament treaties. These are non-arbitrary, they are not luck based, the bolster the integrity and appearance of the participants rather than looking like idiots by losing out by chance on a game through bad luck.

Your arguments are abstracted too far from reality to have any value. You keep presenting solutions which are spherical cows in a vacuum.

I keep assuming you realize that, but I am not so sure it's true. To help you engage, and because you claim to be motivated by reasoned discussion, then you NEED to answer the questions posed that critique your idea. Start here:

If a nuclear armed nation doesn't want to participate in your game, how do you make them?

If even one single nuclear armed nation refuses to participate in your game, then what do you think the other nations would do?

You are right. Holdouts - nuclear powers that refused to play the game - would require persuasion to play the game. You know: sanctions, embargos, blockades.

You could bargain. You could present the goal: fewer total nukes in the world and then propose that you only go a limited way down the pathway: only play the game for, say, 200 rounds. Then you take a breather. That is a slightly better world: 200 less total nukes! Then you say: "Oh, that was so much fun. We live in a better world now. Let us play again. Let us play!"

And then blockades for the holdouts. Heck, it worked in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Blockades.

Huh. On the other hand, we came close to a shooting conflict in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Well, it still might be worth a try.

amorrow2 said:

You are right. Holdouts - nuclear powers that refused to play the game - would require persuasion to play the game. You know: sanctions, embargos, blockades.

Click to expand...

So we're going to cause conflict between nuclear-armed nations over obliging them to play a game they don't want to?

Why do your ideas always devolve to force?

Regardless, if you have to resort to sanctions, embargoes, and blockades... then there's no need for your game, as we could do all the embargoes, blockades, and sanctions to persuade them to dismantle their nukes without the need of the superfluous middle step.

amorrow2 said:

You could bargain. You could present the goal: fewer total nukes in the world and then propose that you only go a limited way down the pathway: only play the game for, say, 200 rounds. Then you take a breather. That is a slightly better world: 200 less total nukes! Then you say: "Oh, that was so much fun. We live in a better world now. Let us play again. Let us play!"

Click to expand...

I don't think any serious ideas can be attained when one doesn't consider the parties involved to be rational agents.

In economics, game theory, decision theory, and artificial intelligence, a rational agent is an agent that has clear preferences, models uncertainty via expected values of variables or functions of variables, and always chooses to perform the action with the optimal expected outcome for itself from among all feasible actions.

Click to expand...

A rational agent has reasons for possessing nuclear armaments. Some of those reasons they consider fundamental to their survival either as the leader of a nation, or on behalf of the nation.

So some of these rational agents won't want to play your game because there's no win condition for them - a game has to have winners and losers, otherwise it's a toy.

Even where it's possible to persuade them to give up their nuclear armament, they understand the value of what they're giving up, and consequently expect other nations who want them to disarm to offer something of similar value.

As I mentioned before: your game invites them to join a situation which they have no control over and to submit to chance with respect to giving up their armaments. On top of the unpredictability, it also necessarily means that there will be losers: nations who by bad luck happened to run out of nukes to disarm before other participants... and now the nation that submitted to this has no nukes, and has lost the diplomatic weight of possessing those nukes.

Finally, they'd look like clowns. Leaders from any nations, but particularly autocratic ones, really don't like to look like clowns.

amorrow2 said:

And then blockades for the holdouts. Heck, it worked in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Blockades.

Click to expand...

Um, no that's not what happened at all.

What actually happened was that Khrushchev extracted concessions from Kennedy because agreeing to remove nuclear armaments has a value, and both rational agents in this exchange knew that. Thus, Kennedy agreed to dismantle all the US' Jupiter MRBM's in Turkey in exchange for Kruschev removing nuclear armaments from Cuba.

amorrow2 said:

Huh. On the other hand, we came close to a shooting conflict in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Well, it still might be worth a try.

Click to expand...

Oh I have a great idea!

Nuclear armed countries should just flip a coin, and whoever gets tails submits to the other country. Well, it might be worth a try!

