Nations At War I: Why do we keep building weapons?

TL;DR

This paper introduces a game theory-based analytical framework to understand why achieving true peace is challenging, illustrating the concept with the prisoner's dilemma to explain persistent conflict and weapon building.

Contribution

It presents the first in a series of papers applying game theory to analyze the persistent nature of war and weapon development, highlighting fundamental obstacles to peace.

Findings

War persists due to strategic incentives in game theory models.

The prisoner's dilemma illustrates why mutual distrust leads to ongoing conflict.

Efforts towards peace face inherent structural roadblocks.

Abstract

This paper is the first in series of four papers that present an analytical approach to war using game theory. We try to explore why is it that "true peace" can't be achieved and all or any efforts we make towards that goal will have huge road-blocks. A fairly simplistic and non technical overview of our approach is given in this paper using prisoner's dilemma.