To start off, why is bounded rationality especially important for understanding nuclear strategy?

It's because, um, the human mind is very [chuckles] central to the decisions about, uh, whether or not to use nuclear weapons, what kind of, uh, weapons to acquire and so forth.

But we have had the feeling, uh, to the best of our knowledge that the importance of the mind is not, uh, respected in the nuclear strategy, that, uh, there's an assumption based on 80 years that we've had these weapons and haven't used them, that it's because of, uh, the deterrent strategy that says that, "You know, if you use these weapons against us, we will retaliate in kind," and that our leaders are wise enough to know that that's, that's not a thing to do, so we have a kind of mutually assured destruction.

It's an assumption of rationality and stability that is well documented by 80 years of success.

But, um, uh, as you mentioned, uh, in the middle of, uh, last century, Herbert Simon, a very famous psychologist, operations research analyst and so forth, who won a Nobel Prize, um, developed a theory of bounded rationality which said that decision-making needs to respect the limitations of human minds.

That is, we have, uh, limited memory, limited attention span, limited ability to process the information that comes to our attention and analyze it in, in various ways, and that that should be factored into decision-making.

And his views were very important in motivating the behavioral science community, primarily psychologists, to begin to take, um, a hard look and do studies to assess the rationality of decision-making.

How might the way options are framed during crisis times push leaders toward escalation?