在《势均力敌》中，我们深入探讨了国防工业的核心——士兵和间谍的世界中的科学技术。.
你可以玩《艾尔登法环》，或者也许你想试试《战神：诸神黄昏》。也许你更喜欢《糖果传奇》。但如果你想让研究人员收集你的游戏策略数据，以及这对现实世界核战争意味着什么，你可能需要查看SIGNAL，这是由核游戏项目（PoNG）提供的。SIGNAL。该游戏的学术团体希望表明，视频游戏可以用于收集大规模的人类行为和军事战略数据。他们推测，也许这种数字工具可以与传统的军事研究和正式的战争游戏一起，挂在腰带上。
在一项试点分析中，其结果几个月前发表在《和平研究杂志》上，学者们分析了400多场SIGNAL比赛，以了解量身定制的核武器（稍后会详细介绍）的存在如何影响某个世界领导人（或在这种情况下，一个扮演世界领导人的玩家）发动原子战争的可能性。
对于不了解情况的人来说，*量身定制*在这个上下文中是指不仅以数百万吨能量爆炸的核弹。量身定制的核武器可能包括增强型电磁脉冲——爆炸后立即爆发的、足以摧毁电网的辐射。它们可能是中子弹，与其它武器相比，它们产生的辐射更多。或者它们可能是比传统武器更小、破坏性更小的炸弹，这一类通常被称为战术核武器。
在一段时间内，这类战术武器曾是美国军械库的关键部分：核鱼雷、核炮弹、核地雷。政府监督项目国防信息中心主任Geoff Wilson说：“今天你叫得出任何一种常规武器系统，以前都有一种核武器来扮演那个角色。”
在20世纪90年代初，美国基本淘汰了这些武器，尽管它目前还有几百枚。俄罗斯有几千枚。最近，与此并非无关的是，它们也重新进入了美国的军事讨论。2018年，《核态势评估》为一种名为W76-2的新型低当量武器铺平了道路；拜登政府2022年的评估将其保留在考虑范围内。
虽然使核武器成为战术核武器（也称为非战略核武器）的确切特征存在争议，但南加州大学国际关系学教授Nina Rathbun最近写道，“战术核武器的当量从千吨以下到大约50千吨不等，而战略核武器的当量从大约100千吨到超过1兆吨不等，尽管在冷战期间开发了威力更大的弹头。”千吨相当于1000吨炸药释放的能量。顺便说一句，美国在第二次世界大战期间投在的日本的两枚炸弹，现在都会被认为是战术核武器。据估计，这两次轰炸共造成11万至21万人死亡。
战术核武器的存在存在许多问题，其中最大的一个问题是：专家们不 G 争论它们是使世界更稳定还是更不稳定，或者它们是使核战争更有可能还是更不可能。也许这些炸弹提供了“以眼还眼”的威慑，以对抗其他国家类似规模的武器，这意味着每个人都避免发动任何攻击。但也许这些武器会使国家*更*愿意发动攻击——从而打破布朗大学Nina Tannenwald所说的“核禁忌”——因为在地面上的后果不像使用传统的、威力更大的核武器那样灾难性。政府监督项目的Wilson属于后一种观点。
但最令人不安的是，没有人知道一场“有限”的核战争，用相对较小的核武器进行的战争，是否会真正保持有限和微小。Wilson说：“一旦你决定在某个地方释放其中一枚，使用更多枚的威胁就会增加。”
Can a game help researchers understand nuclear war?
There isn’t actually ground-truth data to support theories on how any kind of tailored nuclear weapon affects the course of war, because only one country has ever used nuclear weapons in war, and it did so back when no other nation had any. The physical data set has a sample size of one. “We certainly don’t want to have any kind of [real world] experimental data around the nuclear use,” says Bethany Goldblum, a co-author on the recent SIGNAL results paper who currently holds positions at Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
In the absence of such evidence, Goldblum and collaborators hoped that an online war game might provide significant fictional data—enough that it could be analyzed statistically. With a sample size of more than 400 games, they succeeded at that part.
War games in general are a longstanding means used by defense wonks and military leaders to figure out what other humans, beyond their borders, might do, and what they themselves might do in response or preemptively. “People role-playing together in a room is a type of war game that is often referred to as a tabletop exercise,” says Goldblum. It’s a common practice in think tanks and in government. “There are also war games in the form of strategic board games,” she continues. Some studies are surveys, which aren’t quite games but which present people with various written scenarios, to which people respond with what they would do. Usually, participants in these kinds of efforts are experts or practitioners in the relevant field. Digital simulations also exist to explore decision-making in different scenarios.
PoNG scientists, though, wanted their offering to be a little different: to live inside computers, be larger-scale, involve a wider and larger swath of people, immerse players in an environment where they have to live with their choices, and allow for iteration and experimentation. (PoNG comes from the University of California, Berkeley; the Nuclear Science and Security Consortium; and Lawrence Livermore and Sandia national laboratories, and the analysis in the *Journal of Peace Research* came from two of its members.)
So they came up with the “Strategic Interaction Game between Nuclear Armed Lands,” or SIGNAL, which was designed to investigate what Andrew Reddie, a cybersecurity professor at Berkeley and co-author on the results paper, calls their “toy problem”: Does adding tailored weapons to the arsenal increase the likelihood of nuclear use?
