A lot of what happens in politics is due to domestic considerations. Your analysis ignores domestic considerations within Plutonia completely and is thus unlikely a good model of what Plutunia will do. It basically assumes that Plutonia is a country where corruption has no influence on political decisions.
Game theory says that if there’s common knowledge that the only way to stay alive is to use nuclear weapons you can credibly threaten to use nuclear weapons.
On the other hand you can’t credible threaten to use nuclear weapons to shut down research projects in other countries because by the nature of research projects their results in not fully known beforehand. Making bluffs is costly from the side of Plutonia given that it means that future threats will be less believable if they are called.
That is exactly the problem. Suppose the Plutonia government sincerely believes, that as soon as other countries will be protected, they will help people of Plutonia to overthrow the government? And they kind of have reasons for such belief. Then (in their model of the world) the world protected from them is a deadly threat, basically capital punishment. The nuclear war, however, is horrible, but there are bomb shelters where they can survive and have enough food inside just for themselves to live till natural death.
A lot of what happens in politics is due to domestic considerations. Your analysis ignores domestic considerations within Plutonia completely and is thus unlikely a good model of what Plutunia will do. It basically assumes that Plutonia is a country where corruption has no influence on political decisions.
Game theory says that if there’s common knowledge that the only way to stay alive is to use nuclear weapons you can credibly threaten to use nuclear weapons.
On the other hand you can’t credible threaten to use nuclear weapons to shut down research projects in other countries because by the nature of research projects their results in not fully known beforehand. Making bluffs is costly from the side of Plutonia given that it means that future threats will be less believable if they are called.
That is exactly the problem. Suppose the Plutonia government sincerely believes, that as soon as other countries will be protected, they will help people of Plutonia to overthrow the government? And they kind of have reasons for such belief. Then (in their model of the world) the world protected from them is a deadly threat, basically capital punishment. The nuclear war, however, is horrible, but there are bomb shelters where they can survive and have enough food inside just for themselves to live till natural death.