Chapter 2
"It's Hard to Start a War": The Nuclear Factor
"One of Control's problems is to introduce plausibly the behavior of the countries," the Game Director says.* He is talking at the Senior Review about Nu, the 1966 India-Pakistan-China game. But he could be talking about all games before or since. "Plausibility usually comes up for a little criticism at these sessions. Let me say two things about it. First, most of life seems to be a sequence of implausible events...The problem is to choose among implausible alternatives and even if one can interpret these games as true history, rather than synthetic history, one would still, as the historian does, have to say, that's just one way things could have gone...
"The other point about plausibility is the Control Team often finds itself groping for something that is fairly plausible, chooses something, works it over for a while, and it becomes very, very plausible through a process of getting familiar with it. I think, frequently, what these games can accomplish is to demonstrate that what often appears on the surface to be implausibility or improbability is merely unfamiliarity. It's hard to work with any sequence of events in a game for several hours without its beginning to seem either real or as one that could be real."
Assessing games in general, he says, "Some games are particularly good at focusing on the process of decisionmaking, of planning or estimating an adversary. Some games stir up substantive problems and policy issues. Some games are especially rich in by -products. Most games are splendid cram-course in local geography and politics."
[*The Game Director's name is still deleted in the scant fiels about Pentagon political-military games. Obtainable records indicate that Minor and Schelling participated. But, due to the vagaries of game files, neither their names nor the names of anyone else appear in discussion of the game that were released under the Freedom of Information Act.]