To test it out, the project team gathered players through social media, mailing lists, meetups, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and campus events, and also through the chance interest of internet passersby.
Shall we play a game?
SIGNAL went live in May 2019, and it’s still up today. You can play if you convince two friends to log in at the same time as you, learn the somewhat complicated rules, and then stick it out till you nuke each other or don’t. Players are welcomed to a digital board filled with hexagonal tiles arranged in the shapes of three (fictional) countries, each of which is delineated by the color of its tiles: purple, green, or orange. The research team chose the unrecognizable national borders and non-triggering colors (no red, for instance) to decrease people’s tendency to read real-world situations into this fictional universe. “Minor states” are neutral in gray and can become allies.
A swelling soundtrack accompanies the game’s loading. Before you can make any moves, you first have to signal that you are about to do something by putting a generic marker on a hex, thus telling everyone that you might act on that piece of territory. If it’s a hex that belongs to another playing country, the two of you can negotiate in the chat box. Then, you can act—or not—on that tile: conventionally striking it with infantry or a missile, cyber attacking it, or navally attacking it. You may defend your own territory, build cities or military bases, or, of course, go nuclear.
In SIGNAL, the scientists created a setup where two players were nuclear-armed countries and one was conventionally armed. But that setup had two different varieties: In one, which accounted for 209 of the matches in their analyzed dataset, the nuclear-armed countries had only traditional nuclear weapons. In the other, which represented 216 games, the nuclear nations had both traditional and tailored nuclear weapons. It is, the authors boasted, “the largest wargaming dataset collected to date,” at least “to the best of [their] knowledge.”
Players win by increasing their infrastructure and resources and defending their territory—pretty standard for strategy games like *Civilization*. The question the researchers had in mind related to who uses nuclear firepower to help them with those objectives.
It sounds robust, but there are some problems with SIGNAL. “Our game is hard to orient to,” admits Goldblum. “It’s a complex environment, by design, because you have to add enough complexity in order for it to be realistic.” And the graphics are… not stunning. They resemble, admits Reddie, a year-2000 version of *Civilization*.
In addition, players can’t just log on and jump in: They have to have three people handy, or the game will just wait for others to join.
In fact, reasonable skepticism about SIGNAL’s utility and biases, standard for a group of scientists, led the team to also create a survey-based war game, mimicking situations found in the video game, so they could compare people’s behavior in the two.
The results? The presence of tailored nuclear weapons does indeed seem to increase the likelihood that a player will take the conflict radioactive. The results also indicated that if tactical weapons are available, people are more likely to use them than the more destructive traditional ones.
The aftermath
Those seem like neat conclusions, but that’s not the whole story: Despite the large amount of data gathered from the SIGNAL video game, the results from looking at the game-level trends weren’t actually statistically significant. They just trended toward supporting the survey’s findings—those listed above. Considering the game alone, though, the presence of tailored weapons only increased the likelihood of nuclear conflict by 2 percent with a margin of error of “plus or minus 20 percent, so we really can’t say much and need more data to reduce this error bar,” notes Goldblum. The effect was more pronounced, though still not with statistical significance, when the analysis removed the final round of play, in which players may have thrown their weapons “without fear of reciprocal action,” according to the paper.
Demographic findings—about female players, college graduates, people over 29, people with national-security expertise or jobs—also didn’t rise to the level of statistical significance in a game-level analysis, though the potential trends warrant further study, in Goldblum’s view.
That’s kind of disappointing for a game meant, in part, to get a big sample number. But the specific results of this game set’s conditions weren’t the point, says Reddie: PoNG’s creators wanted to prove that experimental war-gaming could be a thing, and he hopes to make that thing simpler for future researchers. “My primary interest is supporting the creation of a sandbox toolkit to actually make it easier to deploy this stuff in the absence of a million dollars of funding,” says Reddie.
Goldblum sees it in a similar way. “The biggest takeaway is that experimental war-gaming offers this new tool for study,” she says. And, she adds, the fact that the results from the two different methods didn’t match up precisely provides a note of caution for other researchers: The tool you’re using likely has its own biases that influence players’ behavior.
Some tend to see this particular new tool as useful. Others, like a set of scholars from the RAND Corporation who wrote a letter to *Science* after the magazine published a 2018 piece about PoNG’s plans, definitely do not agree. The RAND team argued in part that data sets gathered from the public weren’t useful: To understand behavior in international conflict, you need players who are experts in geopolitics. “I’m not necessarily sure that’s wrong, right?” says Reddie. “But it’s a testable theory. They don’t have any data to suggest that they’re right.”
They could gather some, though, if they compared such experts’ SIGNAL gameplay to that of a group of non-experts. In a lot of ways, though, all those human unpredictabilities—the possible dependence on experience, individual difference, inability to get behaviors to cohere or coalesce, strategy alterations based on whether an interaction is occurring on-screen or with a sheet of paper—are also part of the point. “Nuclear decisions would likely be made and influenced by fallible individuals acting under a tremendous amount of stress and time pressure,” says Wilson. In fact, he thinks war games are mostly useful for the pesky personhood that plagues them all.
“The value of war games is, I think,” says Wilson, “that they show how unpredictable and often wrong our assumptions about humans are.”
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