In the late 1940s and 1950s, defense intellectuals developed game theory to anchor military strategy in scientific analysis. The last chapter discussed how game theorists developed strategic rationality as a comprehensive science of decision making, which entailed plausibly identifying “a set of rules for each participant which tell him to behave in every situation which may conceivably arise,” and which was immediately developed for application to military and nuclear strategy. Analysts perceived that military strategy could not be contained by zero-sum game theory and John von Neumann's minimax concept of securing the least bad outcome for oneself. In the Prisoner's Dilemma model of bargaining, John Mayberry discovered that threatening the adversary with the worst outcome that one could credibly muster was the superior approach.

In 1960, Thomas Schelling used a Prisoner's Dilemma model to defend the nuclear strategy of mutual assured destruction (MAD). The Prisoner's Dilemma model of the nuclear security impasse implies that one actor's self-defense necessarily compromises the other's security because each has the first preference of achieving supremacy through preferring the outcome least acceptable to the opposition. Schelling's hope was that in addressing the worst-case scenario for achieving security, MAD would provide a blueprint for achieving peaceful coexistence in a nuclear age.