Suicide Diplomats as Alternative to Ems
Yesterday, I read The Puzzle of War, by Linch. It is the type of thing I could never have written. I lack the smarts, education, and gumption to produce things of that nature. The only thing he lacks, by my lights, is a pathological need to insert jokes at inappropriate times. And this (being a sublimation of both childhood trauma and genetic mental pathology) is not the sort of gift that can be trained.
He explains that war is usually a mistake in the God's-eye view, as one can always, in principle, negotiate terms without deadweight loss, ignoring pathological cases in which one or both sides have an actual preference for war as an end in itself. Men not yet being gods, he gives an overview of the barriers that prevent those negotiations which would eliminate war, and hints at the Pinkerian form of possible solutions. As a resident of InkHaven, I was asked to critique this piece. I had little to say besides, "It's rather good, isn't it?" and "Keep up the great work" and "You place your words in such a way as to cause me no aesthetic offence." But reading it, a puzzle crossed my mind that was not addressed in the text:
Suppose countries A and B are at odds. A believes he has an indestructible superweapon. B has found a means to destroy it. In any negotiation, B needs to reveal the weakness to A so as to get terms that match the actual strategic picture, but doing so would undermine his strategic advantage. Let's assume no trusted third party, including markets.
With technologies such as brain emulation and trusted artificial intelligence, there are obvious mechanisms for doing this - though even these have grave security challenges, too. But this got me thinking of mundane solutions.
The first idea that came to mind, which hopefully doesn't out me as a sociopath: Each side educates a suicide diplomat, trained in all the arts needed for a full understanding of the strategic picture and studied in all the relevant info. They are both indoctrinated with a nationalist fervor that will let them die for their nation and die with pride; a smart depressive of the saner variety may be an ideal candidate for this job. On some neutral ground lined with explosives, they meet, negotiate terms, and agree on a bit to send out to both sides, and this bit defines whether they have agreed to a treaty proposed by the party that instigated the procedure. After this is done, the explosives detonate. If they don't reach a deal, the explosives detonate. In all cases, the explosives detonate.
This is similar to the obvious thing one would do if one could make brain emulations. The key insight is that it is the disposability of brain emulations that allows such schemes, and in war men are treated as quite disposable.
The scheme fails, of course, when one realizes that though common soldiers may be disposable in war, polymathic diplomats are not. A scheme involving amnesic drugs may still work, provided we can find one that doesn't affect cognitive ability. Those drugs that induce retrograde amnesia are particularly promising, but introduce an incentive for A and B to find those men in their armies most resistant to such chemicals. It is considerably harder to find men who are resistant to high explosives.