Can Wargaming teach ethics? With John Emery

·1 hr 8 min·5 clips

Discover how wargaming reveals the hidden emotional burden behind nuclear decisions that policy papers can't capture.

The first lesson is pressure. John Emery describes wargaming as a room where hardliners could turn careful once their choices had to play out inside a game. The title of his paper matters: moral choices are there, but RAND often seems more comfortable treating them as design problems. The abstraction helps. Forces, crops, resources, national priorities, and alliances become variables. Useful, yes, but the mess of ordinary human life gets sanded down. Shelley Lesher keeps the conversation from floating away. Her follow-ups bring the machinery back to the question a listener is probably asking: how does a game teach ethics when nobody wants to call it ethics? RAND wanted whole-society conflict on the board, with rules for alliances, countries, underground sabotage, strikes, overthrows, foreign bases, deployments, and atomic war. That is not cartoon villain stuff. It is serious planning with a dangerous side effect: cleaner calculations can make the consequences feel less close. Then computers arrive with a familiar chill. Alexander Mood pictured high-speed computers taking broad player instructions and handling smaller choices. The 1954 confidence lands strangely now, in an age already nervous about distance, automation, and responsibility. By the end, the warning is blunt. Move people one step away from killing and they may find atrocities easier to approve. The interview stays quiet, which makes it hit harder.

As heard by us

RAND's games become a sharp look at what abstraction leaves out.

John Emery's conversation with Shelley Lesher treats 1950s RAND wargaming as more than a bit of Cold War history. It becomes a way to ask what gets lost when moral judgment is translated into rules, variables, and simulated choices.

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Why you'd press play

You want a clear route from 1950s RAND war games to the ethics of deciding lethal force.

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