Nuclear Weapons in Wargames: Testing Traditions and Taboos

Abstract

I explore the available history of wargaming in the United States to uncover evidence about the willingness of American strategic elites to use nuclear weapons. Recent scholarship using survey experiments has found evidence against a publicly held aversion to the use of nuclear weapons (Press, Sagan, Valentino 2013). This finding casts doubt on the universal applicability of a normative prohibition on the use of nuclear weapons. However, existing research is limited by the fact that the general public is not empowered to make decisions about the use of nuclear weapons. To investigate the views of decision-makers, I look to declassified wargames that considered the use of nuclear weapons. I argue that strategic elites who participated in wargames showed a remarkable reluctance to employ nuclear weapons, and that their reticence provides evidence in favor of an elite tradition of non-use of nuclear weapons. Neither of the two most prominent monographs on the question of non-use (Tannenwald 2007; Paul 2009) use evidence from wargames. The article also includes an investigation of how and why wargames are methodologically useful for political scientists.