The Game Theory Narrative and the Myth of the National Security State

This essay explores what the author terms the “game theory narrative,” a cultural narrative that gained prominence in American culture in the early years of the Cold War. For many Americans in the late 1940s and early 1950s, game theory was a way for scientists, in collusion with the US government, to prevent nuclear exchange by conceptualizing the Cold War as a game, and by playing this game according to specific rational strategies. The first part of the essay describes how the game theory narrative popularized the idea that the rationality of pure mathematics could be applied to manage some major threats of the Cold War—the menace of an unknown enemy and the specter of an accidental nuclear exchange. The following sections explore how this narrative was both exemplified and criticized by a variety of creative works and other artifacts of Cold War culture.