The Big Red Button
On September 26, I woke up to We Will All Go Together When We Go blasting from frat row.
For a second, I was confused: on a school day? But then I looked at my phone and saw the date. Of course: no classes — and I was about to be late for the biggest social engagement of my college career thus far.
Being on campus here at UVA, not too far outside of DC, for Petrov Day was like being at Boston College for St. Patrick’s Day. Every year I’d gone party-hopping with my friends, lit a candle here, recited something about smallpox there, but finally, as a senior, I’d politicked my way onto Petrov Court. What would my gawky freshman self say if she could have seen me waving down at the entire school from the grand float with the big red button? If I missed the parade, I’d never forgive myself. Frantically dashing out of the shower, I speedran a full face of makeup and hurriedly pulled on my flower crown, sash, and replica Soviet Air Force uniform.
The speakers were bumping something by Vienna Teng as I ran out the door. A group of stragglers on the lawn were finishing a sloppy final verse of The X Days of X-Risk as they started in on another round of The X Beers of X-Risk, but I had already missed most of the pregame. I’d heard there was some house that threw a legendary metagame, but I’d never managed to get an invite.
I made it onto the float just as the chancellor was wrapping up his speech commemorating this day in 1983, when Soviet military officer Stanislav Petrov had received a satellite warning of incoming American ICBMs and made the fateful decision to report it as a false alarm. He was right, it was a false alarm after all, and the Soviet higher-ups never had to make the call on whether to rain destruction down on the US. The chancellor said some heartfelt things about quality-adjusted life years and prisoner’s dilemmas and presented a medal to Stanislav Petrov’s second cousin once removed. More candles were lit. My balaclava started to itch.
But then the drumroll began and the parade got rolling with us in the front. The twelve of us on the Court distributed ourselves around the float’s perimeter, each with one hand waving like the King of England and the other hand poised over the big red button that formed the center of the float. Behind us marched a huge papier-mache planet Earth, rigged to blow like a piñata, its holders ready to fire in all directions with their squirt guns, and trailed by an elaborate series of Rube Goldberg-esque water balloon cannons: all of which would be triggered in the event that any of us pressed the button. The school had been using this same planet Earth prop as long as anyone could remember, because the button was just ceremonial and no one on the Court ever actually pressed it, since they were all very vocal about having taken International Relations – or was it Econ? – 101.
Suddenly, as the parade rounded the corner, it came to an abrupt halt; Earth almost crashed into us. I leaned out around the courtiers in front of me to see what was going on. In the middle of the street stood a line of protesters blocking our way. A woman stepped forward with a megaphone.
“We call on the university and the nation as a whole to abolish Petrov Day!” she declared. “It’s time to close the door on a disgraceful era of poorly considered deterrence strategy.”
Looking over the protesters, I vaguely recognized a few faces from around campus; there were a few wearing gear from George Mason and even Virginia Tech, too. They brandished signs with LaTeX-formatted payoff matrices whose numerical contents were too small for me to make out.
“Whatever the merits of Petrov’s judgment,” the woman with the megaphone went on, “praising him specifically for choosing the safe option weakens the credibility of any threat to carry out a retaliatory strike against civilian populations. And if a nation can’t convincingly threaten a countervalue attack, then it’s vulnerable to a counterforce attack against its own second-strike capabilities – which incentivizes that nation to launch a surprise attack first.
“Bad signaling is literally violence. We live in an idiocracy of game-theoretic ignorance. UVA and America, I call on you to rename this holiday ‘Sun Tzu Day’.”
The other protesters whooped. A guy wearing a T-shirt that read All Commitment-Breakers Are Bastards pumped his fist and shouted, “This isn’t how deterrence works, you guys! We cannot stand by as society continues to glorify deviations from stable equilibria!” Somebody else hollered, “Lowering your false negatives means lowering your true positives!” Then they all became a simultaneous din. A few of them seemed to be looking dangerously often at the big red button.
The girl next to me on the float started yelling back at them. “Petrov saved millions of lives on expectation!”
The T-shirt guy shot back, “Yeah, and not pulling the trolley lever saves a life on expectation. What kinda low time preference–“
A guy on the float was ready with a counter-notepad. “If you do out the calculations, an agreement mandating a warning system sensitivity of zero for both sides is actually a Nash equilibrium.”
“Only if the two sides can credibly commit to it,” replied the protester. “And how is that going to work? It’s very hard to prove a negative, especially that you have absolutely no warning system at all, not to mention the necessity of letting the enemy monitor your home territory.”
“If both sides have second-strike capability, they don’t need warning systems!”
“But then you need a ton of monitoring, which is politically difficult, to ensure the enemy hasn’t developed the capacity to wipe out your retaliation capabilities. And they’re incentivized to develop that capacity, and, symmetrically, so are you. That’s what you need a good warning system for!”
A person in the back of the protest hurled a tomato at the float. I leaned sideways just in time to stop it from landing on the big red button. Instead, it splattered all over my gymnastyorka. A second tomato flew my way. But at the peak of its arc, someone casually plucked it out of the air.
The someone was a long-haired man with a serene expression. He kind of looked like he’d smell like weed, but I couldn’t catch a whiff. He had strolled out from the crowd to stand between the parade and the protesters.
Nodding at the parade, he said, “Look, you’re not actually doing a coordination problem. Nothing genuinely bad happens if your button goes off.”
“The Earth goes splash,” I spoke up. “Everybody gets wet.”
“It’s eighty degrees out. People want to get wet.”
“But they’re getting squirted by guns that represent real weapons, and hit with water balloons that represent real missiles,” I explained. “It’s like drinking the blood of Christ at Mass. It’s symbolic.”
“But that’s exactly it!” he said. “Look – even if water hurt more than it does, this scenario doesn’t even correspond to the Petrov scenario. There’s no personal benefit to anyone who presses the button before the others. And there’s not even any means of retaliation, and if there were, it would probably be trivial for the side facing retaliation to just opt out or leave.
“The thing you’re really creating isn’t a war game. It’s ritual magick! You’re learning that the actual thing at stake, the true coordination problem, is the collective suspension of disbelief itself.
“When Petrov was interviewed, he said his civilian training helped him make the judgment call. He said his military-trained colleagues, who were all about following rules, would’ve just launched. ‘I had a funny feeling in my gut,’ he said. And this is what you’re all getting: a gut workout. You’re all honing your instinct for what symbols can arise out of the collective consciousness and how they should be treated.”
“Do you even go here?” somebody shouted.
“No,” said the man, smiling, but he didn’t elaborate. “Anyway, Thomas Schelling said so himself: tacit bargaining can’t be represented as an abstracted matrix – Schelling points come from the soul. Every little bit of suggestion matters when we have to mutually perceive a line in the sand. ‘No nukes, ever’ is not meaningfully different on the physical level from ‘no nukes on such-and-such cities, or under these circumstances, or of larger than that size’; it’s our shared humanity that makes that a salient line to draw, because we are all capable of recognizing the same kinds of salience. If we celebrate Petrov, it should be for trusting his intuition, the ultimate tool of mixed-motive game theory.
“Likewise, this morning we generate a shared meaning by tacitly agreeing that this particular spectacle is supposed to represent something. That this spot, on this day, is where we should all hash out our disagreements on game-theoretic minutiae.
“What matters is not whether your big red button is pressed.” A pause. “I will retain faith in the indomitable human spirit,” he declared, “so long as people turn the events of today into a huge deal and get butthurt on all sides.”
Later, one product of the campus rumor mill would say I was pushed. Another would say I was so moved by the man’s speech that I took dramatic action. A third alleged some internal sabotage; a fourth, that it was all scripted. The truth is that at that moment, I was sweating so hard under my woolen ushanka that I overheated and fainted directly onto the center of the big red button.
The Earth-bearers panicked and doused the protesters with a volley from their super soakers before Earth exploded with a splash a moment later, drenching me enough to revive me just in time to see the water balloons launch. Someone turned on a fire hydrant. A bucket of water was dumped off a sorority roof. A few hooligans started mud-wrestling in the slippery grass.
Above the bedlam, sunlight glimmered down on all of us dripping parade-goers, like the sunlight that had reflected off high-altitude clouds which mistakenly caused the Oko warning satellite to report in 1983 an American missile hurtling toward the Arctic Circle. Standing in the middle of the glistening street, an island amid pandemonium, sopping wet, the man who had been speaking barely seemed to notice the chaos around him. “Long live the zeitgeist, long live the global psyche,” he bellowed. “Hail to the symbol of a world made of symbols.”
He threw back his head to the sky, spread his arms wide, and cried:
“Yes, Virginia, there is a Stanislav!”
Wahoowa
Always a pleasure reading these