The chicken game

You are driving on a narrow road. You are driving fast, for you are late. Then you see a car coming from the other direction, also driving fast. What will you do? Of course, you don’t need to think about it. You slow down and you swerve. Probably the other driver does the same. If you hadn’t swerved, you could have died in the accident that would follow, or at least the car would have big damage. And the same so for the other driver. Why take the risk that the other will not swerve? Nevertheless it sometimes happens that both drivers continue to drive straight on expecting that the other will give way, for why should it be you who must be the chicken? If both drivers think so, and no one swerves, even not at the last moment,  the consequences are fatal.

The case just described is an example of the so-called Game of Chicken. Sometimes it is really played as a game, often it is played in real with possibly fatal consequences, indeed. The Dutch Wikipedia (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_game ) mentions a game popular in New York in which youngsters throw knives to each other. Who ducks is a chicken. It also happens that the game is “played” in a real life situation in which the destiny of the world is at stake. A war of attrition is a chicken game of a sort. After mid September 1914, a month after the outbreak of the First World War, the front in Northern France had stabilized, with the Germans troops on the northern side of the frontline and the French and its allies on the southern side, it appeared to be impossible to force a breakthrough. It became a matter of waiting which party would be exhausted first and would ask for negotiations or would surrender. Finally it was Germany that gave way and lost. However, when we think of a political chicken game, the first that comes to mind is the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962.

My description of this crisis must be very simplified. What I must leave out, for instance, is that there was contact during the crisis, unlike what is supposed in the standard chicken game. It was not simply a matter of “you do this and I do that”, for there was room for negotiations; the “game” was not one-dimensional; etc. There wasn’t simply a good guy and a bad guy. But basically it was this that happened: The Soviet Union wanted to install missiles on Cuba that could reach US territory and so destroy it with nuclear bombs. Soviet ships with the equipment were under way to Cuba (in fact, some missiles had already been installed). When the USA discovered what was happening, it threatened to stop the ships. If no party would give in, so if the USSR didn’t withdraw the ships and the USA would stop them, the consequence could be a nuclear war. If one party would give in, while the other didn’t (the USA wouldn’t stop the ships and the USSR wouldn’t withdraw the ships; or the USA would stop the ships and the USSR would withdraw them instead of trying to sail them to Cuba with force), the chicken would suffer a defeat in front of the whole world. Here is a payoff matrix for this chicken game (the figures for the USA are first):

The figures are a bit arbitrary but I think that you see the point. Cell (a) describes a compromise and (d) a nuclear war. (c) involves that the USA wins, the threat has been removed and its political prestige in the world has risen a lot, while in (b) it’s just the USSR that wins and gains enormous in political prestige while the threat for the USA still exists. What really happened in 1962 was (a), but not exactly. The outcome of the crisis was a compromise of a sort for no party wanted to risk a nuclear war, but in fact the USA won: The Soviet Union withdrew its missiles, and the USA promised not to invade Cuba (as it had tried in 1961); the demand of the Soviets that the NATO missiles in Turkey should be withdrawn as well was ignored. Therefore (4,1) is a better description of cell (a) in this case. One result was positive for both parties and has been followed by other countries as well: It was decided to install a hotline between Washington and Moscow for direct communication between the political leaders in case of crisis. Unlike what many people think, the hotline is not a telephone connection but originally it used a Teletype equipment and nowadays it is a fax. Even if you play the game of brinkmanship, in the end it is better to connect.