Peter Byrne in Silicon Valley Metro (from 2006): "During the Cold War, {Daniel} Ellsberg worked as a "game theorist" for the Rand Corporation and, then, at the Department of Defense as a high-ranking official developing nuclear attack options. At Rand, he used the statistical methods of game theory—which purports to describe how "rational" people act when confronted with rational choices—to show that it was irrational to develop nuclear first strike capabilities against the Soviet Union. Ellsberg's math demonstrated that manufacturing attack missiles capable of destroying Soviet missiles would achieve the opposite of deterrence: It would encourage the Soviets to bomb us before we bombed them, so we should bomb them before they bombed us, ad infinitum. His recommendation to concentrate on planning how to survive an attack, and being able to retaliate proportionately, was ignored by civilian and military policy makers who, as Eisenhower famously pointed out, were more interested in making money and manufacturing arms than in avoiding Armageddon.
Ellsberg makes a distinction between "pre-emptive" warfare, which is the policy of planning to strike an enemy when you know it is about to strike you, as opposed to "preventive" warfare, a medicinal-sounding term which pleads self-defense as an excuse for aggression. The United States has long practiced preventive warfare—short of employing its nuclear option—in Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Iraq and covert actions galore.
Ellsberg points out that, like his predecessors, President Clinton approved of pre-emptive warfare and the "first use" of nuclear weapons as an instrument of foreign policy. But President Bush and his neoconservative advisers are the first leaders to publicly favor preventive use of nuclear weapons against perceived threats to American business interests. And they have reconfigured the Pentagon's war plans to that end...
Leaders of emerging industrial markets in the Third World could employ game theories, too, to figure out the best way to respond to the belligerence of the United States. The most well-known games are zero-sum games, in which the winner takes all. For example, Bush is playing a zero sum game in which the fate of the world seems to count as nothing against the short-term profits of Halliburton, Exxon, AT&T, Citicorp and the Carlyle Group.
In more rational games, though, winners are rewarded for cooperating with each other and committing altruistic acts. In fact, the successes of natural selection in biology and socioeconomic cooperation between humans can be modeled by game and probability theories that demonstrate the efficacy of cooperation over competition. In the end, Bush's enemies (who are not the enemies of the American people) will probably be forced to cooperatively arm themselves with nuclear bombs so as to cooperatively deter us from deterring them."