You are the supreme leader of the small independent nation of Bar.
Diplomatic relations with the larger, neighboring nations have never been worse.
You need an ace up your sleeve, a weapon that would change the tide of any conflict in your favor. You need a threat that will make your adversaries sit up straight and treat you with respect.
You need a nuke.
By a stroke of luck the CIA has gifted you a nuke with no strings attached. Just one nuke. You have ensured that the governments of the neighboring countries are aware of this nuke. Assume it works and you have the ability to detonate it at any point in your neighbors' territory with complete certainty.
Is this single nuke valuable?
This is not a simple question to answer. The nuke is valuable because it can change the calculations of your adversaries, but only so long as they believe you could use it. If they do not believe you would use it then the nuke will not affect their decisions.
If you use the nuke you will have no nukes left and your adversaries know it. You would be in much the same position as if you had never had a nuke at all.
So, if the nuke is only valuable if you might actually use it, but using it means your adversaries no longer need fear being nuked, is the nuke valuable?
The answer to the question is, yes; the nuke is valuable -- but only in certain ways.
Since you can only use it once and everyone knows it, it would only make sense to use the nuke when doing so would permanently change your situation. Armies can be re-raised, infrastructure can be rebuilt, all at a cost, all routine. Nuking a capital would decapitate the leadership of one country but the others would be unharmed and use it as a justification to strike. Like scooping a bucketful of water from a lake any losses you inflict would be filled in.
The problem may be described as one of Depth. The neighboring countries have depth of defense, depth of infrastructure, even in the aggregate depth of leadership. Your one nuke has no depth. They can take more losses than you can inflict without significantly changing the underlying logic of the situation, while you, using your single ace up your sleeve, would find yourself in a different and inferior logic. Their losses would be quantitative. Your loss would be qualitative.
It only makes sense to use the nuke when doing so would change the fundamental logic in your favor.
In a second scenario, if you faced one single adversary, one army, one capital, one problem that could be dissolved with a single strike, the logic is different. The adversary has far less depth. This is like scooping a bucketful of water from a washbasin. Doing so dramatically changes the nature of the situation.
In a third scenario where you again have several neighboring nations, if you had access to two or three nukes, or a nuclear program that could build them in a reasonable time frame, the logic is also changed. Using your first nuke does not result in a qualitative loss of your capacity; only using your last nuke does. This is like having many buckets to scoop from a body of water; each may make quantitative changes but they are in the aggregate qualitative.
Hopefully your friendly neighborhood CIA doesn't gift nukes to any of your rivals for its own geopolitical purposes.
The point of this article is that decision-making in competitive environments is informed not only by what you can do but by what you can keep doing. This affects far more than international rivalries.
The three scenarios above dealt with country-sized decision-making units. Assuming that each country involved can maintain a reasonable internal coherence it can function as a unit and take losses that, while terminal for the individuals involved, are recoverable for the entity as a whole.
This is the strength of alliances among countries and communities among people. This is the weakness of countries or individuals striking out alone. While a country or a person may be capable of any number of things, willingness to execute is based on depth of action. "Can I do it?" is less important of a question than "Can I keep doing it?" or "Can I do it and get away with it?" It is the long term that matters.
Forming an organization does not make any member physically safer from a theoretical conflict event, it only changes the logic of conflict.
The frontier farmer does not become less vulnerable to a bandit's bullet by joining a militia. He only increases the chance that someone else will shoot back if he falls. He has no additional depth of action. The organization does. This depth dramatically changes the bandit's calculations; in the past he could exploit the farmer's lack of depth in order to act with impunity but now the militia will shoot back no matter how accurate his first shot. Even though the bandit retains the advantage of surprise and skill his opportunities to profitably attack are restricted.
If most bandits are rational actors they will know if only intuitively that the presence of the militia is a problem for them and will act accordingly. Thus forming a militia is in the farmers' interest even if it never gets called up. The appearance of depth of action reduces bandit predation so long as the farmers can keep this appearance plausible. The militia doesn't need to win conflicts; simply maintaining the plausible capacity to win prevents those conflicts from occurring in the first place.
The bandits have several possible responses; they may strike out for more vulnerable pastures, run for Congress, or form their own organization. Like the farmers' militia, the bandits' band does not make its members less vulnerable to bullets but rather changes the logic of resistance; shooting at one bandit may be successful but will certainly result in terrible retribution. The farmer caught by such bandits will rather surrender his coin, corn, and livestock than die in his own blood while his homestead burns.
This goes a long way to explain why forming, infiltrating, and disrupting organizations is so important to existing power structures. Participating in organizations larger than oneself can provide a depth of action that sharply reduces the need for action in the first place by changing adversaries' logic of long-term conflict.
What if there is no long term? What if actors are not able to appreciate the long term?
When put into a position that appears to jeopardize continued existence people will follow different calculations. It is no good having an ace-in-the-sleeve that will provide a hundred advantages in a year if there is little chance of living that long. The man with one nuke may be entirely harmless so long as he perceives an open future. Take that away and he may well detonate. A fugitive will lay low and travel by night while he can but if surrounded by cops may opt for the near-suicide of a shoot-out.
This is why Sun Tzu advised leaving an enemy a way so that he will not fight as hard as he could.
People or entities that lack the ability to run these calculations are also more liable to engage. A man who normally would see the wisdom of overlooking a slight may when drugged pick a fight with an entire gang.
Red-blooded Americans are fond of boasting that the government can have their guns when they take them from their cold, dead fingers. In fact the atomized individualism of such people affords so little depth of action that most would surrender their arms if the government showed up in force to demand it. Why risk certain death for no payout? However much they protest it the logic of the situation points in only one direction. So long as gun owners offer no real threat of coordinated violence the tyrannical elements of government have nothing to lose by nourishing-via-opposition a posture that is useful for propaganda while posing no particular challenge.
The concept of depth-of-action is an aspect of the abundance mindset. A man fixated on a single possibility will behave accordingly. Adopting a perspective that recognizes many possibilities changes both his subconscious calculations and the calculations of those with whom he interacts, resulting in a different set of behaviors.
Update: Now that the post is live it occurs to me that the real lesson here is this: it does not matter what you are capable of doing. What matters is what you are willing to do and what other people believe that you are willing to do.
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