Cold War Poker

There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about.
- John von Neumann

George Orwell first used the term "cold war" in his essay "You and the Atomic Bomb" in October 1945, 10 weeks after Nagasaki and a year before publishing Animal Farm. The essay described a totalitarian state much like the USSR "in a permanent state of 'cold war' with its neighbours." As usual, Orwell foresaw what was coming before nearly everyone else did. The Soviets wouldn't test an atomic device until August 1949, but when their hydrogen bombs, designed by Andrei Sakharov, were deployed in the early '50s, the nuclear arms race heated up quickly. The Cold War got colder and almost infinitely more perilous.

Two brilliant Jewish professors at Princeton helped the United States to eventually win both the race and the war without a single nuclear shot being fired. John von Neumann (1903-1957) was a Budapest-born physicist and mathematician who had fled Nazi persecution in Germany in 1933. The newly founded Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton offered him an appointment alongside Kurt Godel, Albert Einstein, George Kennan, and Robert Oppenheimer. It is difficult to imagine an academic program bearing more fruit.

The seeds of one of its most fertile collaborations had been sown back in 1928, when von Neumann published "On the Theory of Parlor Games," an elegant, pathfinding paper inspired in large part by poker. Zero-sum games of complete information, such as checkers and chess, failed to interest him. Why not? Because the correct move is always discernable by both players, leaving no room for deceit. He was intrigued by the fact that poker strategy involves probability, psychology, luck, and budgetary acumen, but is never transparent; it depends on the counterstrategies deployed by opponents. The "Parlor Games" paper was, among other things, his first attempt to express the tactic of bluffing in mathematical terms. But before he could follow through on its implications, he and his family had to escape the expanding reign of terror in Europe.

By the late '30s, however, the volcanically creative polymath was able to team up with economist Oskar Morgenstern to develop the "Parlor Games" theory. Morgenstern had himself found safe harbor at Princeton after being purged by the Nazis from the University of Vienna. The two men decided to cowrite a 50-page manuscript for the Journal of Political Economy. But as they bounced more ideas back and forth - with Morgenstern, as midwife or editor, asking provocative questions, von Neumann doing the heavy mathematical lifting while serving long stints as a military advisor to the U.S. and Britain - the project mushroomed into Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, a 616-page magnum opus. Though publication was delayed by the wartime paper shortage, when the book appeared in 1946, it revolutionized not only economics and defense strategy but created a new field of scientific inquiry called game theory.

In spite of its fun-sounding moniker, game theory is an unplayful branch of economics in which ruthless self-interest governs every decision. Each kind of contest is expressed mathematically; its rules are defined and a game tree is drawn, from which solutions to winning logically proceed. In practical terms, game theory provides tools for analyzing situations in which players or countries try to make interdependent decisions with maximal utility. It was eventually used to analyze business models, poker hands, presidential candidates, evolutionary biology, and thermonuclear confrontations.

Meanwhile, and with terrible irony, von Neumann in 1943 had become an indispensable member of the ultrasecret Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, serving as the group leader in charge of designing the Bomb. Among his dozens of crucial inventions were a potent uranium isotope, the implosion method for causing nuclear fuel to explode, and a binary data-processing program called "the von Neumann machine." Today it is called the computer.

At the end of their 80-hour work weeks, many of the scientists relaxed the same way Roosevelt and Truman did. The Ukrainian chemist George Kistiakowsky won money not only from the inventor of game theory, but from Stanislaw Ulam and other century-class mathematicians. Kistiakowsky says their play was so weak at first that he offered them lessons, pointing out that "if they had tried to learn violin playing, it would cost them even more per hour. Unfortunately, before the end of the war, these great theoretical minds caught on to poker and the evenings' accounts became less attractive from my point of view."

Unlike many of his fellow scientists, von Neumann got along famously with military men, especially the poker players among them. One regular tablemate was Leslie R. Groves, the no-nonsense general in charge of the entire Manhattan Project who later appointed von Neumann to the Target Committee, advising Truman on sites "the bombing of which would most adversely affect the will of the Japanese people to continue the war." Von Neumann had always found poker more lifelike than other games, its tactics gratifyingly similar to those deployed by generals and presidents. Indeed, this was probably what gave the 52 flimsy pasteboards their uncanny weight in the first place - not unlike plutonium 239, the royal flush of cold-warfare elements and the one we may still have to answer for.

Von Neumann certainly did. After V-J Day, he served as a military advisor to both Truman and Eisenhower, and as a member of the Atomic Energy Commission. He was credited with closing our "missile gap" with the Soviets by designing intercontinental ballistic missiles with multiple warheads, and with deterring attack with a strategy of mutual assured destruction. Known as MAD, it assumes neither side will launch a first strike because the other side would retaliate so comprehensively that the populations of both countries would be annihilated. Critics branded his counterintuitive doctrine "inhuman," and it made him a model for Stanley Kubrick's mad Dr. Strangelove, portrayed with dark hilarity by Peter Sellers. Yet the fact is that MAD kept a single warhead from ever being launched. Von Neumann was awarded the Medal of Freedom in 1956, a few months before dying of brain cancer. The harrowing malignancy was probably caused by either inhaling plutonium at Los Alamos or being irradiated while observing his brainchild, the first man-made nuclear explosion, at Alamogordo Test Range on the Jornada del Muerto Desert on July 16, 1945.

