We live in a curious time. We are agreed that our educational and university system has been increasingly dominated for the past half century by a pseudoscientific philosophy that doubted on principle the validity of moral values. Our constitutional system is implemented through courts managed largely by a legal profession educated in such an amoral environment that any explicit value or religious criterion is practically precluded from being taught as true.

Forty years ago, when the world was plunging headlong toward total war, the Soviel Union was America's ally. Ten years later the same Soviet Union was being scorned as the home of “Godless communism” and the enemy of everything sacred to ihe “free world.” With the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. the two nations were facing each other across an abyss so large that nuclear war seemed a distinct possibility. Ten years after that, at the Moscow Summit of 1972. an American president with unimpeachable anti-Communist credentials was supping with yesterday's devil in the very capital of world communism; Nixon and his hosts managed to produce an “orgy of agreements” (the phrase is Max Frankel's), including the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT 1) and the start of an era called detente. Within six years another American president was announcing that “America is now free of the inordinate fear of communism.”

Game theory in both popular and academic circles is prominently associated with the nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union. But game theory, unfortunately, is not easy to use, and much of its application to the nuclear dilemma has only fathered confusion. Two of these confusions are particularly destructive.

The first comes from thinking of strategic interactions as games, to be won like chess and poker. We owe this confusion directly to John von Neumann, who gave the name “game theory” to his analysis of the logical structures of strategic interactions. It is too late to change the name, but it may not be too late to quit thinking of poker and chess when we are involved in the more crucial strategic interactions that fill our lives.

Wilfred Owen, one of the poetic voices stilled by World War I, chose as his subject “war and the pity of war,” finding his poetry in the pity. It can be argued that even then the pity had gone out of war. It is certain that the events of subsequent wars—large and small, local as well as worldwide—have been so pitiless in character and conduct that little or no “poetry” remains.

We are three-quarters through a century of unprecedented violence, with the grim prospect of even greater evils tying ahead. In his Twentieth Century Book of the Dead Gil Eliot offers what he considers a reasonable estimate of 100,000,000 “man-made” deaths since 1900. That figure alone is enough to give us pause. But it is not merely the number of deaths that should concern us here, but who is killed and the manner in which the victims are killed. In World War I, of the ten million or so victims, 90 per cent were soldiers. The carnage of World War II was so great and so indiscriminate that an equally simple estimate is almost impossible to contrive.