So far we have seen that strategic rationality, which endorses the logic of consequences, accepts an underlying philosophical realism about value in the form of interpersonally transferable utility, and rejects joint maximization, seemed tailor-made to address the as yet counterfactual hecatomb of waging nuclear war. Thomas Schelling had sought to defend mutual assured destruction (MAD), reminiscent of reciprocal security under classical liberalism, by modeling a high-stakes nuclear security standoff with the recalcitrant Prisoner's Dilemma game. Given the existential reality of assured destruction in a nuclear war among superpowers, and the shared goal of avoiding Armageddon, by all counts MAD should have won the theoretical security debate and prevailed over US nuclear strategy.

Yet, with hindsight, observers may now be tempted to conclude both that the nuclear security debate vindicated nuclear utilization targeting selection (NUTS) theoretically and helped the United States win the Cold War in practice. Readers may thus wonder, “Why revisit the nuclear security debate, especially given the successful denouement of the superpower standoff?” The choice of adopting orthodox game theory as the exhaustive statement of coherent action necessarily pronounces escalation dominance logically superior to reciprocal deterrence, despite the fact that maintaining nuclear ascendance over another superpower is impossible.