How Might Psychology Contribute to Reducing the Risk of Nuclear War?

trying chance here and system there, soaring, jumping, backtracking, crawling, sometimes freezing on point like a bird dog...[the decision-maker] exploits mental processes that are only slowly yielding to observation and systematic description. (p. 81) Is this fully rational? It is not. But Lindblom's point, which forms the psychological foundation for what he calls our policy "science of muddling through" (Lindblom, 1959), is that while it may not be rational, it is natural. It really is what we have to work with. Any strategy of improving the rationality of our decision-making must in his view begin with a realistic appraisal of our deficiencies which are many. "Policy-makers," as psychologist Philip Tetlock (1983) has put it, "see the world 'through a glass darkly'through the simplified images they have created of the international scene" (p. 68). But bounds on the rationality of our decision-making are not only internal, part of our evolutionary equipment (or its lack). We are also constrained by imperfections in our ability to cooperate optimally within organizations and institutions, such as governments, which are above all else instruments of social decision-making. As Herbert Simon (1983) has recently and pointedly emphasized "we are not monads" (p. 75). Foreign policy in particular is not conducted, for example, by having citizens (who've never met) fill out a multiple choice test which they submit via secret ballot, to be counted and acted upon by someone like our foreign policy robot. Quite the opposite: foreign policy decisions are made by relatively small groups of various orts, each with different goals and therefore interests, whose activity requires processes of consensus-building, conformity, and so on, which further erode any hope for fully rational foreign policy. What does all this um up to, with regard to intermediate psychological causes of a potential nuclear war? Just his: that by having defined a nuclear war as supremely irrational, even insane, and having structured our nuclear forces o as to guarantee that any rational decision-maker will see the suicidal foolishness of nuclear war having done all this, we still have no basis whatever for concluding that nuclear war is anything like "impossible." In Einstein et al.'s. post-revolutionary world federation? In a world of nationstates ruled by robot-like, perfectly rational actors? No, probably not even in these fantasy-worlds would nuclear war be impossible. And in our actual world, according to all we know about the internal nd external constraints on our rationality, we have no justification whatever for believing that nuclear war is impossible.