Morgenstern also advised Eisenhower as the arms race threatened to spiral out of control. The poker tactics at the cold heart of game theory helped the war-weary president see his way through a variety of crises with the Soviets, when a single miscalculation by either side could have led to the deaths of hundreds of millions of people. As Morgenstern wrote in 1961: "The Cold War is sometimes compared to a giant chess game. The analogy, however, is quite false, for while chess is a formidable game of almost unbelievable complexity, it lacks salient features of the political and military struggles with which it is compared." Because chess is a game of complete information, it provides no opportunities to bluff, leaving it "far removed from political reality … where the threatening nation has to weigh the cost not only to its enemies, but to itself, where deceit is certainly not unheard of, and where chance intervenes." Luck, deceit, and cost-effectiveness are basic to poker, a game in which "the best hand need not win."

"If chess is the Russian national pastime and poker is ours," Morgenstern continued, "we ought to be more skillful than they in applying its precepts to the cold-war struggle." We need to be strategically astute because "nuclear weapons are spreading ominously while the ability to deliver them anywhere, from any point on earth, is already in the hands of the two super-powers. With bluffs so much easier to make and threats so much more portentous than any previous time in history, it is essential not only for our own State Department but for the entire world to understand what bluffs and threats mean; when they are appropriate; whether they should be avoided at all cost; in short, what is the sanest way to play this deadly, real-life version of poker."

Parallels between poker and nuclear showdowns are seldom neat or one-to-one, yet no game more closely resembles military and diplomatic maneuvers. Morgenstern says they are "similar enough so that something substantial can be learned from good poker principles. Corresponding to each player's cards and chips, you have the quantity and quality of a country's weapons, the disturbance which one country can cause another, and the changes in national plans that can be imposed. Bluffs correspond to the numerous threats being made with increasing frequency on the contemporary international scene."

While Stalin seldom bluffed, his successors regrettably picked up the knack. "Unquestionably the most successful bluff, by either side," wrote Morgenstern, "was the Soviet Union's threat in 1956 to rain missiles on England unless she stopped her actions in Egypt" during the Suez crisis. He also believed the West was bluffed by the simple roadblocks the Red Army put up around West Berlin. Instead of a massively expensive airlift, all we needed were a few tanks to break through the roadblocks. "We held strong cards but we didn't know how to use them. We fell for a bluff that was easy to recognize as a bluff, even … when our total nuclear power was so much greater than that of the Soviets."

"If the Communists seem to be superior players to date, it is perhaps not so much because of their tactics in playing any particular hand, as because of their firmer adherence to sound optimal strategy," he continued, before presciently adding: "the United States has, with some justice, been criticized for being alternately too uncertain of its line … and too rigid, as in our refusal to recognize Red China - the most populous country in the world and, in a few decades, sure to be one of the most powerful."

In Big Deal, Anthony Holden illuminated the pokerlike nature of the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Holden showed how it "can be analysed in almost uncanny detail as a slowly developing hand, involving bluff and counter-bluff, with stakes as high as they go." Khrushchev, like "all the best poker players, was playing the man rather than his hand. He and Kennedy had played an earlier game at their Vienna summit, where the Russian leader had 'read' the new American president as young, inexperienced and easy to push around."

Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis seconds this view: "In no sense did Khrushchev want, or think the Soviet Union could survive, a nuclear war. He was, however, more prepared than Truman or Eisenhower - or Stalin - had ever been to risk war: to threaten nuclear escalation in the belief that the West would prefer altering over maintaining the status quo. With all the flamboyance of a high-stakes poker player, Khrushchev raised the ante, confident that he could bluff his opponents into backing down." Despite America's superior arsenal - an 8-to-1 advantage in rockets, made even more potent by von Neumann's ICBM system - Khrushchev believed Kennedy would prove too weak to keep the Soviets from basing nuclear missiles on Cuba; that his humiliating failure at the Bay of Pigs and in other covert operations had sapped his overall confidence on the subject of Castro's domain. But when the 45-year-old president boldly "quarantined" the island and sent uncoded orders putting American bombers on highest alert, Khrushchev, in Holden's phrase, "folded his hand and conceded the pot." During two weeks of military and diplomatic posturing, both sides had engaged in dangerous - some would say reckless - brinksmanship. Even though Khrushchev had "blinked," he still had long-range bombers and submarine-based missiles capable of hitting our cities, so Kennedy needed to let him save face. He authorized a public statement that the U.S. was "unlikely to invade" Cuba if the Russians dismantled the bases, and privately promised to remove our Jupiter missiles from Turkey.

"As in poker," wrote Morgenstern, "both we and the Russians must realize the importance of making threats commensurate with the value of the position to be defended, and not bluff so grossly that the raise is sure to be called." He concluded by underscoring the key difference between the two kinds of showdown. "In poker there are always some winners and some losers; in power politics, both sides may lose. Everything."

In the end, of course, our planet was fortunate that neither the West nor the Soviets overplayed their hand militarily. The Cold War ended peacefully in 1989, when Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika (openness and reform) led to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the Iron Curtain, and the Soviet Union itself. We should also recall with relief that in Orwell's 1945 essay about the Bomb, he emphasized "how likely we all are to be blown to pieces by it within the next five years," one of the very few predictions he made that hasn't come true, at least so far. That it hasn't come true has as much to do with von Neumann's ICBMs as it does with his poker-based game theory.