{"id":4219,"date":"2008-03-01T02:34:12","date_gmt":"2008-03-01T09:34:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2008\/03\/01\/madness\/"},"modified":"2008-03-01T02:34:12","modified_gmt":"2008-03-01T09:34:12","slug":"madness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2008\/03\/01\/madness\/","title":{"rendered":"Madness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mother Night<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.<\/p>\n

~ Kurt Vonnegut<\/p>\n

\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/div>\n

\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

“The Nukes of October<\/a>“:<\/p>\n

Codenamed Giant Lance, Nixon’s plan was the culmination of a strategy of premeditated madness he had developed with national security adviser Henry Kissinger.<\/p>\n

Now, thanks to documents released through the Freedom of Information Act, it’s clear that Giant Lance was the leading example of what historians came to call the “madman theory”: Nixon’s notion that faked, finger-on-the-button rage could bring the Soviets to heel.<\/p>\n

Nixon’s madman pose and Giant Lance were based on game theory, a branch of mathematics that uses simple calculations and rigorous logic to help understand how people make choices \u00e2\u20ac\u201d like whether to surge ahead in traffic or whether to respond to a military provocation with a strike of one’s own.<\/p>\n

The madman theory was an extension of that doctrine.
\nThe sudden conclusion reinforced the madman pose.<\/p>\n

Denying that there was ever a madman theory in operation, he emphasized that Giant Lance was designed to be a warning, not a provocation to war.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mother Night We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be. ~ Kurt Vonnegut \u00c2\u00a0 \u00c2\u00a0 “The Nukes of October“: Codenamed Giant Lance, Nixon’s plan was the culmination of a strategy of premeditated madness he had developed with national security adviser Henry Kissinger. Now, thanks to documents […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[676],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-4219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-antiwar-movement"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4219\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4219"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=4219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}