*spherical cow sails past under inertia in a vacuum*

Sparhafoc said:

I don't think any serious ideas can be attained when one doesn't consider the parties involved to be rational agents.

Click to expand...

Which is entirely my assessment of these threads by amorrow. I honestly don't think we're dealing with a rational agent. We can't be, or he'd at least be considering objections to his preposterous and dangerous lunacy. frankly, I wonder how he can manage to type so many words when he clearly spends most of his time chewing the carpet.

Blue Sky Thinking, but let's do it without colour, absent a gassy atmosphere, and strictly no thinking!

Here, I threw together the pseudo ode for making that round-by-round sequence to play the game down to its final round.




struct nation {
string nationName;
integer originalCount;
integer currentCount;
}

main{

// Read in data file
// format: multiple two-line sets of:
// nationName as string
// nukeCount as integer

integer totalLeft=0;

create natList struct nation;

open datafile;

while not endOfFile do{
add item natList;
readline datafile to natlist.currItem.nationName;
readline datafile to natList.currItem.orinalCount;
natList.currItem.currentCount = natList.currentItem.originalCount;
totalLeft = totalLeft + natList.currentItem.originalCount;
}

if natList.isEmpty() then exit();

//Take away one nuke from each nation

struct nation * natPtr = natList.firstItem();

while natPtr not NULL {
natPtr -> currentCount = natPtr -> currentCount - 1;
print "Nukes left is " nukesLeft ". Nation " natPtr -> " nationName " destroys one of its nukes";
natPtr = natList.nextItem();
}

// Take away one nuke per round, maintaining nuclear parity
// until all nations have only one nuke left

float highFraction;
boolean oneNukeEach = false;

while not oneNukeEach do {

natPtr = natList.firstItem();

// First determine if anyone has more than one nuke
oneNukeEach = true;
while natPtr not NULL AND oneNukeEach then {
if natPtr-> currentCount not equal 1 then {
oneNukeEach = false;
natPtr = natList.nextItem();
}
}

if not oneNukeEach then {

// Find the nation who has more than one nuke and
// has the greatest percentage of their original nukes

struct nation * maxNatPtr = natList.firstItem();

float maxNukeFract = 0.0;
float tempNukeFract;

natPtr = natList.firstItem();

while natPtr not NULL then {
// Cast the integers to floats
tempNukeFract = (float) natPtr ->currentCount / (float) natPtr -> originalCount;
if tempNukeFract > maxNukeFract then {
maxNukeFract = tempNukeFract;
maxNatPtr = natPtr;
}
natPtr = natList.nextItem();
}

maxNatPtr -> currentCount = maxNatPtr -> currentCount - 1;
print "Nukes left is " nukesLeft ". Nation " maxNatPtr -> " nationName " destroys one of its nukes";

}

print "The final round! Each nuclear nation destroys its final nuke and we arrive at a nuclear-free world.';

}

I prefer the Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in my Armpit One Midsummer's Day. Grunthos the Flatulent, despite never having existed, has contributed more to the betterment of humanity than this dreck.

If find getting the technology together to list out every round of the game to be exciting. It reminds me of when I got some of my DNA data from 23andme.com . I keep a short file online at


It gave me confirmation that two facts are true at the same time:

1. I am a mortal human being with a mind.
2. I am currently a mass of atoms where the atoms last much longer than I do.

That whole atom-life-mind thing. This page talks about it:

So here is the debugged Java source code


package disarm;

import java.lang.String;
import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;

public class Main {

public class Nation {
String nationName;
int originalCount;
int currentCount;
}

public static void main(String[] args) {

// Read in data file
// format: multiple two-line sets of:
// nationName as string
// nukeCount as integer

int totalLeft=0;

Nation natPtr;

List<Nation> natList = new ArrayList<Nation>();

try {

File file = new File("disarm.txt");
//creates a new file instance

FileReader fr=new FileReader(file);
//reads the file

BufferedReader br=new BufferedReader(fr);

//creates a buffering character input stream
//constructs a string buffer with no characters
String line;

while((line=br.readLine())!=null){

natPtr=new Main().new Nation();

natList.add(natPtr);
natPtr.nationName=line;


if((line=br.readLine())!=null){
natPtr.originalCount = Integer.parseInt(line);
if(natPtr.originalCount < 1){
System.out.println("Bad data 123");
return;
}
natPtr.currentCount = natPtr.originalCount;
totalLeft = totalLeft + natPtr.originalCount;

}

}

}catch(IOException e){
e.printStackTrace();
return;
}

if(natList.isEmpty()){
return;
}

FileWriter myWriter;

try{

myWriter = new FileWriter("planfile.txt");

// myWriter.write("Files in Java might be tricky, but it is fun enough!");
// myWriter.close();
// System.out.println("Successfully wrote to the file.");

} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
return;
}



//Take away one nuke from each nation

for (Nation natIter:natList ){

if (natIter.currentCount > 1) {

try{
natIter.currentCount--;
myWriter.write( "Nukes left is " + totalLeft +
". Nation " + natIter.nationName +" destroys one of its nukes. "
+ natIter.currentCount+"\n");

totalLeft--;

} catch (IOException e) {

e.printStackTrace();

return;

}
}

}

// Take away one nuke per round, maintaining nuclear parity
// until all nations have only one nuke left

double highFraction = 0.0;

// This boolean is true when all nations have only one nuke remaining

boolean oneNukeEach = false;

int count = 0;

while ( ! oneNukeEach ) {

// First determine if anyone has more than one nuke

oneNukeEach = true;

for (Nation natIter:natList ) {

if( natIter.currentCount != 1 ) {

oneNukeEach = false;

}

}

if (! oneNukeEach ) {

// Find the nation who has more than one nuke and
// has the greatest percentage of their original nukes
Nation maxNatPtr = natList.get(0);

double maxNukeFract = 0.0;

for( Nation natIter:natList ) {
// Cast the integers to doubles
double tempNukeFract = (double) natIter.currentCount / (double) natIter.originalCount;

if ( tempNukeFract > maxNukeFract && natIter.currentCount !=1) {

maxNukeFract = tempNukeFract;
maxNatPtr = natIter;

}

}

maxNatPtr.currentCount--;

try {
myWriter.write( "Nukes left is " + totalLeft +
". Nation " + maxNatPtr.nationName + " destroys one of its nukes. "
+ maxNatPtr.currentCount+"\n");

totalLeft--;

} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
return;

}

}
count++;
if ( count > 5){
// return;
}
}

try {
myWriter.write("The final round! Each nuclear nation destroys its final nuke and "
+ "we arrive at a nuclear-free world.\n");

myWriter.close();

} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
return;

}
System.out.println("Done.");

return;

}
}

So I put a copy of the Java source file at


and a sample input file at


And a sample output file at


See? All of the steps along the pathway. Again, start with 200 rounds at a time. That is less than 2% of each nations nuclear arsenal to destroy

The treaties of the past have been the product of lengthy complicated negotiations by experts. My disarmament plan is linear and fair. Just slow, steady progress to a good goal.

Now, is a nuclear-free world a dangerous world? It probably would include onsite inspections and stuff like that. Even if a rogue nation secretly recreated some of it's nukes, the rest of the world could do the same in a timely fashion.

That is what George Schultz emphasized in his Stanford talk that I attended. POTIS has only a few tens of minutes to launch a retaliatory strike if our computers say that the enemy nukes are incoming. He never explicitly said it, but the implication was that a nuclear-free world is a safer world. He also emphasize how in the past, sometimes our computers (and Russian computers) gave false alarms! Very dangerous.

If you guys say that Iran might secretly develop some nukes so we have to keep several hundred around for the rest of the world, I am willing to listen to that feedback.

Again, Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize in part for his 2009 Prague "Nuclear-free world" speech. It seems that that is what the rest of the world wants. Still, Obama failed to deliver on that nuclear-free world. Now the task is left up to us.