The Prisoner's Dilemma

This week, we read The Clan of the One Breasted Women, and it got me thinking about the Cold War and nuclear/atomic bomb testing in general. 

There's this picture of all the scientists that worked on the Manhattan Project standing clumped together on the grayscale stairs of a random building. Situation aside, I love this picture: I once read this Op-Ed about how "the only time there has ever been more intellectual power in a single room was when Thomas Jefferson was sitting by himself writing the Declaration of Independence".*

But, this picture is also the first of a fifty year long cold war that is the exemplar of why humanity has never, and will never, be able to control themselves. Oppenheimer himself, upon watching the explosion at Trinity, said, "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds". My APUSH teacher last year once told us that during the height of Cold War tensions, there was enough nuclear weaponry in the Soviet Union and United States to bomb/destroy the entire world twenty times over. And as easy as it would be to blame the ever-so-human love for violence and destruction, our AP Economics teacher showed us that there is a logical reason why this happened: the Prisoner's Dilemma. 

This is called a Nash Equilibrium: it would be more secure for the collective world if the USSR and the US did not create nuclear weapons, yet because both countries are acting in their own personal best interests, both countries produce them. 

And I guess that it's because of this that our lines in the sand will always be crossed. No nuclear weapons? Fat chance. No germ-line editing? We stuck to that agreement for a grand total of six months. No cloning? Dolly was born that year. Rules are made to be broken. Not because we want to enter a nuclear war, or because we want to exploit eugenics, or because we want to clone ourselves for a human organ farm, but because we want to prove we can. 

*Also, to be honest, I don't know how one can think this when *this* picture exists: